Ah! to be in Columbus, Ohio, in the Summer, when the Democratic Presidential campaign starts!

It is a truism that at election time, the extremists on either side of the aisle move to the center to appeal to the most voters. On July 25, Hillary Clinton moved to the Center.

In Columbus, Hillary accepted a leadership post on the Democratic Leadership Council, the centrist group that helped get her husband elected President. She asked for a "cease fire" between liberal and centrist factions in the party.

It's a smart move on Hillary's part. Let's face it, the majority of Americans are afraid of Liberals. All it took for Bush the Pater to defeat Dukakis was to make sure the "Liberal" label stuck. Well, that and Dukasis' tank ride. Bush tried the same technique on Clinton, but was undone by his broken "No New Taxes" pledge. Clinton the Pater learned this lesson, and in his first speech as President, he apologized for raising taxes, and said that we, as a nation, had to contribute more. (Nice touch, that: making taxes a contribution we make.)

So, where does that leave Clinton the Mater? Why, it leaves her jockeying for the center, where she will appeal to more voters. It will be interesting to see how well she succeeds in spite of the venom the Right heaped on her while her husband was in office.

I should make it clear here that i didn't vote for bush in 2000 so much as vote against Gore. Tipper Gore, that is. Seeing Frank Zappa testifying before Congress about the dangers of his music put me off her and her husband. What we got is a rating system on music that guarantees kids will get the highest rating they can get their hands on. Same thing is going on with video games, today. (In most states, beer companies cannot put the alcohol content of their product on the label, because The Powers That Be are afraid we unedumacated masses will chase the alcohol. But they require wine to have the alcohol content on the label. Screwy, huh?) In fact, Hillary "It Takes a Village To Raise a Child" Clinton recently said that parents, and not the village, needed more help protecting their kids from video games. (If a parent has to have a chip in their TV and a rating on a video game to help them raise our kids, then we're in a lot worse trouble than pixelated hookers can generate. Ah! for the 80s, when music wasn't suggestive. Remember April Wine? They had a great, wholesome tune about lost love called "If You See Kay." In the 80s, they knew how to conceal the dirty words on the radio: they spelled them!)

Wow! Three parenthetical comments in one paragraph. I thinks that's a personal best!)