Nobody’s Opinion; I am going on a most important mission tomorrow…hunting for lost hormones, which I am told can be found in abundance in the Opinion Journal.

So I’m posting a piece that I wrote in August of 2003. It was a small admiration attempt to honor Laura Bush AND since she was recently in the news with a medical problem, and she is a fan of Mark Twain, I decided to post this in honor of our doctors, first Lady, and the two Mormon boys who got lost because they read “Huckleberry Finn” and went looking for the Mississippi.

Hopefully, they have some fun before they find them.

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The First Lady got me into reading Mark Twain again after hearing that he was one of her favorite authors. I started with Life on the Mississippi, because I live very near the Mississippi. I did not expect though that Mr. Twain would teach me how to really think about the nature of cows. I mean, who thinks about cows?

Pretty much the only time one thinks of cows is when you see a bunch of them in a field and you say…Oh look at the cows, honey: as if that revelation alone will give you a deep bonding moment with whomever happens to be in the car.

Yes, cow bonding.

Many people under fifty do not even know who Mark Twain was. Mark Twain was never mentioned in any school that I attended while growing up. I’m positive my son has never heard of him. He probably thinks Huckleberry Finn is a cocktail. No, he suffers from dyslexia like the rest of our youth, who have been taught how not to read so as to be easily controlled. Better to keep them dumb and drugged…ask any Marxist or Democrat.

The liberals who control the textbooks have had him banished to footnotes. Due to political correctness, they thought that the truth in the portrayal of the black slave Jim, in Huckleberry Finn, who Mr. Twain made as a very heroic fictional character, was a put-down to blacks. Of course, anyone who has read the book knows that it was a put down to slavery, but the liberals think that you are so stupid that you won’t get the message behind the story. The liberals believe that Jim’s colloquial speech patterns are something we should not be exposed to. He sounds so dumb. Anyway heaven forbid that the truth of history be reported in any book.

No, Jim's speech was offensive they say, but the liberals are not offended in anyway with the lack of proper English pronunciation in the current population of young black rappers and many black youth. (As Mr. Cosby has recently pointed out.) Go figure.

I’m sure that’s why that whole collection of Mark Twain’s writing has sat on my selves all these years…unread. Somewhere I had forgotten that it was The Prince and the Pauper that got me hooked into reading at such a young age in the first place. Thanks to Mrs. Bush, I dragged out my precious unread collection and I learned about cows.

Cows in the flood.

Mr. Twain explains in Life on the Mississippi that when there is a flood he observed (he was observing the flood of 1903) that cows will stand still while the water rises around them. He thought that was the strangest thing. They will not move, standing until the water reaching up to their necks carries them away, and they drown.

Horses, he noticed would swim and try to get out... try to find food. Not something we think about in the days of McDonalds, Wendy’s, and Burger King.

Then I got to thinking…that’s what we’ve become. The American people are like cows in the flood. All our independence, all our fight for freedoms, all our integrity and pride in our work, all the greatness of invention and optimism and belief in the American way has been wiped away by the rising water of socialism, and fascism slowly flooding around our feet, creeping up on us…day after day…year after year…and we have stood like cows in the flood. The flood of totalitarianism, the flood of fascism, creeping up on us slowly, deliberately, and in this flood is snakes.

There are snakes in the mud. And some of these snakes are pretty nasty.

Now, it's nothing new to site politicians as being as low as snakes. This has been going on since the first election, somewhere in the caves of Iraq. They slim around mostly, they are hard to catch, and they're slippery on many issues. Their bite can be lethal. For example, not all snakes (ladies) are men. Some like the coral snake can have very pretty covering... like Hillary Clinton.

Hillary is playing the middle now. She talks little, because she is not as quick thinking on her feet as Bill. I was thinking about Hillary’s first term in the White House, and how Janet Reno and Madeleine Albright were Hillary’s old friends. Isn’t that called nepotism? Doesn’t that just happen in Communist countries?

Albright said that whenever Hillary went overseas she always wrote a report for Albright. And we thought she was just baking cookies!

