In Italian there are a number of vivid words for odd mixtures of things. Minestrone is of course a soup of assorted vegetables. A Polpettone is a meatloaf of different ingredients. Accozzaglia suggests a certain mélange of elements drawn from hither and thither and it is generally unmatched or incompatible. Much of this nomenclature originates in the kitchen, where, as so often in Italy, disparate elements are artfully combined into the makings of a feast.

Something similar might be said of the present state of affairs we find ourselves in. If you listen carefully these days, you can finally hear the sound of Democrats taking principled positions on national issues. (I was wondering where the hell they had gone!) But it all sounds like mixed up rhetoric to me. In a series of speeches, Al Gore has suddenly come out of oblivion swinging (A might too delicately, in my opinion.) at the administration's policies on his own signature issues of the environment and energy. (That's not an ENOUGH agenda!) It's as if Mr. Gore has suddenly woken up and realized that he has nothing left to lose!

Perhaps his missing his greatest ambition by 537 votes, (Read it! We were only 537 votes from disaster! The Ben Laden Clan was after the Bush Clan for the Gulf War, me thinks!) has set him free at last, free at last, from his lifelong caution about saying what he thinks. Bold talk always carried a whiff of intricate calculation with Mr. Gore, which was a definite pitfall for him. But now s he finally sounds mad! He sounds more like what we thought he was really made of, the man Democrats wanted to vote for, one who could free the party from its own inherent timidity.

He and his party cohorts are speaking up now, together producing something like an incoherent attack on the domestic policy of the Bush administration. Their themes are hardly surprising as they are the same theme platforms they ran on in the last election: against tax cuts for the wealthy (Too Late! Bush has already done that!); privatization of social security (Too late! Bush has already opened the "Lock Box" and stripped that fund of billions of dollars!); more spending for environmental protection and health care (Too Late! Plans are already in work to utilize our domestic reserves of oil and companies, one by one, are eliminating their health care benefits!)

SO, WHERE ARE WE GOING? DAMNED IF I KNOW!