I have bit my tongue in recent months because firing off a round at Randi Rhodes was followed almost immediately with the unimpeded rise of "das gut" Schultz. I had nothing to do with any of this, of course, but karma is karma. We've killed too many Indians and indigenous peoples on our own continent for the "Heartland" paradigm to survive intact, or be taken seriously by any thinking, feeling human.

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Caller: "Hi, Ed. What do you think about ethanol?"

Ed: "I think it's terrific."

Therein lies the rub. In the face of taking food out of the mouths of the poor people of Central and Latin America, Ed Schultz thinks it's just fine to pour corn into the gas tanks of our hunks of metal instead of into the human beings who are our closest neighbors.

Please do not attempt to argue simple economics with me. I can add. I can subtract. Democrats multiply while Republicans continually divide. I have a college degree -- a couple of them – and so I will not be shouted down on this issue: people are starving so that we can drive our automobiles any damn time we want.

But facts don't stop guys like Ed "das gut" Schultz. Now he thinks it's necessary to school Barak Obama on what it takes to address, "the common man." Please, Ed, pull your head out of that ice-hole you've been fishing out of for too long and pay closer attention to something besides your own damn bank account, which, your listeners should note, continues to be shot-through with nickels, dimes and quarters from ClearChannel and Rupert Murdoch.

The reason why simpleton pleas for the redress of grievances for the common man worked so well for so long is because simpletons were the only people left voting in this United States of America. Post-Reaganomics, everyone else has been walking around with a permanent crick in their necks from shrugging their shoulders and saying, "I don't know how they do it...I don't get how they get away with it." And so they quit taking their government and its policies seriously. The really smart people learned their lessons at the barricades, and from those who were beaten by riot police at the barricades, that George Washington told a multitude of lies far larger than the fact that he chopped down his father's cherry tree. Abe Lincoln also lied through his teeth, too, because no one presides over a Civil War, reunites a country, and then gets assassinated without having told some whoppers to the wrong people along the way. Get serious, folks.

Statistics don't lie, but, as a veteran of the educational testing industry, I can assure the reader that statisticians are constantly poking each other's eyes out with their pinocchio-like proboscises. All "re-search" is "me-search," so the more scientifically-educated the expert, the more likely it is that they are going to see what they want to see in their numbers -- until the math just reaches out and smacks them with a two-by-four.

Whack!

There have never been this many people going to the polls to vote before. The truth is, we do not know how to talk to the American people. As it turns out, we have more than just a few Reagan-Democratic simpletons showing up to the polls these days.

Barak Obama talks to the American people as if we were actual adults and not the hand-to-mouth simpletons cynical, evil, well-educated authority figures like to manipulate to see how long they will vote against their own best interests. I'm thinking Karl Rove, as a for-instance, manipulating and gaming our voting system(s) to get neo-fascist conservatives elected to high office.

In fact, vote-suppression is an integral part of how neo-fascist conservatives operate: turn government into a farce and watch the educated take a pass on voting, much less participating, in their own governance. So when simpletons like me show up to the polls – still donning our propeller hats professing true belief in democracy – we get beaten bloody by the simpletons who shout louder and longer than we ever have time for. Abandoned and rejected, we give up trying to fight against those who value brawn over brains.

But not this time. The numbers and the statistics of the past will not be helpful in interpreting what is happening across America. Just as soon as Hillary will down a shot of Jack, Barak will talk about hope and change in a suit and tie. And because he has the bonafides to pull off participating in discussions from the Chechen rebellion to Aunt Mable's sweet-potato pie recipe, when Barak opens his mouth to speak, people listen because for once in several generations they are hearing and seeing themselves in their representative.

In an earlier piece I made mention of the fact that Barak Obama will be bigger than Martin Luther King, Jr, and I was not engaging in political hyperbole. Nor would I be underestimating the impact of this well-educated fellow if I were to place him above Abraham Lincoln in his competence and leadership ability. He is that good. Better than Bill Clinton by a long shot because Barak is sincere whereas Bubba was just trying to get in your pants for a little while.

Please do not take offense at my characterization of Reagan Democrats as simpletons. No one man can successfully pass judgment on any other. But I am willing to bet that I have gotten fairly close to the mark in my criticism of Ed Schultz. The man has become a shill and a mouthpiece for corporate America. I put him in the same class with all the Oprah goop-heads who think "conscious capitalism" is the wave of the future.

No, it is NOT. Consummate capitalists set the fascist ball in motion from the beginning. Let us not fool ourselves any longer. We need to be done with this vestige of our British heritage and throw away corporate capitalism and the great concentrations of wealth that feed and produce it. These wealthy, powerful white males are not happy, contented people, they are fundamentally ill and flawed as human beings and they know it.

Stop allowing yourself to be dictated to by corporate apologists like Ed Schultz. Sick people do sick, stupid things to themselves and others. Look around you. Read the headlines. Does the world appear to be run by sane individuals with the best interests of the human species in their hearts?

A vote for Obama is a vote to begin the process of cleaning up the mess we have created with our apathy and our arrogance – and a vote against corporate apologists like Ed Schultz who make a living telling people only what they want to hear and not what they need to hear.

Tune him out. He's made more money than he needs, apparently, because Ed Schultz is no longer paying as close attention to the "pulse of the Heartland" as he used to. He seems incapable of realizing that the man wearing the hard hat at the construction site isn't the high-school dropout he used to be. Increasingly, that man or woman is a degreed professional whose job has been shipped overseas.

Authors Bio:
Award winning poet, writer and refugee from the educational testing industry. Richard agitates, supports and motivates activists of all kinds, the most well-known being Cindy Sheehan. Web developer and designer by day, writer by night, Richard has the disposition of an observer and essayist. Richard has fallen in love, one day at a time, with the writing of Raymond Carver, while sparring, verbally, with the flying monkey right since 1998. Richard built his first computer from scratch in 1977 and had his heart broken for the first time in 1980. It has been stomped on and dragged behind a Chevrolet for many miles since that time. Thanks in no small part to Republican partisan politics and internecine policies.