It must have been Harry S. Truman, the plainest amongst our plain presidents, who scared us all into having idiots running our government by saying: �Whenever you have an efficient government, you have a dictatorship.� Of course, he failed to acknowledge the possibility that we could have the worst of both worlds: inefficient government and dictatorship. And at this moment, we seem to be marching in step to get there soon.

Are our nation�s best and brightest so repulsed by the bureaucracy in the public sector that decidedly prefer to take up arms running the predatory wing of the private sector?

Maybe some of the �brightest� are doing that, but they cannot also be called �best� while allowing themselves to be corrupted by a heartless capitalism equally ready to reward its bright leaders as it is to deny countless people from sharing the economic trough.

It does look more and more as if both public and private sectors are being ran by the very same gang of thieves, all operating from a single �carnivalesque� den, where the larcenous elite pick the lazy, career-politicians as their lead carneys for deceit.

And these lead carneys are seldom the brightest, and definitely never the best!

Americans have done it in the past . . . so why not again? I mean . . . elect the village idiot to be mayor . . . well, president and CINC for this US-village we live in. No disrespect intended, not for the sake of disrespect; certainly not by simply calling a dumb ass who aspires to be America�s supreme leader by a first, middle and last name, all in one. And every village, we are told, is expected, certainly entitled, to have one. An idiot, that is!

One would think that hitting on nine out of 10 prognostications would make most of us who are humility-challenged a bit giddy zigzagging in haughty satisfaction; almost as if invited to a seminar conducted, ex officio, by none other than Nostradamus � in spirit, of course. But to me, this nine out of 10 �good guesses� that I�ve attained during this past year lose any and all merit when the error, the incredible miss, involves the man of the hour, Sen. John McCain of Arizona, the soon-to-be standard bearer for the GOP in the coming presidential election. And that�s how I messed up, big time, when last May in one of my columns I prematurely called this politician a has-been, and laid to rest his presidential ambitions with an obituary that read R.I.W. (Rest in War) instead of R.I.P.

Foolish me! Of all the predictions I�ve made throughout the years, this one I thought to be a cinch, a sure thing . . . an �almost-certainty� with an infinitesimal margin of error. I was almost embarrassed to even consider it a prediction instead of a factoid. Pleassse! How can the Grand Old Party consent to be represented by anyone like John McCain . . . a person irrelevant in just about every aspect of the party�s conservative tradition; a true morbid warmonger just like the present occupant of the White House; a phony funny-racist; an inarticulate man . . . one lacking minimal brain power? How, may I ask?

Could it be that Americans prefer not to have anyone smarter than their surrounding mediocrity leading them? Or that after having been submerged at the bottom of iniquity with George W. Bush for eight years, we might fee the need for a decompression stop presidency before our nation resurfaces without suffering from the bends? Nonsense . . . a McCain presidency would be no different from a Bush�s third term . . . equal opportunity idiocy, and more thieveries of the filthy, or cleanly, rich.

One cannot fathom McCain as the next president of the United States . . . the new scorn of the gooks and their new replacements, the terrorist Islamo-fascists! Not this burnt scrap from the bottom of Annapolis� kettle. But then again, Americans more often than not seem to side with the perceived underdog, particularly when seen as a hero-patriot, and it would be hard to find a greater underdog than the village idiot.

Don�t count McCain out . . . at least for now! It�s an indisputable fact that in America, money is total power, and at the end of the day power always grabs the reins.

� 2008 Ben Tanosborn