It’s unbelievable how people can live in a totalitarian state such as the one in Zimbabwe. With all our problems in this country we are still fortunate enough to be relatively free even thought we can’t go anywhere because of the price of gasoline. It’s great to be able to bad mouth the president without fear of being shot.

In Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe was just reelected president for the sixth time. If you vote against him you are either, beaten, raped or shot. His opponents have to hide or withdraw from the race to keep their supporters from being tortured and killed. Mugabe is a Marxist and controls the people with an iron fist. Zimbabwe used to be a British Colony and was rich in agriculture. All the white landowners have been driven away and the country is now in total chaos. Everyone is starving and the life expectancy has dropped from 60 to 37 years. A huge segment of the population has AIDS. To make matters even worse, the country is in the grips of a horrible drought.

The differences between the extreme right and the extreme left have always been fuzzy to me. On the right there is the preservation of personal wealth and private ownership and on the left the government owns everything and there is no personal wealth or ownership. Communism and socialism are at the far end of the spectrum on the left and libertarianism with elimination of the state is to the right. Fascism is even further to the right. The writer Ayn Rand developed a right wing philosophy called Objectivism that is described in her books Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead. The John Birch Society is another right wing group. To me all these are forms of the totalitarian state and are dangerous.

Leaders to the right or left are usually greedy pigs. In the case of communism, people like Castro and Stalin have everything and the rest of the people are in poverty or prison. On the right, tycoons, barons and dictators have the wealth while everyone else is working to scrape out a living.

In our current political state we have Obama and the Democrats that lean to the left and McCane and the Republicans leaning to the right. Lately, both Obama and McCane have been moving to the middle. Usually, in America, whatever system is in power we want to change it. I’m just happy that we have the ability to change without being tortured or killed like those poor folks in Zimbabwe.

The main fault with our system is that the parties spend their time and energy bad mouthing each other and as a result get little done. We have been bogged down on developing a solution for the energy problem for years. I guess nothing is perfect except the porch.

The way the political system works at my house is pretty neat. I am both a monarch and a slave and my wife is the Prime Minister. She basically runs the house and handles the money. I act as her slave by taking out the garbage, emptying the dishwasher and running various errands. She also claims she is a slave but I have never been able to see it that way. My job as Monarch is much like the Queen of England. I stay primarily confined to my throne on the porch and render opinions regarding the War in Iraq, the price of gasoline and other important matters of state. It’s a great system, especially since the Prime Minister keeps me fed.