Hey Lepus — I'm no great fan of Dubya's, but are you forgetting his predecessors? Take Kennedy — a fine, upstanding Democrat who first rode onto the public stage on the coat tails of Joe McCarthy, embarrassed the nation with his womanizing, pushed us to the brink of WWIII (Cuban missile crisis) because he was afraid to the seen to be soft on communism and, while consistantly polling the lowest popularity of any president in history, allowed J. Edgar Hoover to run the U.S. so that little sleaze wouldn't publicize the dossier he kept on Kennedy. Oh yeah, he was also the one who put into place the White House taping system that finally caught Nixon.

Then there was good ol' Lyndon J. — who spent like a drunken sailor on social programs that nearly bankrupted the country and had little long-term effect — and made up incidents (Gulf of Tonkin) to justify escalating a war that everybody, particularly Eisenhower, had warned the U.S. to stay out of.

Poor old Nixon was just dumb — he chose to surround himself with people who would do ANYTHING to retain power and Gerald Ford as his VP. Of course he too had made his early name as a McCarthy wannabe.

Ol' Jerry F. had just played too much football without a helmet, but at least he had the sense to know he was just a caretaker.

Then we got Carter, who was so intelligent he could see all sides of a problem but couldn't make a choice about anything. Hell, he couldn't even get out of his own head to follow his lust.

Then we got Bush. Like him or not, he was the only U.S. leader in decades who could analyze a threat to the country and actually DO something about it. His biggest failing, as far as I'm concerned, was that he urged the Kurds to rise up against Saddam Hussein and then let his advisors talk him out of helping them when they did. Got hundreds of thousands of them gassed or napalmed when Saddam took his retribution.

So then we got Clinton — or should I say The Clintons. Lovely couple. She overweeningly hungry for power, him overweeningly hungry for sex. The fact that the economy hit an upswing while they were in office made them look a lot better than they were for the country. But what did they DO? Can you think of a single policy initiative that actually worked? Maybe Hillary will be more successful when she's elected in 2004 or 2008.

Till then, maybe Dubya will be hamstrung by a divided Senate to the point that he can't do any real good or any real damage. But Gore would have had the same problem, wouldn't he?

Oh, and to your last comment about walling off the south — that was tried before, by the south. As I recall, it was a Republican who launched an unconstitutional war to stop it. So maybe you're right.

cheers,

david