DADT to DOOFUS – and other recent notes on humanity’s progress

President Obama and the nation’s two top military leaders have called for an end to the policy that prevents gay Americans from joining the armed forces to give their lives so tribal thugs in Iraq and Afghanistan can beat their wives in peace.

In calling for an end to the years-old military policy of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (DADT), the administration moves to bring gay Americans squarely under the decades-old policy of DOOFUS (“Do Obey Orders From Us”).

Although not a household word in its military connotation, our DOOFUS defense policy has a list of clear achievements:

          * DOOFUS-led thinking overcame many daunting obstacles to eliminate weapons of mass destruction from Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, not the least of which being there weren’t any WMDs to eliminate.

          * DOOFUS thinking made us oust the Taliban from much of Afghanistan, freeing the people from the control of religious zealots and allowing them to return to their simple agrarian ways as the world’s largest producer of opium.

That gay Americans could one day openly be a part of these and similar chapters in our nation’s history would be a turning point. One can only hope that having mastered the art of turning, we could together approach the holy mystery of which direction.

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IT’S A SMALL WORLD AFTER ALL as global citizens learned that both former Vice President Al Gore and current terrorist Osama Bin Laden have some common ground. Both are concerned about global warming, which Bin Laden blamed on industrialized nations in a recent rant. Actually both men also share a high regard for the late Alfred Nobel – Gore because he earned the peace prize created in Nobel’s will and Bin Laden because he appreciates the dynamite Nobel invented.  Pairing the two prominent figures on the world stage might have created more of a buzz, but Washington and most of the East Coast chattering classes were busy shoveling repeated foot-deep doses of global warming.

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R.I.P. MASSACHUSETTS PURITANISM – Republicans who snorted indignantly for decades over the reputed private amorous dalliances of the late Senator Ted Kennedy certainly showed a different way and their true moral compass when they nominated – and their fellow citizens elected – Scott Brown to fill Kennedy’s seat. Brown, who posed nude for Cosmopolitan, is not only a senator with nothing to hide, but is very clearly on the record hiding nothing.

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