The Paper Nominated Me 12 Or 13

The Publisher, Jeff Johnson, Who Has Offered Not A Word Of Explanation To Me, Has Privately Told People That He Hated Every Word That I Wrote. I Assume That Mostly Refers To My Exposing The Lies Used By President Bush To Justify The Invasion Of Iraq. Fortunately Sixty Percent Of Americans Now Get The Point, But Only After Tens Of Thousand Of Americans And Iraqis Have Been Killed And Maimed As The Carnage Spirals Out Of Control. My Only Regret Is That My Pen Was Not Sharper And My Words Tougher.

Boycotts Don't Work. They Work In Certain Isolated Situations, Where You Have Some Potential. But In The Main, The Best Way To Bring About Freedom In A Society Is To Normalize, Have Tourism, Have Trade, Have Contact.

Eisenhower Provided The First Break In The Cold War, By Bringing Khrushchev To The United States, In Humanizing The Soviets; And Then Nixon, By Making The Opening To China; And Then Reagan, Even Meeting In Reykjavik With Gorbachev And Acknowledging That Nuclear Weapons Are A Horror. So I Won't Accept That Republicans Just Escalate. Republicans, At Least When They Were More Moderate, They Were Maybe Even More Isolationist, They Sometimes Brought Sanity To The Debate. We Don't Have That Now. We Have - All These Republicans Have Gone Off The Neoconservative Deep End.

The Fact Is ... That When Totalitarian Nations Like China And Saudi Arabia Play Ball With U.s. Business Interests, We Like Them Just Fine. But When Venezuela's Freely Elected President Threatens Powerful Corporate Interests, The Bush Administration Treats Him As An Enemy.

Much Of What Candidates Have To Do Is Raise Money And Appeal To Constituencies Or Interest Groups That Can Provide That Money.