Billo!

George W might not be the best president we’ve ever had, nor the brightest, but he’s a solid contender for President With the Biggest Cojones: He thanked U.S. troops today for serving extended tours of duty, saying in part “Some [of you] were boarding the plane home to return to your families when you got word that we’d extended your tour. I know that was a trying time. But no change in plans could shake your resolve.”

Actually, every last man and woman getting on those planes had resolved to go home. The government was extending their tours unilaterally, evoking the enlistment agreement’s “Once you sign this we own your ass” clause.

“As you know, you go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time” -Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

Except that if the army you have isn’t large enough for the military adventure you wish to stage, there’s nothing wrong with acquiring the army you want by forcing members of the National Guard into active service overseas.

Big news: John Kerry might have had a girlfriend on the side. Was it really so bad the last time the Democrats had a candidate who couldn’t keep his zipper closed? He won the nomination, was elected President, and was the first Democrat in over half a century to be elected to two terms. The economy was good, and the Constitution was still in effect. Would you rather read headlines about soldiers being blown up, or the President being blown?

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A Tennessee woman is suing Janet Jackson (and Timberlake, CBS and MTV) for compensatory and punitive damages, claiming that Jackson’s exposure caused her to “suffer outrage, anger, embarrassment and serious injury.” I’m thinking Johnnie Cochran must be dying to defend Jackson: “If it’s not the whole tit, you must acquit”

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I really don’t care that the woman in the supermarket this morning was having trouble with her cell phone reception while she was getting instructions on what fruits and vegetables her family needed: Anybody who actually walks down an aisle saying “Can you hear me now? Can you hear me now?” needs to be smacked.

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Victoria’s Secret is selling flannel nightgowns. That’s just so very wrong.

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Looking at the defense and homeland security budgets, it’s impossible to miss the fact that terrorism and other threats from the Moslem world account for an overwhelming percentage of it. Now obviously, it’s in the best interests of neither the United States (some opportunistic members of the administration notwithstanding) nor the Moslem community here and abroad to have this perceived as a U.S. vs Islam conflict.

Now, the only way to remove the Moslem=terrorist link in the collective mind of the Western World would be for prominent Moslem leaders throughout the world to absolutely denounce terrorism. No equivocating. Just stand up and announce that it’s wrong.

“But Billo, people have suggested this before, and it’s just plain unfair that we should single out Moslems and force them to publicly denounce terrorism!”

Well you know what? This is all unfair. It’s unfair to the 3000 people who were killed when the Twin Towers came down. It’s unfair to their families. It’s unfair to the people living in New York City’s Chinatown, whose businesses were destroyed when the entire area was effectively shut down. It’s unfair to everybody who travels by plane and needs to get to the airport an hour or two earlier than before and whose flight might be diverted because it turns out somebody accidentally carried a nail-clipper on board or looks at a stewardess the wrong way. It’s unfair to everybody. The only people who came out ahead on this were George Bush, John Ashcroft, Rudolph Giuliani and the asshole who was in lower Manhattan just hours after the 9/11 attacks selling “I Can’t Believe I Made It Out!” t-shirts.

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A judge has ruled that online pop-ups were legal, protected as free speech. I assume it would be equally legal for somebody to interrupt a trial in his courtroom every three minutes by jumping up and screaming “YOUR HONOR, YOUR PENIS IS TOO SMALL!”

Some Democratic hack is running for re-election, so the President flies in to speak at his fundraiser. The airport is virtually shut down for a while, and they close up not only the highway the President is planning to take, but two other major roadways he might take.

And this is rush hour, of course. Then you’ve got dozens of local cops on special duty, mostly to keep the rest of us from using any road with a legal speed limit of over 25 mph All this to protect a man who, if he just got into a cab like anybody else would be anonymously safe.

I wonder whether anybody has ever figured out how much it costs us for every dollar raised for the Democratic hack (though of course you won’t hear a peep from the Republicans, because Bush abused the system just as shamelessly for Republican hacks).

And “shamelessly” is the key here, because these guys act as if this is all the way it should be: Either they really don’t understand that it’s wrong, or they’re just too arrogant to care.

Politicians also think nothing of selling out our rights to go about our business: The town whose post office I patronize recently prostituted itself to a movie studio last month. Somebody got schtupped something, and there were probably perks for a few businesses, but basically the director ran the town for a couple of weeks. Streets were closed, stores were kept from doing business, and the movie folks unapologetically herded people from place to place.

I had to park 5 blocks away (in the rain) to get to the post office; and when I finished my business there, a woman in a blazer told me I couldn’t walk out for a while. I smiled and said “You do know you’re joking, right?”

So anyway, there’s a Meryl Streep movie opening later this year, and if you see a scene set in front of a post office, you might see Billo walking through the background where he shouldn’t be.