Lou Dobbs almost killed me

I had a near-death experience in the barber's chair today. Of all ironies, the hard-working Vietnamese immigrants that cut my hair had anti-immigrant bigot Lou Dobbs on their TV. I've grown so disdainful of his biased, short-sighted, illogical opinions as to physically recoil at the sound of his voice. The air was blasting so I couldn't hear his blathering....until, with hot foam lathered on my neck and a straight razor bearing down to clear it away, the air shut off and I could hear old Lou going off on another tirade.

As the razor scrapped across my neck, I froze and tried to tune him out, knowing that sooner or later he would say something so remarkably stupid that I would involuntarily shutter, and the razor would slip and that would be the end of me. Death-by-idiocy.

An example of the demagoguery I had heard on the show already: one of the FOOLs (Friends of Old Lou) was talking about how partisanship today was at an all-time high - all because of Iraq, mind you - and that it is higher now than it was during the height of the Vietnam War.

But let's think about that for a moment. The height of the war was, what, 1967-1968. Lyndon Johnson, a Texas Democrat, was president. He led a Democrat-controlled House and a Democrat-controlled Senate, all of whom felt committed to this war in Vietnam. But you can't expect the Republican party, traditionally the more strong-defense, support-the-troops party, to be yelling and screaming about "Johnson lied, people died" and how the Gulf of Tonkin was a sham. No, they supported the war effort and the president leading the war effort.

Reverse the parties in power, and you'd likely see a partisanship on par with today's tone.