One of our cats just jumped up in my lap and I had to pause to pet her. She is the one that is so dumb my grandkids can carry her around upside down and she just purrs and purrs. Her answer to everything is to look at it quizzically and then either play with it or try to eat it or just ignore it. She lives in a simpler world than I do and it seems really attractive to me this morning. Perhaps I will be reincarnated as a cat in my wife's house. It could be a life of great contentment.

Patooch is a grey cat that looks like a huge mouse with a furry tail and I have a few questions that I would like to ask her. Patooch, what should we do about the problems in Iraq? Here she climbed up on my shoulder and purred in my ear loud enough to drown out the sounds inside my head. What should we do about the mess in Afghanistan, Patooch? She rubbed against my aching head and it hurt a little less after she was done. How can we bring Democracy to the Arabic peninsula and the rest of the Middle East Patooch? Now she is batting at a stray hair hanging down over my ear and still purring. She switched to the back of my chair to get a better base for her morning games with the back of my head. Patooch, what are we going to do about the problems of poverty in the nation? She leapt down still purring and went toward the kitchen looking back at me expectantly. Oops, her sister Charlotte blindsided her on her way to the food dish and now they are rolling around in their mock-fierce play that they indulge in every day before breakfast. It is really hard to get them to take life seriously, that is why they are so beloved in our house.

There are few answers to those questions that promise a good ending to the Wars we are waging on Terrorists, on Iraq, on Poverty, on Drugs, on Taxes on Welfare and on the bureaucracy or at least big government. We haven't started one on sex yet but that may be next. Anyway we clearly need a war on the deficit; that has the attention of everyone except possibly Patooch and Charlotte. We may need a war on proliferation since we have already declared one on treaties between ourselves and other nations. We were almost at war with the UN for a while and it looked like we were going to take on both France and Germany. Luckily that has faded and we are now trying to make nice with all of them. I had a neocon cat once but he lost a fight with a coyote over who owned the arroyo out back. My politically incorrect daughter called him her "crack baby" kitty. Now I keep my cats indoors because cats can be too tamely dumb to live in a world of owls and coyotes and skunks.

Maybe that is the problem that we are experiencing in Iraq and Afghanistan, we are too tame for the competition in that arroyo. I watched a large number of Shiite mourners whipping themselves with chains at the funeral of their fallen leader. I haven't seen that much tolerance for pain in this country since when I was young and motorcycle gangs fought with chains instead of guns. There are thousands of volunteers pouring into Iraq to fight our troops and kill the Iraqis who work with them. They are only trying to create order, why is the opposition so intense? Whoops Charlotte just jumped into the chair that Patooch was occupying and the kitty wars are on again. I never try to separate two cats fighting; I learned that bit of wisdom when I was really young, back when the neocons were still liberals. Oh well they are licking one another again so I guess my intervention wasn't really needed. God bless and keep you all safe in these times when every catfight becomes a war and our arroyo is the whole wide world.