As we recover from Super Tuesday, we find Obama with 13 states and Hillary with eight, though hers carry 80 more delegate votes. They seem no longer in a heated debate for right and wrong, but in a cautious waltz, properly distanced not to step on each other’s toes. Perhaps they will dance back in a few months as the Democrat dream-team. After all, we seem to be a nation of American Dreamers, who like things to turn out “nice.” How nice to have a woman and a black man. Ah, but who will be on top?

Back in reality, Kucinich is in Cleveland fighting for his political life. His fierce stands against the Iraq war, which supposedly Americans wanted to hear, brought him scant funds, a push off the networks' podiums, and the wrath of the Democratic Party for writing and reading his articles of Impeachment against Dick Cheney for illegally dragging us into the war. This as Dominatrix Pelosi stalled the Kucinich Articles to death in committee. So much for politicians who refuse to compromise; not nice.

Like his outspoken analog of the 2004 election, Howard Dean, who rose up like Birnham Wood in the night of George Bush, coming to Dunsanane to cut the tyrant down, Dean has been bumped up, and mostly out of sight, as Democratic Party chairman. Dean, the man who grew a grassroots movement on the Internet with a incredible outpouring of greenbacks and followers; Dean the phenom, who denounced the imminent war on Iraq and the calumnies of Bush; Dean, made to appear short of mad for raising his voice, cut down, marginalized, silenced, for Kerry, the bumbling elite Skull & Boner, who could not even defend his heroic war record.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, there they are. And on the right, if you would be so kind as to turn your heads, we have John McCain, now a certifiable crusader for a 100-year war, followed by the Evangelical Lite Mike Huckabee, and lastly, Mitt Romney, who wrote his way into the race with his checkbook. Of them all, McCain seems the most crazed and likely to start WW III, and thus most likely to win the Republican nomination. I don’t know if he’s nice enough to be president, unless moderated by nice Mr. Huckabee, who wanted to make sure South Carolinians would keep their right to hang their Confederate flags if not their Negroes. On the margin of this field, stands a raving Ron Paul, who would eliminate everything but a free market economy to fulfill his dream of a thinly-veiled Darwinian dog-eat-dog society.

Then we have the smiling by-standers of John McCain, the thrice-married Rudy Giuliani, partner in Dallas law-firm Bracewell & Giuliani, now brokering the privatized Super Highway from Mexico to Canada; the head of Giuliani and Partners Consulting, the former owner of Giuliani Bank, with more conflicts of interest than affairs with former gomarrahs, almost. Then we have the smiling Indy/Demo/Republo/pro-Israeli Senator Joe Lieberman bowing towards McCain to secure the “Promised Land.” In total, la crème de la merde par excellence.

So there are your babies. And then there are the Diebold (or lie boldly) electronic vote-changing machines, along with Sequoia, ES&S and others, to make sure if even by some miracle the least offensive nice candidate was about to win, it could be all turned around in the night for the most offensive wolf in the pack.

So how does this, did this all happen again, this time bringing even more voters to primaries and caucuses? Hey, you gotta believe. Believe that all these contenders did not get filtered through the Council on Foreign Relations, Trilateral Commission, Rockefeller and allied foundations, thinks tanks, deep pocket corporatos, special interests, foreign favor-buyers, financial Titans, and uber shakers and movers like the Bilderbergers. Politics, of all things, does not exist in a vacuum, but rather like seeds in dirt in an old coffee can, grows with a persistent sprinkling of cash, promises of power, memorial libraries, etc. -- if you play ball.

So that’s the message, the post mortem. If it’s too gloomy like the damp humid sky of Manhattan, threatening to rain another 9/11 somewhere, then it’s not too late to move to Sweden, Norway, France or the moon. Or maybe it’s time to hold your ground, reread the Constitution and Bill of Rights and find a way to create the free debate, the open discussion-forum democracy was supposed to be, rather than the privatized province of an Imperial President and his courtiers. This is not a crime to say or do, as the IP & Co. would have you believe. This is your inalienable right, not to be manipulated by fear, by phony money people, corruptible politicians, holy rollers, camp-tent televangelists, the defense industry, the oil industry, Big Pharma, private armies, and other bloodsuckers. Don’t be their sucker. Talk back, fight back, think back . . .

Your Imperial President Bush has laid a $3 trillion plus budget (the biggest in history) at the feet of Congress, guaranteeing upfront a $400 billion plus deficit and war expenditures for McCain’s 100-year war. This on top of the $9 trillion national debt. This week the economy lost 14,000 jobs, in addition to the 2 million already offshored, but ExxonMobil had the most profitable quarter of any corporation in history. Yet the stock market tanked in spite of four Fed interest rate cuts within a few months.

If you and your family want to survive, stop being so nice. See it all, tell it all, to yourself and others, like it is. Even if “it” doesn’t sound nice. Even if you have to get ugly, like really ugly, and do what the people who created this incredible democratic republic did to their King George & Co. As an old ad boss of mine once said, “Nice closed last Tuesday.” And so it goes.