The following fake interview with Gary Trudeau (creator of the Doonesbury comic strip) was created because we could not do the whole thing in cartoon form as we wished.

                                        HUSH: One could only wish.

SOLVING CRIME

Dear Vee Jay Hush

I have a theory on how to fight crime in America.If we simply arrest all those people who havethree names we will wipe out all major crimes. In support of my theory let me point out such major criminals as Lee Harvey Oswald, John Wayne Gacy and Mark David Chapman. All of these men had three names! Let’s wise up America and wipe out crime by taking out all the nutty guys with three names!

Yours in incoherence
Howard Brush Dean

P.S. I am a real doctor you know!

MAKING PEACE

Dear Vee-Jay Hush

I have devised a plan for world peace that I think might prove useful to the newleadership in Washington D.C. Here is how it goes:

    Step One: Contact all of our Islamist friends from around the world and invite them to a 
                        conference in Munich.

    Step Two: Give them everything that they want.

    Step Three Return home and declare that you’ve achieved ‘peace in our time’.

    Final Step: Give your offices to Winston Churchill and let him clean up the mess you’ve 
                        made.

I hope this has been helpful to you as I have previous experience in this area that I think could make me a relevant figure in today’s political climate.

Mr. Neville Chamberlain London, 3^rd tombstone to the left of Bertrand Russell

Editors Response: We have forwarded your letter to Jimmy Carter as we feel his interest level will likely be higher than ours. Please remain infamous and someone will shortly outdo you.

GOVERNMENT EXPERIENCE

Dear Vee-Jay Hush

I have recently lost my country and would like to apply to rule another one. This may be difficult as I am now scheduled to hang but I wished to express my interest nonetheless. My talents include the ability to make ridiculously grandiose statements of victory in the face of ignominious defeat. My hobbies include gassing innocent villagers and allowing my late sons to torture anyone they want. I hope to hear from you soon.

Mr. Saddam Hussein
c/o Katie Couric

WISDOM FROM QUITE HIGH

Dear Vee-Jay Hush

I am a gay man who wears outlandish glasses who has not had a hit song since the mid-1970s. I am certain this qualifies me to ban all religion. Thank you.

E. John
14 Paul Anka rd.
Has Been City

Ed Bradley died of Leukemia Thursday at the age of 65. He was a long-time member of the ‘60 Minutes’ cast and the report regarding his death struck me as distinctly sad. Not because I knew him, I did not, nor because of anything in particular that he’s ever done; he was after all no earth shaker but just a journalist. Nonetheless, he did always come across as a likeable guy with an engaging style of narrative that drew you in even when you were not originally inclined to listen. Thursday night, as my wife and I watched Katie Couric honoring him on CBS, I was bothered by the vapor of his life and the apparent lack of genuine concern he had for whatever lay beyond it.

From what I could see Ed Bradley, like many of his compatriots in the media, was a classic Progressive Utopian, a man who believed, as I myself once did, that life is all about humanity; that the world is a mess but that humanity can get itself out of it and progress to a better age by willing it just hard enough to make it happen. With a little pluck here and a whole lot of compassion there, man could make a world of peace by simply believing in his own ability to do it. It’s the very center of the liberal world view and I recognize it as being much like that which I once held as my own. I suspect that’s why most media representatives have so little patience for the Christian view of life. Its not just archaic in their eyes but suppressive; inhibiting as it does the advancement of the progressive utopian dream with its ‘medieval’ theology about fallen man, the devil and the need for a Savior.

Not that Ed never talked about the afterlife. Last night, they showed a part of an interview he did late in his life and he actually answered a question about the end of his life by giving a tongue in cheek nod to Christian doctrine, albeit by way of bad Hallmark theology . I will have to quote it roughly for I don’t remember the exact words but the gist of his answer was as follows: "When its all over and I come to the pearly gates and Saint Peter greets me there and asks me what I did to deserve entrance... I’m going to look him in the eye, smile and ask ‘did you ever see the interview I did with Lena Horne?’"

Lena Horne. Now I’ll grant you I will probably never meet or speak to anyone as talented or as famous as Lena Horne, but I doubt God would be impressed with that anyway. He’s not only met every famous person, He created all who have ever lived. How sad that Bradley thought just enough of the message to make a joke of it. Sadder still if he actually passed from this world thinking that his accomplishments as a journalist were going to help him to pass into the New Jerusalem without first being drenched in the blood of Another. How terribly, terribly sad for Ed Bradley and all who thought his comments were simply cute banter with no consequences beyond the end of the interview; or the end of his life.

