Tina Dupuy

Who would have guessed we'd have a national conversation about urinating on corpses? And worse yet to have people with a media megaphone attempting to defend it. The video of four marines desecrating the remains of a Taliban fighter in Afghanistan surfaced on YouTube last week.

The first thing worth noting is this treatment of war dead is absolutely against the Geneva Convention. The second thing is we threw out the Geneva Convention when we invaded Afghanistan.

Which leads me to the following conclusion: It's time to end this war. It's time to leave.

We like risk and reward. The gold rush was as much a motivation to be a pioneer as was the more noted religious freedom. Poker is actually considered a sport. Yes, poker players are athletes according to the U.S. government. It's the one sport you can train for while chain smoking in a tracksuit.

But like every wine connoisseur will think they have nothing in common with a wino; we celebrate gamblers but not degenerates.

We don't like people who lose and continue to place bets only to lose again. But here is the Republican Party wrapping up their year as unapologetic gamblers with America's fate in their greasy hands.

A perfect summary of the Grand Old Party's relationship with the U.S. Constitution comes from Texas Governor Rick Perry at Mike Huckabee's candidate forum on Fox News last Saturday. Governor Perry claimed as president he could overturn a law passed by Congress by executive order (he can't), and then to show his bona fides on the subject ,he pulled out a copy of the Constitution from his breast pocket -- displaying it proudly to the national audience.

You may have heard the Occupy Wall Street protesters are being paid to camp out. I heard it; they're being funded by a shifty billionaire and that's why they're demanding billionaires be taxed more. Seems likely. Also they're all Communists and ACORN. And whatever you've been scared of before -- probably that. Sharia Law, maybe? Anti-Semites? Anarchists?

Pirates, at least the traditional image we have in our minds (the ones with the parrots on their shoulders and wooden legs from the 1700s), were in reality rapists, thieves and murderers. They were violent outlaws; terrorists of the Caribbean colonies. Some of them were hired as mercenaries called privateers, but they were still pirates even with a note from the king. They pillaged, slaughtered and plundered for a couple hundred years.

And a couple hundred years after that? Well, now pirates are a multi-billion dollar Disney franchise.

The movement known as the tea party started in the mainstream media, on a national show. CNBC's Rick Santelli, fired what cable news would later dub "the shot heard around the world" in 2009, when he lamented paying for the mortgages of the "losers" who couldn't pay their bills. "President Obama, are you listening?" he bellowed.

Well, it was broadcast on national television.

By the way they snarl about the mainstream media on Fox News, you'd think they were disseminating their programs via ham radio instead of on the number one cable news network in the country. Fox News is as mainstream a media as any. And they've puffed up and promoted their pet protest group called the tea party for the last two and half years.

Yesterday, I was idling behind a seven-year-old Saturn sedan with an anti-Obama bumper sticker reading: "Because everyone deserves some of what you've worked hard for."

There's a knee-jerk response to dismiss the driver as being some dupe naively parroting slogans not meaningful in his tax bracket. (You'd never see that sticker on a Rolls-Royce.) It's not just the success of Republican "messaging" -- there's more to it than that.