IT JUST DOESN'T MATTER

I'll be honest with you: I don't care much about the "Sex on the City" scandal regarding Guiliani and his sex-related corruption. I mean, I'm not surprised, and really I don't think anyone else is except for that small percentage of Republicans who saw him as a possible contender if the foaming-at-the-mouth-haters failed to win the nomination. Perhaps I'm being naive, but there is NO WAY IN HELL one of these white boys jockeying for press attention and money (Rudy, Huckabee, Romney, Paul, Kucinich, McCain, Thompson, or Tancredo) is going to win the 2008 Presidency.

Not unless there's an overt or covert coup, involving vote-stealing techniques already used by the Republicans or new methods in the pipeline. Which is a separate issue from any so-called candidacy.

The will of the country is overwhelming and growing in one direction, a change away from the anti-Constitutional rot and working-class bloodletting that has marked Neocon tenure. If there was a way to subvert this will, the attack dogs would already be on it.

Which, indirectly, may be happening: All this publicity for right-wing minority views gives them a credence they don't deserve and a viability that exhausts our hope. This sounds like typical Rovian machinations, and may well be deliberate from a mainstream press in complete denial about its lack of objectivity or journalistic integrity. Aside from the obvious benefit of continually extracting every last dollar from the deluded class that Republicans can filch.

I was reminded of the disconnect between what the media (and far too many blogs) are obsessively reporting about and the issues that actually weigh on our minds out here in regular-how-to-pay-the-rent-land today when I read the Des Moines Register story (via HuffPo and Alternet) about the Heartland Presidential Forum in Des Moines yesterday. The article states "The people got more microphone time than the politicians" both as "person after person shared emotional stories of perceived injustice" and the crowd reacted volubly, mostly supportively to the stories they were hearing.

When "Billy Lawless, a Chicago immigrations rights organizer" asked Hillary Clinton "if she'd commit to giving undocumented workers a path to citizenship in her first 100 days as president" and she hedged on the question, despite his repeating it, Hillary was booed, "apparently upset that she wouldn't commit to a 100-days promise."

Wait -- aren't we being repeatedly told how much the common American OPPOSES a path to citizenship, especially in the Midwest?

The questions and stories raised by this crowd covered immigration raids that destroy families, SCHIP and insurance terrors, multinational corporate farming destroying small farms and the environment, and the oil-based debacle of invading Iraq. In other words, what's really on the minds of people who are living month to month and not waiting for Armageddon to blow the noon whistle.

So I'm getting pickier about what I choose to read or listen to, and I'm saving my commentary for what's actually going to determine this horse race. The herpes sores erupting on the faces of Republican candidates are irrelevant to me -- they are jokes who will be forgotten jokes in another year. (Dan Quayle, anyone?) And while it's possible that one of the remaining credible candidates (all Democrats) will self-destruct or has a skeleton not yet emerged from a closet, it won't matter because we have such a strong field from which to make our choices.

But I do want them to hear from us "We care about how far you'll go in cleaning up the mess". That's what really counts. And that means naming the mess, something the Republicans simply cannot do because its roots are entangled with their party ideology at this point.

We want our Constitution back. We want checks and balances. We want an economy based on shared prosperity. We want the rest of the world to respect us again. We want health care and education and secure jobs that pay enough to have a savings account. We want to be generous and good-natured, the kind of big kid that toddlers instinctively trust because they can tell we're not gonna push 'em around. We want feminism to stop making arrested adolescents snicker, and we want racism fucking stopped in its fucking tracks, for once and for all. We want god in our hearts but not running our government, because we know in our gut god is leaving the hard decisions up to us, that's what being a grown-up is all about. And we want a President who is up to the job of listening to us, changing and learning with responsibility.

Eyes on the prize, people. And don't forget to have some good clean fun every single day.