I don’t know what happened to Michael Jackson when he was a child, but whatever it was it created a badly scarred human being capable of badly scarring a new generation of youngsters.

Think about it, nobody does to their face what he has done to his if they are happy on the inside. It’s very obvious that he is anything but happy on the inside. It shows that he can’t even face himself in the mirror, and that’s why he has tried to change his appearance so radically. Then he discovers that even though he can change his appearance, he can’t change what is on the inside, gnawing away at him. Every time he looks in the mirror he sees himself, and he hates what he sees.

I don’t know what happened to him as a child - I don’t know what happened in that home, - his brothers and sisters aren’t talking, his parents aren’t talking - but something so traumatic happened to that child in his home that it has made him the way he is today - weird - and a danger to today’s children and tomorrow’s.

This is a man who needs therapy, very badly. He needs deep immersion therapy. He never had a real childhood, but that is not an excuse for him to say that because he never had his childhood he can look into the eyes of children, claim he can see God, and is therefore free to sleep with them.

If you want to take Michael Jackson at his word, he thinks it’s just hunky dory to sleep with little 12-year-olds and 11-year-olds and 10-year-olds. As one of my son’s teachers once said, there are more things caught than there are things taught, meaning we can teach our children not to do something, but if we do it ourselves or allow bad things to happen in their sight, they catch that and think it’s okay. As the old saying put it “actions speak louder than words.”

So if you’ve got parents out there who think it’s okay for their children to sleep with Michael Jackson it isn’t surprising that a child catches the idea that if his parents think it’s okay for him to sleep with an adult male, it must be okay for a man to sleep with a child. When he grows up you may well have an incipient pedophile on your hands who was taught as a child that an adult man is free to sleep with children – and maybe even touch them as well.

The fact of the matter is, that Michael Jackson is one sick puppy who has the bizarre notion that it’s okay for him to sleep with children. I don’t care if he never lays his hands on them – the idea of a grown man sleeping with children is sick even if he never touches them. The damage is done.

Think about it: you don’t know, I don’t know, Ed Bradley doesn’t know any man who sleeps with children except for Michael Jackson. And because in America, so-called stars are allowed to get away with everything, if a child sleeps with Michael Jackson, it’s okay. He’s a star.

But if it was me, or you, or anybody else sleeping with a child, we’d already be in handcuffs headed for the slammer or we’d be shot dead by the parents. But mega-stars like Michael Jackson get a pass, and the message goes out to all the world, that if it’s okay for a widely admired star like Michael Jackson, to sleep with children, then it’s okay for children to sleep with Michael Jackson and that’s where they climb up the slippery slope.

His celebrity protects him, and incredibly he sees nothing wrong with sleeping with children, and because he’s a star he’s been allowed to get away with it for years.

This is a man who needs our prayers - and lots of therapy. And the kids he slept with also need our prayers.

Happy New Year.

©2003 Mike Reagan. You must contact us if you would like to print this column in your publication. Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by: Cagle Cartoons, Inc. Cari Dawson Bartley [email protected], (800) 696-7561

Every year around this time we hear a lot of complaints about the commercialization of Christmas and the downplaying of the significance of this wonderful feast day when we celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ.

Nowadays it’s not even called Christmas in our public schools, instead it’s called something like “Winter Holidays.” Go into a store and they don’t say Merry Christmas anymore, instead it’s now “Happy Holidays.” It seems that people are frightened to death they might offend somebody. Suddenly, paying homage to God is offensive.

The emphasis now is on gift giving, and it’s a trap we all fall into because we want our kids to have happy memories of this holiday spent around the family Christmas tree.

I can understand that. While we recognized the religious significance of Christmas, the memory that stands out in my mind is what happened when I was ten years old. In those days, my father had a ranch where he raised horses. His ranch – the second one he owned - Yearling Row II - was in Malibu Lake. Every Saturday he’d pick me up at my mother’s house in Beverly Hills and take me out to the ranch.

At the ranch he raised yearlings for sale at Santa Anita and Del Mar every year and some of Ronald Reagan’s horses did very well at the race tracks. In those days there was nothing I wanted more than to have a horse of my own, a wish I never expected to have fulfilled.

A couple of months before Christmas my father told me that the father of a young boy about my age was going to give his son a horse for Christmas. The father wanted to keep the horse at our ranch and have us train him so the boy could ride it.

