Preparing for '06

Recommended Reading between now and the 2006 elections People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil I've actually met some of the people that fit M. Scott Peck's criteria for a diagnosis of "human evil," so I'm not as hopeful as he is that they can be healed... Still, perhaps his book could be useful in helping people avoid electing people to office who have the personality disorder he describes. A very shorthand (and admittedly misleading and hugely inadequate) description of a part of the problem of human evil is that people who are evil attack others instead of facing their own failures. You know, kinda like politicians who insist that solutions to problems (real or imagined) involves simply throwing more money at programs (which means taking more from the taxpayers to do it) that have alrady proven harmful, are themselves a major cause of problems pols want to solve by blaming others for their failures. Yes, it's more complex than that. But I've become convinced that it's not just liars, thieves, buffoons, poltroons and mountbanks who run for office. Along with the (supposed but not yet proven) sprinkling of honest and capable politicians—I assume there are at least two, somewhere—I believe one can likely find a relatively high concentration of people with the egocentric personality disorder Peck describes as human evil. Let's see if we can't avoid sending them to our State capitols and to Washington, OK?