WELCOME TO THE SEASON OF SILLINESS

With the year 2000 approaching, things are rapidly spinning out of control.

This became clear when Donald Trump announce a pending exploratory
committee for a possible presidential run. He of the titanic ego and the
bad comb-over has always been susceptible to flattery. But who knew his
vanity would be tweaked by a National Enquirer poll saying he'd make a
strong presidential contender?

The only thing sillier than Trump talking about running for president is
the newly declared federal war on birdseed. U.S. Customs officials have
impounded 20 tons of sterilized hemp seed being shipped by a Canadian
farmer to his American customers.

Sterilized hemp seeds are used as birdseed, but hemp and marijuana are also
different varieties of the same species of plant. You can get as high off
smoking hemp, which contains only a tiny fraction of the psychoactive
substance present in marijuana, as you can off smoking polyester.

But federal officials are treating the hemp seeds as an illegal drug. The
irony is that while American farmers are barred from growing hemp, American
companies have been importing toms of hemp seeds for decades. They’ve used
it for birdseed, cooking and body oils and even clothing.

The war on drugs has been expensive, destructive and misguided for years,
and has now sunk so low that it is seizing imported birdseed. This, too,
must be a sign of millennium madness. Yet another is the Pentagon admission
that for months the United States has been stoning the Iraqis. That’s
right. To minimize injuries to civilians around military targets caused by
shrapnel, our military has been dropping bombs that contain no explosives.
Instead we are hurling laser-guided cement toward military targets.

Irag’s United Nations ambassador has complained that the stoning of Iraq is
still killing people and the United States should stop it.

If a Donald Trump presidential threat, seizure of birdseed by drug warriors
and the stoning of Iraq don't prove that the nation has been overcome by
silliness, I don't know what does.

Perhaps it’s not because the century is ending but perhaps it’s because --
with the Cold War long over, peace and relative prosperity in the land and
those welfare deadbeats routed off the rolls -- the country has no serious
issues now. So it descends ever more into the trivial.