[Vision2020] I hear he doesn't kick Barney.

[Joan Opyr]

Let me chime in with Sunil, Carl, Tom and Don and disagree with Doug.  I 
know you're all surprised, and when you've finished fanning yourselves and 
passing around the smelling salts, please continue reading.

First, I don't know that George Bush does treat Laura substantially better 
than Bill treated Hillary.  Sure, we don't have a salacious report from 
Kenneth Starr detailing his exploits with cigars and interns, but we do know 
that Mr. Bush spent the first ten years of his married life falling down 
drunk, and the he ran various and sundry businesses into the ground.  
Doesn't sound to me like a recipe for connubial bliss.

Having grown up in house full of alcoholics, quite frankly, I'd rather live 
with an adulterer.  Someone who has a zipper problem would be infinitely 
preferable to someone who regularly sets the house on fire, marches around 
with a loaded shotgun, and insists on playing "Deep Purple" on a Wurlitzer 
organ at three o'clock in the morning.  (Not that I'm suggesting Mr. Bush 
has done any/all of these things.  According to "George and Laura: Portrait 
of an American Marriage," he just drove drunk, screamed obscenities at 
people in restaurants, and danced naked on a table in a Texas bar.)

Some of our best presidents have been demonstrably unfaithful to their 
wives: Washington, Jefferson, FDR.  The great Winston Churchill was no 
paragon of fidelity.  (In fact, I'm at a loss to name a European prime 
minister or premiere who was faithful to his wife.  Hitler, maybe?  And 
that, I think, might be attributed to the shortness of his marriage to Ms. 
Braun rather than to any virtue on his part.)

If we're looking for honesty, decency, and integrity in a President, we need 
a more sophisticated measure than whether or not his marriage seems happy.  
I don't care if George Bush is nice to Laura, his dog, or the guy who 
empties the spitoon in the Oval Office -- if he's forthright in private but 
lies like a rug in public, what have we gained?  We have two hundred dead 
military personnel, a thousand wounded, and countless dead Iraqi civilians 
on our hands.  Under the circumstances, I don't care if George sends his 
mother a box of candy on her birthday.  When a President takes us to war, we 
need to be absolutely certain that the rationales offered are as clear and 
true as humanly possible; they should withstand the most intense scrutiny.  
That's the price of risking other people's lives for the sake of your own 
convictions.

I was far more disgusted by Bill Clinton's support for the Defense of 
Marriage Act, his bombing of Yugoslavia and Kosovo, and his signing of the 
so-called Welfare Reform Act than I was by anything he did with Ms. 
Lewinsky.  She was over twenty-one, and if Mr. Starr is to be believed, she 
never said anything but yes.

When the American people are screwed, on the other hand, it's almost always 
non-consensual.

Joan Opyr/Auntie Establishment

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