My dad asked, “Is that alright with you?” and through clenched teeth I muttered it was. I was insanely jealous of this kid who was going to get a horse and I wasn’t. I wanted to ask my dad “What about me”?’ but I went along with it.

Out came this Palomino horse and every Saturday when I went to the ranch with my dad, before we went swimming we would go into the ring and my dad would put a rope on the horse and put me up in the saddle and we would go in circles around the ring, getting the horse ready to be ridden by a young boy. I did this every Saturday throughout October, November and early December; and every week I got closer to the horse I named Rebel, and resented the boy who was going to get him for Christmas.

A couple of days before Christmas my dad called and said he wanted me to go with him to the ranch on Christmas Eve because he was going to give the horse to the boy and he knew I’d want to say goodbye to Rebel. I sat on the sidewalk in front of my Mom’s house waiting for my Dad to pick me up, crying my eyes out. I cried all the way to the ranch. When we got there Dad told me to go out to the barn and say goodbye to Rebel because the boy’s father will be there any minute.

When I went into the stable I saw that both upper and lower doors of the stall where Rebel was kept were closed. I undid the door latch on the upper door and this freshly groomed Palomino stuck his head out to me and around his neck was a big red ribbon holding a Christmas card which said “Merry Christmas Michael, Dad.”

That night, as I lay in bed I couldn’t wait to find out what other presents I was going to get, so around 1o’clock I sneaked out of my room and looked downstairs where the tree was, and I saw my mother carrying a brand new saddle and bridle gear to put under the tree.

Mom and Dad had figured out that he would do the horse and she would do the saddle and tack. From that day on until Rebel died years later we were inseparable. I even took him away with me to summer camp. He was a gift that kept giving.

©2003 Mike Reagan. You must contact us if you would like to print this column in your publication. Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by: Cagle Cartoons, Inc. Cari Dawson Bartley [email protected], (800) 696-7561

If the Democrats who spent years making fun of conservatives by ridiculing them as right wing conspiracy nuts look up they will see a fleet of black helicopters hovering overhead.

The desperation of a party coming apart at the seams is now in full public view, and as the panic sets in, Democrats are grasping at wafer-thin conspiracy straws. In recent days Americans have been treated with a spectacle of top members of the party coming unhinged and seeing monsters under their beds.

• Rep. James McDermott, a Washington state Democrat who angered the nation by standing on Iraqi soil and attacking the U.S before the war began, now imagines that the U.S. could have nabbed Saddam Hussein “a long time ago” if we had wanted to. He told KIRO radio station in Seattle that there were people in the administration “all along who knew basically” where the dictator was.

“I’ve been surprised they waited, but then I thought, well, politically, it probably doesn’t make much sense to find him just yet,” he said adding “There’s too much by happenstance for it to be just a coincidental thing that it happened on this particular day.” When asked if he thought the timing of the capture was meant to help President Bush, McDermott laughed and said: “Yeah. Oh, yeah.”

• Former Clinton Secretary of State Madeline Albright joined the black helicopter watch when she asked reporter Mort Kondracke if he believed that President Bush has already nabbed Osama Bin Laden and has him stashed away somewhere, planning to spring him on the nation at a politically opportune time before the November elections.

When Kondracke said “You can’t seriously believe that,” she replied that such an “October surprise” was “a possibility.” Now she’s trying to back down, saying she was only kidding, but Kondracke stands by his story and is backed up by two witnesses who insist she was dead serious when she slipped her moorings and drifted into Cloud Cuckoo land.

• Former Vermont Governor Howard Dean has seriously suggested that President Bush was alerted to 9/11 before it happened. Speaking on National Public Radio (where else?) Dec. 1, he created a new conspiracy theory by suggesting that George W. Bush ignored alleged Saudi Arabian warnings of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. And when he appeared on Fox News Sunday Dec. 7th, he declined to disavow the absurd rumor or apologize for having spread it.

That all of this garbage has sprung from the fevered brains of leading Democrats is simply a sign of the panic inspired by the dramatic resurgence of the economy, the Republicans’ successful co-option of the potent Medicare issue, and the capture of Saddam Hussein. They had pinned their hopes on the economic collapse they were praying for and watched in horror as the economy rebounded. They relied on the mantra that Saddam was still free and why hasn’t Bush caught him, and watched in open-mouthed shock as U.S. soldiers dug him out of his rat hole.

