I'd throw you a lifesaver but you'd only confuse it with the candy and try to eat it.

Sorry. It's late and I've used up my allotment of smiley faces for the day.

If you were alive in 1862 you would have been saying Lincoln was evil and attacking the "southerners" not "rebels." He was attacking "Georgia" not the "Confederacy." You would attack Lincoln with the same laissez faire approach to facts and reason you demonstrate when attacking Bush.

You think our soldiers are killing "Iraqis" when they kill "insurgents."
You think Iraq was better place for everyday Iraqis before the US came!
You think that Afghanistan was better off under the Taliban and lament their increased production of opium!
You think that Palestinian suicide bombings are the logical byproduct of oppression and humiliation and not the byproduct of sadistic, corrupt, Palestinian leadership.

I know why Tom takes the time with you, because he thinks you can't possibly be that dense that you can read articles like that and that some of the content wont trickle in just a bit - but clearly you don't read even half of the stuff he's linked to, you fight the ones you do, you repudiate the content and close your eyes like a four year old, sticking your fingers in your ears and sing loudly, "La laa la la la la I caaaan't hearrr yoooou."

It's excusable when kids and teens rebel against the establishment clinging to spurious fantasies about conspiracies and repeating their new word "imperialism" as many times as they can as if saying it often makes it true, but seeing someone who should know better by now, that's when it's just sad. It's like Lindy believing the government is concealing the casualties just because some paranoid-delusional writer blames Jeb Bush and his older brother George for the hurricane. The blind leading the blind only because they tell each other what they want to hear. Many young leftists want to hear that the government is Baaad, Bush is a MORON and Dick Cheney is an evil capitalist TOOL! That's fine when you're wet behind the ears and your brain is the size of a turnip, but the stupidity is supposed to be outgrown as you mature and see the fraud and the moral bankruptcty of the utopian, liberal philosophies which always leave more people suffering, poor and abused.

Welfare, government healthcare for all, all seem like good ideas to a child. In reality they lead to a lowering of quality for all. I know it. I've seen it. Firsthand.

The hurricane wasn't created by the CIA to disrupt the elections, no one is carting away hundreds of dead Florida folks to be put in some George Bush run Soylent Green processing plant and we sure as heck aren't in Iraq for imperialist gain and the nuclear reactors in Bushehr didn't appear on cue after Bush was "appointed by the Supreme Court."

Rumsfeld isn't some evil monster intent upon ruling the earth he is a guy in his seventies trying to do the right thing and make a difference. His war plan, the low manpower plan - saved lives. Had we gone in with 300,000 we would only lose more people - not less. MORE! We would have exceeded the casualties we have now just in accidents, friendly fire and by providing more humans per square foot for suicide bombers.

Yah yah...I know you don't believe a word of it. It's all the grand poohbah's conspiracy to kill Muslims, take Iraq's oil and support Israel.

Well I got news for you Bowser, in a hundred years, after all of us here at the HZ are gone, the world will be a different place and it isn't going to be a socialistic utopia. It's going to be a scary place of high technology, massive poverty and tons of human suffering - just like it is now. Places that follow the US' lead will be better off and those that cling to violent religions, false illusions of equality, fallacious notions of the distribution of wealth or the idea that Europe knows best - those folks will be buried and will be suffering the most.

My objective is to make sure the US gets a foot in the door in some of these dens of despair and lead out the suffering into the light of US democracy, technocracy and freedom.

You can vote against it. You can vote to keep them enslaved for the next 100 years and tell yourself that it's really Bush that is the bad guy - but it won't matter. You can close your eyes to the gains and shine a spotlight on the setbacks, but the difference is being made. The seeds are already planted.

The bumper crop will arrive long after George Bush and the fanatic hatred of him are just digital bits in a historical archive.