By Father O’ Bother

I am struck with a need for perspective this morning. Allegations of gross immorality and drug abuse against well known Colorado preacher Ted Haggard, and his subsequent removal from the pulpit, have left many conservative Evangelicals stunned and just as many media drones positively giddy. With the elections tomorrow and the media’s obvious desire to produce a low Evangelical turn out at the polls, this could not have come at a worse time. And yet, the very fact that this was my first groan upon hearing the news is causing me to reflect on my priorities. After all, is this scandal’s effect on tomorrow’s election really the most tragic part of this issue? Was Haggard ordained to be a political activist or first and foremost a purveyor of the good news of Jesus Christ (Matt 28:16-20 & Acts 1:8)? My own reaction was immediately political and for this I am presently convicted. The allegations against Haggard, even if just a fraction prove to be true, will likely have a far greater negative effect on the already sagging credibility of evangelists in America than it will on the election on Tuesday. And even if the Democrats gained full control of the house, and hamstrung the remainder of President Bush’s final term, topping it all off with an RSVP to Osama Bin Ladin come to Washington and explain the feasibility of Shariah Law, it would not be near the spiritual calamity as that of a gospel message dragged once again through the dirt before a multitude existing in a darkness so deep they don’t even know they’re in it.

We are to be salt in a rotting world (Matt 5:13) and so I will definitely vote tomorrow. What’s more I hope that all other eligible Evangelicals will do so also (even if their only reason is to annoy an arrogant and obviously partisan media). Nonetheless, I am reminded once again how shaky the ground under my feet when I place my hope in American politics rather than the solid ground of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

The Republicans today are making much of Senator Kerry’s comments to an assembly of students in California this week. He told the students that they would ‘do well’ to get a good education and that if they didn’t get a good education they’d get ‘stuck in Iraq’. Speaking on behalf of my party, the Democratic Party, I must stand and be heard on Kerry’s behalf. After all, he’s right about the unwashed masses and we Democrats have always been a leading voice in the class warfare trenches. Everyone in my party and in our media knows that educated people become liberal Democrats and uneducated people, particularly those Fundamentalists who are always untaught and easy to lead, become janitors, and military personnel. It is true that Senator Kerry was himself once a member of the military but he managed to keep that service amazingly short and soon atoned for it by becoming one of the most vociferous anti-military voices our country has every produced. Like it or not, Kerry is simply expressing the views of those of us educated liberals of the great American intelligentsia. We talk this way all the time both publicly and privately. Wasn’t it our proud party that compared Guantanomo to the Nazi war camps? And have we not been the loudest voice in favor of retreat in Iraq, even to this day?

Nonetheless, we must remember that this does not necessarily make our party an anti-war party. We’re the party of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whose fair minded allotment of the lion’s share of Eastern Europe to Uncle Joe Stalin led directly to the Cold War, and who wasn’t blessed by that?

By Osama Bin Hidin

By Father O’Bother

One need only examine current events to see the difference between Christians and Muslims in history. This last year, Dan Brown, author of the best-selling book‘The DaVinci Code’, trashed the whole premise of the Christian faith on a massive scale, making the fictional claim that Jesus had married Mary Magdalene and the two had gone off happily to France where they created the royal line of the kings of France. Christians were offended but as far as I could hear there were no public protests and there were certainly no contracts put out on Dan Brown’s life. In Islam, on the other hand, one is dealing with an entirely different world. Let’s move ahead to this summer, when the pope quoted a scholar from the middle ages who happened to mention the violent nature of the religion of Islam. What was the reaction? It was essentially this: "If you call our religion a religion of violence again, your streets will swim in the blood of you and your followers and their children and their children’s children. We’ll teach you with the violence of our religion that we are not a a violent religion!

The difference between the multi-generational militancy of Islam and the old militancy of Christianity is actually very simple: When Christians, or so-called Christians, have shed blood in the name of Jesus (and there is no denying that they have!), they have done so in defiance of the faith to which they claimed to adhere. When Muslims have shed blood in the name of Allah, however, they have all too often done so as a direct result of their faith.