The holiday season is a stressful time, and it's especially bad for those of us with addictive personalities. It's a time when we often seek solace in our substance of choice. A dangerous time when use can quickly become abuse, addictions can rage out of control and destroy our lives.

Most years I can tough it out, remain at least somewhat functional and make it through to the new year, where I invariably make the same old resolutions to put an end to this madness once and for all. But this year is worse than most. Much worse. My body is ravaged and my mind is a wasteland. There are days when I drink a whole bottle and still I want more.



The first step in any program is to admit you can no longer control your addiction. What I've done to myself is bad enough, but it's what I've done to my children that is unforgiveable. They know what's going on. The hurt look on their faces when they come home from school to find yet another empty bottle is devastating. The sadness in their eyes haunts my dreams.

Former psychiatrist (and current right-wing hack) Charles Krauthammer invented Bush Derangement Syndrome a few years ago. Here is the definition he provided for it:

"the acute onset of paranoia in otherwise normal people in reaction to the policies, the presidency—nay—the very existence of George W. Bush".

Wow. I think I may have it. I'm definitely paranoid.

I've watched our preznit invade and occupy 2 sovereign nations, and I see him very publicly searching for a reason to attack a third. I listened to him proclaim for 3-plus years that he conducted the war in Iraq according to what he was told by the generals on the ground in Iraq, and then, with Iraq coming apart at the seams, watched him take a mulligan, change generals, and seemingly absolve himself of all accountability. My paranoia stems from the knowledge that he still has more than a year left to make matters worse.

I've reached a point where I can no longer bear to listen to the leader of my country speak publicly. At press conferences, when asked a question for which he does not have a prepared answer, dubya babbles like he's been hit on the head. I believe a man who thinks this poorly on his feet doesn't spend much time thinking when he's seated, and I suspect any thinking he does is both shallow and linear. I can't help feeling our preznit is simply not bright enough to lead this nation competently. He may be educated, but he is far from wise.

I believe the religio-military dick-measuring contest dubya calls the War on Terra has become our national shame. And I believe the rest of the world has pretty much the same opinion. They, like me, are just gritting their teeth and waiting for him to be gone, hoping America will change course with our next president.

For the first time in my life, the man who is responsible for projecting America's image abroad embarrasses me. Dubya embodies the image of America as schoolyard bully; arrogant, ignorant and aggressive.

I was all atwitter wondering what new heights of verbal gymnastics the administration that never makes mistakes would reach in trying to spin the just-released National Intelligence Estimate from this past summer which indicates Iran halted it's nuclear weapons program 4 years ago. I knew they wouldn't let me down. From CNN:

Bush said Tuesday he saw the latest estimate on Iran as "a warning signal."

"What's to say they couldn't start another covert nuclear weapons program?" Bush asked.

The latest estimate shows "Iran needs to be taken seriously as a threat to peace," Bush said.

Wow! It's breathtaking in it's simplicity. See, the fact that Iran doesn't have the weapons program we've been accusing them of having just proves how dangerous they are. Don't you get it? They could start a new double-super-secret weapons program any minute now! Be afraid!

Even more brilliance from National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley:

"If we want to avoid a situation where we either have to accept Iran ... with a path to a nuclear weapon, or the possibility of having to use force to stop it, with all the connotations of World War III -- then we need to step up the diplomacy, step up the pressure, to get Iran to stop their so-called civilian uranium enrichment program," he said. "That's our policy going forward -- no change."

We must keep up the pressure on Iran, keep threatening to bomb the bejeebers out of them, in order to force them to abandon the nuclear weapons program they, umm, abandoned 4 years ago. Yeah, that's it. I just love how he uses the phrase, "so-called civilian uranium enrichment program," like he's questioning claims made by those evil Iranians instead of our own National Intelligence Estimate.

Our government is stuck in a Monty Python skit.

I was hoping that this story was about the president of Sudan standing up to the mad mythologists and the invisible cloud-daddy and saying, "Enough already," but it looks more like he bowed to international pressure rather than reality. From the stories I can find searching the intertoobz, he simply signed the pardon papers, without making any public statement whatsoever. That means he's either pissed off or frightened. And either way, the religious craziness in that country is going to continue unabated.

These are the stories that make me glad I live in the USA. Even with dubya's grand experiment in empire building on credit, and the resulting loss of our international reputation, it's still a lot better place to live than Sudan and so many others like it. Places where religion has become government, where, as a free thinker with a mouth, I would quickly find myself separated at the neck. For me, freedom is pretty much a state of mind. To live in a place where state of mind is mandated by centuries-old theology would be my personal definition of Hell. I'd probably ask them to cut off my head.

That's probably why our own fundamentalists drive me crazy. How can anyone advocating creationism and prayer in our schools and the posting of 10 Commandments in our government buildings not look to places like Sudan and connect the damn dots? Those countries embody government by the religious right; intolerance and anger are the law of the land.

In late spring and summer of 1787 our founding fathers met to write the US Constitution. A grand opportunity lay before them; to create a country that would endure and grow into the great, largely unexplored land stretching westward. An opportunity of a lifetime for the greatest minds of their time; Franklin, Washington, Madison and Hamilton among them. Over a period of abut 4 months, these 55 men, the vast majority of them religious men, sat down and wrote a document creating a republic in which religion played no part. It did not happen by accident.