...or is more of the same just more of the same?

Volume II

Item

Say what you will about former Congressman Eric Massa from New York. When forced to confront his somewhat unconventional behavior with staffers and anyone else in the showers, he resigned. That's more than can be said of Larry "love amongst the stalls"Craig or everybody's favorite international soulman Governor Mark Sanford of Appalachia. Massa might have been having a few too many sleepovers with the boys in the band but he only made his excuses after he left the Congress. John Ensign, the Senator who felt that sharing everything with his chief of staff included the man's wife, then ran to his parents to bail him out, is still in office. So is Senator David Vitter whose name and number appears in more call girl Roledexes in Louisiana than the number of the VD clinic. So here's to you Eric Massa. You might have crossed the line at your "crossing the line party" but your tickle parties gave America a good laugh.

____________________________________________________________________



Item



Washington D.C. said goodbye this week to Desiree Rogers. The former White House Social Secretary resigned her post amid allegations that she confused her role as party planner with co-first lady. Ms. Rogers made a spectacle of herself in more ways than one. Desiree was posing for the cameras at the President's State Dinner honoring India's Prime Minister while Michaele and Tareq Salahi were schmoozing their way past the Secret Service. While security is not among her duties, she became the face of the scandal. If you don't know who will replace Ms. Rogers, well, the Obama's hope you never do.

___________________________________________________________________


Item

And now we come to Colleen R. LaRose, aka, Jihad Jane. People like this make any sensible discussion of homeland security impossible. Conservative fear-mongers will use this arrest as proof that the Patriot Act and illegal wiretapping are noble and necessary. They will rail endlessly about evil subversives in our midst and how no one is safe from radical Islam. Borrowing a clinical term from the Kennedy School of International affairs...CRAP.

Jihad Jane is a dangerous, deluded misfit. In a country of 300 million I suspect she is not the only one. Had she chosen Christianity or Scientology as a cause and set out to assassinate Sean Penn or Arnold Schwarzenegger the arrest wouldn't have made page 10. The internet has given voice to every type of oddball and eccentric (including no-nothing bloggers). How many Nazi sympathizers might we have unearthed in 1942 if the world wide web were available? How many misguided souls, hungry for a little attention and frustrated by the lack of it, would have surfaced as "reds" during the commie-hunting days of the House Unamerican Activities Committee?

Ms. LaRose is a crazy person and a criminal. She should be prosecuted as such. (No star chamber military courts please.) She is not special or particularly sinister because her brand of lunatic affiliation is Middle Eastern. She is just another loner with a grudge. She is not the tip of some Jihadist wet dream. You have much more to fear from Tom Cruise recruiting your children than from Osama bin Laden. Really!