But what would happen to his cool armor if he could be reminded of all the good, non-violent things he has done? Further, what would happen to him if he could be brought to understand the preciousness of the lives he has destroyed? This is not as simple a question as it might appear. I firmly believe the only punishment that works is love. Or, as the Buddha said: Hatred will never cease by hatred. By love alone is it healed."

Um, yes. As I have oft repeated, the things that make many artists great, or at least good - heightened sensitivity and imagination, narrow moral absolutism and/or broad moral relativism, extreme empathy - are often the things that make them public policy nightmares. Unfortunately, the world is real and must be dealt with as such - too many lives are at stake.

Walker's tribal ring-around-the-rosies technique for dealing with "irresponsible or unjust" behavior can only work in a small, homogenous community with deeply held, shared values. Dealing in the manner Walker prescribes with a deranged, monomaniacal, civilian-slaughtering religious fanatic who wants only the death of the several billion humans who don't share his particular worldview would result only in a large ring of dead people, the elimination of the tribe, a bit of simple genocide. There would be no community left into which such a person could be welcomed back. One cannot be shamed into proper behavior with love if one has no sense of love in the first place, if one is driven only by divinely-sanctioned hatred.

Is Kucinich suggesting a few million of his "tribesmen" gather around Afghanistan and western Pakistan and sing the praises of bin Laden's cave-dwelling, mass-murdering, plane-crashing, world-raping ass into megaphones as a cornerstone of his foreign policy? That'll show those terrorists. Perhaps he is eyeing Walker for his Secretary of Love position.

Bin Laden and his ilk do not see the "preciousness" of ANY life (other than perhaps their own - let others be the suicide bombers, right Osama?), and they are willing to sacrifice ANY number of their fellow humans - friend, foe or neutral - for their millennial causes.

Mercy, love, human kindness: these are all seen as signs of contemptible weakness punishable by humiliation and death by these anti-human, diabolical, affectless replicas of human beings. People like this cannot be appeased, beguiled, bribed, mollified, or "loved" into submission - the only remedy for their implacable murderous hatred, for the preservation of the "tribe," is their elimination, not some quaint little fable about a verbal circle jerk.

That Kucinich would enthusiastically accept the endorsement of Walker, and apparently any other dangerously deluded fool with a recognizable name who comes along, says all that needs to be said about his judgment and fitness to run this country - and they called Jerry Brown "Moonbeam."

And don't miss "pimping for Dennis" here.