Tuesday, September 30, 2008—Non-binding elections have long been known as “beauty contests.” Now we’re heading into an alleged election that could put this real, live beauty contest winner, Sarah (Heath) Palin, a heartbeat—an old man’s heartbeat—away from the Presidency.

Either democracy is a lousy idea, or something’s screwy.

Forty years ago the alleged editor of this venerable rag began pondering this question: if the American form of government is the best in the world, what are we doing here in Vietnam, killing and being killed to no apparent purpose?

Eventually—about twenty years later—he stumbled across a fairly obvious answer. The government screwed up, of course. But why did our tri-partite government screw up?

The government screwed up because the Fourth Estate failed. If the public understood better what was really going on, the slaughter would have ended sooner. But the way our news media are structured, they can’t afford to tell the whole truth.

One thing led to another—long, strange story—and the alleged editor got his hands on the oldest newspaper in the country. For nine years now, we’ve been publishing a newspaper every fourteen days, and giving it away. We can’t say exactly how many individual copies of the paper we’ve published, but the number is surely approaching 1,000,000.

The important thing here is not that we’re publishing our one little paper and have been doing so for nearly a decade.

The important thing is that there’s nothing stopping others from publishing similar papers.

If everyone in the country had a local, free, fortnightly paper that was capable of telling the whole truth—or at least trying to—this might be a different country. One that didn’t have to worry about a beauty contest winner in the Oval Office.