TEA PARTY CANCER CONTINUES TO SPREAD

America is being eaten alive, and from within, by a cancerous tumor called intolerance. It is fueled by the selfishness of a growing mass of individuals who yearn for a country of 8 million like-minded citizens instead of 350 million diverse people whose myriad opinions deserve respect and recognition. If left untreated, it will destroy the very principles our nation was founded to champion: Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness for all, not just for a selective few.

The cancer I refer to is America's Tea Party movement, the militant arm of the GOP.

When Georgia Republican Congressman Paul Braun was holding a town hall meeting yesterday and was asked by a Tea Party activist, "Who's going to shoot Obama?" the staunchly conservative Congressman's knee-jerk reaction wasn't to chastise the questioner for posing such an inappropriate suggestion. No, the Congressman's reaction was to score points with the sympathetic crowd by reminding the questioner that in 2012 he'd get a chance to vote Obama out of office.

Of course, later on, after Congressman Broun realized that his inappropriate response had touched off a political firestorm, he claimed to have been too stunned by the question to fashion an appropriate answer, but that claim rings hollow when you consider that Congressman Broun is a seasoned debater who is well-skilled at the art of verbal jousting. Broun knew exactly what he was doing when he played to his adoring Tea Party crowd by dignifying the assassination question with an answer that did nothing to chastise the sentiment being expressed by the questioner he faced.

The Tea Party follower who questioned Congressman Broun simply uttered the words that many Tea Party supporters are hoping in their hearts – that Obama will be killed and his supporters will be relegated to the back-burners of history. That doesn't sound like the Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness for all principle that Jefferson espoused, and that's because it isn't. Followers of the Tea Party are only looking out for themselves, and as far as they're concerned, the rest of us can go to hell…and the quicker the better.

DUPING CONGRESS - MIND GAMES FOR THE MINDLESS

I guess it should come as no surprise that the United States Army has been accused of using psychological operations personnel to attempt to influence U.S. Senators who visited the war operations in Afghanistan to win increased funding for the war effort. After all, if the Taliban and the Pakistani and Afghan war lords can fall prey to psychological warfare, why would anyone think political combatants like U.S. Congressmen would be any different?

The Army just got caught with their hand in the cookie jar!

I'd like to be outraged, but I'm not. I'd also like to think our Senators would be beyond being so duped, but then I recall the whole Iraq war fiasco and how this country, including its Senators, were duped into going to war in the first place, so that doesn't surprise me either.

What does surprise me is how much we've risen in the influence-peddling, arm-twisting game. In the old days, luring a Senator into a compromising sexual tryst or a drunken binge were the easiest ways to insure a particular Congressman's cooperation on an army war request, but nowadays, I guess those tactics won't work. After looking at the list of targeted Senators, I initially thought that maybe, given their advanced ages, sex and booze were no longer a temptation, but then I realized that in today's Congress, neither would necessarily end a Congressman's career if his or her seat was a safe seat, so sex and alcohol were no longer useful for political blackmail. Mind games were probably the Army's only alternatives.

The Army really shouldn't fret over this incident. The American people have a proclivity for being duped in the political arena, so by next week, this scandal will have run its course and we'll have moved onto some other hot-button issue with no real meaning in the general scheme of things. I'd like to blame that fact on the Army too, but something tells me they're too smart to acknowledge any role in it.

NO MARTYRDOM FOR GADHAFI

The news media outlets are reporting that long-time Libyan dictator, Moammar Gadhafi has defiantly declared that he will die a martyr's death, if necessary, to save his country, but dictators, whether religious or secular oriented, seldom live up to their bravado. Most of them, once they lose power, find themselves shivering with the same kind of fear the people they once brutally oppressed felt moments before their death.

I'm a staunch opponent of the death penalty, even for scum-of-the-earth dictators like Gadhafi, but I have no qualms about stuffing him in a cell with no light and letting him rot. A Martyr's death is too good for the man.

A CATHOLIC LESSON NEVER LEARNED

The February 10th arrest of Msgr. William Lynn of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia highlights, once again, that the Catholic Church hierarchy in America and in Rome do not take seriously the need to protect children from sexual predators in the Roman Catholic clergy. Msgr. Lynn was charged with endangering the welfare of children resulting from a grand jury indictment that he covered up evidence of sexual abuse committed by priests he supervised and moved them to other parishes or schools where they could continue to sexually abuse children.

Despite the ongoing sexual abuse scandal that has rocked the Roman Catholic Church for years, leaders in the billion-strong denomination refuse to admit to systemic problems in dealing with sexual abuse among priests and have demonstrated an incredible lack of understanding of homosexuality, sexual abuse, and pedophilia. The result of their failures is a problem that just won't end.

It's a shame that children attending Catholic institutions have to endure such risk of abuse and that the work of thousands of faithful Catholics clergy gets tainted every time a new scandal is exposed. It's frustrating. It's downright maddening, and it's totally preventable. The truly sad part is that Catholic Church leaders still haven't learned their lesson. Until they do, the abuse will continue.

SILENCING VOICES - A HARBINGER OF BRUTALITY TO COME

You can usually judge the humanity of a regime by the amount of unsympathetic brutality they are willing to employ in putting-down public demonstrations against their policies. Recently, in places like Iran, Tunisia, Libya and Tibet, the regimes in power have demonstrated no compunction against using lethal force to quell civilian dissenters, while leaders in Bahrain and Egypt and even Venezuela, Hugo Chavez's backyard tolerate a modest degree of political opposition in their countries without attempting to forever silence critics with bloodshed. Those latter countries may not be paragons of democracy, but at least they're a step above the former list of countries where leaders joyfully bathe in the blood of their opposition.

Nationalism and nationalistic interests frequently fuel the drive of a nation and its rulers to attempt to subjugate the citizenry of another nation, and in the process of doing so, unleashes the sadistic brutality we know as modern day warfare, but when efforts to subjugate one's own citizenry reach a similar feverish pitch, the brutality of government leaders seems to know no limit. That's why the prevailing color of many a revolution is red.

I greatly admire the dissenters in Egypt, Iran, Libya and Bahrain who have taken to the streets to protest the oppression of their corrupt political and religious leaders, and their courage in the face of grave risk of death and imprisonment speaks highly of their moral character and fortitude. They are the true modern patriots.

Likewise, I applaud the working class people of Wisconsin who have risen to protest the corrupt attempts of their state government leaders to silence their collective voices and to deny every day workers the right to band together to improve their common lot. I'm talking about the right to collective bargaining and unionization, and the attempt by the GOP governor and legislature of Wisconsin to deny workers those rights.

When governments attempt to forever silence the voices of their citizenry and deny those citizens the right to affect change, sadistic brutality and bloodshed is never far behind. Citizens of Wisconsin – beware!