A look at the lighter side? Nah!

With all the crazy stuff going on, it was hard to know what to write about this week. No matter what a little old country editor picked, it seemed like someone somewhere would accuse him of fear-mongering, far-right-wing extremism or outright racism.

Might be better just to sweep some of these stories under the rug and pretend they never happened:

Max Baucus, our own esteemed Montana senator, had his 15 minutes of national fame, and then went up in flames as both Democrats and Republicans savaged his long-awaited health-care reform proposal. For a guy who has been touting the benefits of bipartisanship for months, he sure looked lonely when he stared into the camera Wednesday on a vast and otherwise empty platform. Turned out, the only thing bipartisan was the attack on poor Max.

This followed the bipartisan attack on Rep. Joe Wilson for shouting "You lie!" when President Obama told a joint session of Congress that health-care reform wouldn't cover illegal aliens. The attack on Wilson for being an ill-timed boob unfortunately distracted from the issue that Wilson had rightly hoped to bring attention to. Indeed, despite the president's solemn denial that he lied to the nation, he was whistling a different tune when he kowtowed to the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute last week. There he admitted what should have been obvious all along: The reason why health-care reform won't cover illegal aliens is that there won't be any (illegal aliens, that is). President Obama said the health-care debate "underscores the necessity of passing comprehensive immigration reform and resolving the issue of 12 million undocumented people living and working in this country once and for all." In other words, let's just call everyone an American citizen and be done with it. As the president said in his speech, "Todos somos Americanos. We are all Americans." And apparently he means it - everyone has a right to be an American citizen whether they earned it or not. Health care is just one of the many benefits you can win for being smart enough to cross the border illegally.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration also announced that it was dumping the missile shield defense system that was intended to protect Eastern Europe from nuclear threats. This delighted two of our primary adversaries, Russia and Iran, and had the collateral effect of stabbing our Polish and Czech allies in the back. It might not be so bad if the president gave this defense system up as part of a hard negotiation with the Russians, where we got something in return. But no, this is just plain, abject submission. In the old days, it used to be called appeasement, but now nobody knows long words with historical importance any longer, so it barely was a blip on the cable-TV radar, which seemed mostly focused on the tragic death of a Yale University student, with occasional forays into the bizarre worlds of deceased diva Michael Jackson and accused kidnapper Philip Garrido.

All that, plus hundreds of thousands of Americans traveled to Washington, D.C., to rally against what they perceive as the inattention of the political establishment to the needs and wants of Main Street America. Not only did the White House NOT get the message (Press Secretary Robert Gibbs postured that he didn't even know the rally was taking place), but then the protesters were ridiculed en masse by the speaker of the House, Nasty Pelosi, who said she thought the language being used at freedom rallies and town-hall meetings (and presumably in columns such as this' just might incite violence. Whereas presumably Pelosi's nasty habit of implying that conservative protesters are Nazis is intended to, uh, quell passions. Oh yes, and this concern about civility comes from a woman who called President George W. Bush "an incompetent leader," "a man with no judgment" and a "liar." Perhaps we should suggest a 'resolution of disapproval" on her.

And let us not forget the two lone journalists who exposed the mighty corrupt empire of ACORN as the nutty venture it truly is with a hidden camera and an outrageous story of underage Salvadoran prostitutes in need of government-subsidized housing. If they gave out Pulitzer Prizes for impact, quality and depth of reporting, these two would win hands down, but unfortunately in the Jim Crow two-tiered world of journalism, the prize is "for liberals only." Conservatives need not apply.

So, like I said, there was no shortage of topics for discussion.

The only problem was that, after several weeks of gloomy columns about unconstitutional legislating, unrepresentative representatives, and disastrous debt, I had decided to reserve this space for something a little lighter. We deserve a good laugh, don't we?

I waited all week, but nothing funny showed up. At least, nothing funnier than Max Baucus twisting in the wind while his liberal friends toyed with him like cats clawing at catnip.

Which reminds me of an Abraham Lincoln joke: "Things may come to those who wait, but only the things left by those who hustle."

If you have been sitting around "waiting" for common sense to return to our federal government, you just got out-hustled. Might want to think about joining the next tea party instead of continuing your rabbit crouch. There are plenty of "hustlers' in Congress and the White House, and unless you get up off your butts, they will take whatever isn't nailed down - oh, and just in case you hadn't noticed, the last time I looked, the Constitution wasn't nailed down.

And that's not a joke.

n Frank Miele is managing editor of the Daily Inter Lake and writes a weekly column. E-mail responses may be sent to edit@dailyinterlake.com