She made fifty-one trips to foreign countries on her own. Who knows how many more she made with Bill. So here she was, running the State Department and working for her future goal to set up her and her husbands’ new world government and her bid for the White House, and using our money to bribe whatever dictator would take it. They gave (our) money away all over the world.

What bugs me is that they are always talking about the rich. Well, nobody in the world spent more on themselves than the Clintons and it was all without our good graces. The Democrats now are complaining about Bush campaigning. Well... where was the complaining when the Clinton’s were running all over the world?

Promoting the future jobs after the White House of both Clinton’s of course. Is there any doubt by anyone of that?

Hillary is so sure she is going to be President, she probably already has Chelsea's wedding planned. Chelsea’s wedding is going to make Princess DI’s look like a bash down at the local pub. Of course, she will be married in the White House, with the most expensive lay-out that anyone has ever seen, including Barbara Streisand singing “Happy Days Are Here Again” in the Rose Garden.

Just think how mom’s mouth is salivating at the gifts that will pour in from all over the world. Taking White House furniture will just seem like cheap junk when all the diamonds from Africa and Rubies from Russia, not to mention the gifts from all Bill’s old girlfriends coming up in Mac trucks. Spielberg will film the wedding and it will be broadcast on every station around the world. China has already sent gifts in, and we really don’t want to know about it. They will collect enough money to set up the Hillary’s future Presidential Library in Chicago, and Chelsea’s Presidential Library in Oxford. NO...you say?

And will she marry a black because her father was the first black President? Has her marriage already been arranged? A Saudi Prince? A Chinese student of political science going to Harvard with a job at the World Bank? Prince William? Michael Jackson? Or a clone of Bill? (Hey, I threw that one in for the former Pres…knowing how he would admire the possibility.)

No, more importantly to this dynasty is this; is Chelsea a cow, a snake, or a horse? (Speaking metaphorically of course)

Now, I haven’t seen Mark Twain being discarded from my local library, but I did find two years of George magazine being put up for sale at 10 cents a copy, so I bought them. And there in the November 1999 issue, the second issue after the JFK Jr.'s horrible tragedy, Hillary starts her promotion for the Senate and the White House. In fact, the picture that she uses to promote her current book was taken then, in black and white.

Think about this. It was rumored that John-John was going to run for New York Senate. He dies, and in the very next issue of HIS magazine, is Hillary, your new NY senator. Isn’t it wonderful to be on top?

I wondered if the article would have appeared at that time had not John been killed. In the article Hillary was quoted as saying “I will always be furthering the work that I have done in the White House.”

Well, if that’s true, then you’d better pray that you know a man named Noah, and he has room for a lot of cows on his boat. If Hillary ever becomes President, slavery will take on a whole different meaning. We will not just have to stock up on water; we will need life jackets, life boats, and swimming lessons. The whole Middle America will be flooded, and not just by the Mississippi.

But, there are still horses. (Coulter, Rush, Hannity, O'Reilly) America has beautiful running horses, still running free, with beautiful long manes, swimming through the flood, lashing out like lighting, kicking when the noose folds around the neck, never to be saddled. (Savage?) Running…running for freedom and truth. (Hey, I can be corny, I’m not claiming to be a writer.)

It makes me sick that kids are growing up without reading that great timeless stories of Mark Twain, and not reading the very words of our founding fathers, or even Booker T. Washington. The kids are sitting around watching reality TV and playing Video games. And we "adults" are sitting around, chewing on our cuds like cows, getting fat, while the water of liberalism and corruption rise around our feet. Not moving, just standing there...frozen. Looking and listening to the snakes in the mud. Our feet stuck. Look around you... see any cows?

Hey, I don’t know about you, but I’m buying a saddle. And I’m starting out of the gate by finishing the rest of Mark Twain. And just in case this flood is not receding, I’m praying: it’s Pascal’s wager.

We are cows in the flood: there are snakes in the mud, and I say we head for dry land.

Besides, being down in the mud is getting old, don't you think? Time to get out.