Yep, I'm taking my youngest kid to a birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese.

Don't let the commercial fool you with smiling children playing nicely together in an expansive play area, where "kids can be a kid".

Let me explain how a typical "UpChuck D. Cheese" works. You go in with your little loved ones. Immediately your well-behaved angels turn into drooling, demanding hellions. To play the games, those loud, colorful, loud, enticing games you have to buy tokens. Give the tokens to the kids and off they go to play games. Here's the kicker. Most of those games give a reward in the form of tickets. Get enough (note that word - enough) tickets and you can exchange them for prizes. Mind you that the prize that your kids absolutely must have happens to be the one that they need just a few more tickets. And so begins the cycle of whine, money, play, tickets, whine, money, play, tickets until your nerves are worn and your wallet empty. Sure, being a kid means throwing a fit for Mommy or Daddy to give them ten more dollars for tokens.

And the smiling children you see in the commercial? Forget it. It's open warfare for the games that give the most tickets or that happen to be "broken". Little kids are easy prey and dropped tokens and tickets disappear in milliseconds.

Expansive play area? Sure, with a body density rivaling a Tokyo train at rush hour. These places profit off of volume so the more kids crammed in the better. Think mosh pit.

To add insult to injury is the food, particularly the pizza. I haven't had pizza like what they serve since my dorm days at college many moons ago. Back then they served and we ate this cardboardy-type square with grey on it. The grey might have been the cheese or the tomato sauce, we never figured it out and we didn't care. It was cheap. At Chuck E.'s the pizza isn't cheap but you'll eat it out of necessity, something to take your mind off the mayhem happening off the starboard bow, to dull the pain knowing that your little darling is likely learning how to jimmy open an arcade game. If marijuana were ever made legal Chuck E.s would clean up. At the least they should serve a tequila valium cocktail.

The worst part is that the last time I took the kids to a party at a Chuck E.s I swore that I would never, ever take them there again.

Putin and Iraq
How convenient. How timely. Putin has confirmed that - indeed! - Hussein had links to terrorism. This earth-shattering revelation appeared as a teeny blurb in the L.A. Times. This news is so important that even Bush hasn't waved it around. Sorry Putin. For whatever deals you expected to come out of this revelation, it's too little, too late. No one believes this crap any more. Bush has lost all credibility. The best link so far is that in 1994 some Iraqi muckety-muck may have met with some al Qaeda muckety-muck. Yep, that's a link - a meeting in 1994. Send in the troops. Let's roll!

As I repeat again and again, we are talking two distinct issues here, not one. The first is the "War on Terrorism" as begun from 9/11. Bush has failed. He had the world's sympathies and alliance. He had the Taliban in Afghanistan removed as he pursued bin Laden to the hills on the border of Pakistan. He was going after a known terrorist and the world cheered him on. Then he changed direction.

Issue two: the Neocons had an agenda for changing the Middle East. Perhaps for oil, for power, for strategy, for all of the above, in any case Bush shifted the focus from chasing bin Laden to deposing Iraq. But the Neocons needed a reason and the "War on Terrorism" seemed a likely excuse IF a link between Hussein and al Qaeda could be found, IF Hussein could be seen as a threat to the U.S.. I won't rehash the lies and distortions used by Bush, you've read them and are likely bored by the same-old.

Point being we have two things going on with the Neocons trying desperately to muddle the two together in the publics eye. Don't be confused. Don't be fooled. Bush and the Neocons have proven themselves incapable of dealing with either issue. And sadly we are in a "War on Terrorism" and we are in Iraq. What we need now is a leader who can see beyond mere bully tactics and can use diplomacy. It may be Kerry ; it's certainly not Bush.