Allegedly politically astute, they stupidly forgot that the ball is always in the President’s court and that with all of the power available to the White House, the President can always find a few rabbits to pull out of his hat when the need arises. And so they found themselves blindsided when they lost the only issues they’d been exploiting.

Their reaction to the quagmire they have managed to fall into has been a retreat into the world of fantasy poor Hillary Clinton discovered when she sought to cope with all the disclosures of her husband’s sordid conduct. She blamed it all not on her husband, but on that vast right wing conspiracy which somehow had been able to cause him to drop his pants at the very sight of Monica Lewinsky.

©2003 Mike Reagan. Mike’s column is distributed by: Cagle Cartoons, Inc. Cari Dawson Bartley [email protected], (800) 696-7561 Call to purchase this column for reprint or web posting.

If my father didn’t have Alzheimer’s disease and was aware of what’s happening in Washington, he’d be cursing himself for having appointed Sandra Day O’Connor to the United States Supreme Court.

In the Court’s latest outrageous ruling, it was O’Connor’s swing vote that created a 5-to-4 majority that decided that free speech as protected under the First Amendment isn’t all that important after all.

In that ruling Wednesday O’Connor and her colleagues just went ahead and simply emasculated the First Amendment, deciding Congress in its wisdom is free to pass laws abridging freedom of speech, as long as its motives are as pure as the driven snow.

It used to be said that the Constitution means whatever the Supreme Court says it means. Nowadays it seems to mean whatever Sandra Day O’Connor says it means.

The majority – three of whom have previously said that the Court should turn their noses up at the Constitution and abide by the decisions of foreign courts - found that much of the McCain-Feingold campaign reform law is constitutional - mainly those provisions which limit the amounts contributors can donate to political parties and bans a wide range of political advertisements in the 60 days prior leading up to an election.

Their reasoning: the very thought that campaign contributions might somehow “corrupt” political campaigns is more important than the right to free speech.

Speaking for the majority, Justices O’Connor and John Paul Stevens wrote, “The question for present purposes is whether large soft money contributions to national party committees have a corrupting influence or give rise to the appearance of corruption.”

This ruling is nothing less than a guarantee that incumbents will be given protection against being thrown out of office by the groups of voters, who now are deprived of the opportunity to say anything negative about an office holder or the issues in the 30 days before a primary and 60 days before an election. It is nothing less than an incumbent’s full employment guarantee.

Instead of protecting the free speech rights of every American, Justice O’Connor and her colleagues in the majority chose to protect the interests of incumbent elected officials, thus defending them from the having to deal with messy hard-nosed political debate. As some critics have noted, if campaign speech can be regulated or even outlawed, in the eight or so weeks before elections, why allow the people to vote in the first place? Instead just appoint politicians to office for life.

This ruling means that such groups as Focus on the Family, Concerned Women for America and the National Rifle Association will be banned from alerting voters about the real issues in a political campaign in the two months before an election.

The ruling hands more power to the dominant liberal media, the ABCs, the NBCs, the CBSs of the world while taking away the power of the people and giving it to them and the rest of the media.

The court upheld restrictions on ads appearing close to an election paid for by unions or corporations that refer to a candidate. This amounts to a curtailment of the right of free speech and it is really a warning that there is more of this to come, as Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in his dissent. The media itself may be the next target, he wrote noting that he found nothing in the majority’s reasoning that would forbid “outright regulation of the press.”

This is the same court that ruled that virtual pornography is constitutional, even if people perceive it as pornography but if I want to take out an ad supportive of a candidate’s position within 60 days of an election it could be perceived as corrupting the political process and is therefore unconstitutional.

Justice Antonin Scalia wrote that the court has in recent years defended the free-speech rights of tobacco companies to advertise and sexually explicit cable programming, but now “smiles with favor upon a law that cuts to the heart of what the First Amendment is meant to protect: the right to criticize the government.”

So I can draw a virtual picture of a candidate naked, but I can’t say anything about him or his policies in the 60 days before an election.

©2003 Mike Reagan. Mike’s column is distributed by: Cagle Cartoons, Inc. [email protected], (800) 696-7561 Call us for copyright permission to print this column.