"Shite by any other name..."

It’s depressing to watch the early slate of candidates being trotted out for the 1998 Presidential run.

Rudy “The ‘G’ stands for Gun Control” Giuliani? John “Gang of 14/McCain-Feingold” McCain? Mitt “No abortions/No assault weapons” Romney? Two east-coasters and a senile Southwestern septuagenarian? Is there no one promising from those bright red flyover states? These guys are a trifecta of weaselly, mealy-mouthed, career yes-men whose only claim to conservative status is that they look somewhat conservative by New York standards. Curtail free speech? Check. Gun control? Check. A nod and a wink to illegal immigration? Check.

And on the Democrat side we have Chicago’s own Barack Osama Obama, whom everyone agrees is a “rock star” among politicians, but can’t come up with anything else about which to boast on his resume. And then there’s Hillary, a harridan I would cheerfully vote for only if she were in a contest against that poster child for liberal lunacy, Dennis Kucinich, with Cindy Sheehan as his veep.

And I’m not a classic conservative…”angry moderate” is the phrase a friend used to describe me. I favor abortion rights, stem cell research, keeping God out of government, space exploration and strict enforcement of pollution/environmental regulations. Conversely, I also want to shrink the federal budget, put an end to illegal border crossing, free law-abiding citizens from onerous gun regulations and, if necessary, use force to protect American interests at home and abroad.

The worst thing is that it is fast approaching the season when these candidates will fine-tune their image try to convince the voters that these turds can, indeed, change their smell. To paraphrase the Bard’s famous observation by Juliet, “What's in a name? that which we call shite by any other name would smell like crap.” The east coasters are now faced with running outside their home turf and trying to win the hearts of “flyover country’s” voters. Predictably, they will bury their gun control speeches and resurrect tales of religion in their lives. They will wring their hands over the epidemic of illegal immigration while maintaining the need for “humane” measures to help the huddled masses already here illegally.

Is this the best we can do? The greatest Republic on the face of the Earth is reduced to depending on insipid power-grabbers more interested in tailoring their speech to the latest poll than stating their positions with integrity, honesty and intelligence?

I guess I’ll have to console myself that it’s a long time until the election, and perhaps today’s Presidential luminaries will burn out before November 2008. Twenty two months and counting…