Please excuse our pre-Halloween playfulness here. Its just that when something as particularly dreadful as H.R.3962 gets sprung on Congress at the last bitter moment, we can’t help but giggle nervously, look around, and wonder if this is all part of some mischief night prank. After all, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was seen hovering around it like some sort of medium at a seance.

H.R.3962 is another one of Rep. John Dingell’s environmentally-friendly recycled lobbyist hashes. So far its just titled “To provide affordable, quality health care for all Americans and reduce the growth in health care spending, and for other purposes.”

We’re waiting on our tip-toes for the next great Democrat acronym, but since all the good ones have already been taken (AHCA, AAHCA, AHFA, AHAA, AAAA, AAA, etc.) we’ll jump the gun and call it “Dingell’s Universal Medical Bill” or DUMB.

Now, we won’t bother ranting and raving about DUMB’s jaw-dropping page count. Been there, done that with Dingell’s pre-DUMB offering, H.R. 3200. Hate to credit the creepy likes of Alan Combs for anything, but he pointed out that nobody questioned the page count of the Patriot Act when it was rammed through Congress. So who should raise a ruckus over the leaning tower of DUMB that was threatening to topple onto Rep. John Boehner the other day? Certainly not us!

Nor shall we raise the issue of “shall” appearing more times throughout the text of DUMB than Sen. Chuck Schumer before a press conference podium in any given week. “Shall” is one of those antagonistic words best left in the earlier works of Shakespeare. Nobody in their 260s and younger actually uses that word in normal conversation. “Thou, thee, thy, shall.” Most bills drooling out of the Congressional offices sound like the King James version of the Bible, only without divine inspiration.

Nor must (aha! “must” not “shall!”) we take on the fact that nobody’s still finished reading Dingell’s other “Nightmare on C Street Southeast,” alternatively titled AHFA. Or AHCA. Or one of those handy acronyms.

Republicans keep demanding 72 hours for the public to glance at a bill before its ram-rodded through Congress like ball-shot in a Parrot gun, but hey! We don’t know anyone who got through Dan Brown’s novels in less than 72 hours. And his stuff’s one-quarter the length and occasionally entertaining.

Let’s face it. We’re slow readers. We like to absorb the nitty-gritty details. Look, we’re still stuck on page 994 of AHFA (or is it AHCA?), where “Ye Lords & Ladies of the manor shall forfeit a goodly portion of crops & fruits of thy forest & heath, lest toiling peasants of thine fields succumb to privation & black death…”

No wait. Wrong bill. That was Title XI Sec. 23 Subsec. 12(A)(1)(a)(iii) of Pelosi’s Medicare overhaul from that other fright-fest, the 110th Congress.

We won’t even bore the kids with pointing out how utterly two-faced it is for Dingell to put “reduce the growth in health care spending” in the title of this crushing behemoth. Great. It’ll reduce health care spending. But where? At the drug store? Will bandages for mummy-wrapping be cheaper after DUMB is signed into law?

Call us crazy, but adding “only” $90,000,000,000 a year to the budget (plus another $90,000,000,000 to cover the lies being told on Capitol Hill) isn’t saving anything. Running a deficit like we are now has never happened in history for a very good reason: It can’t be done. Oh, the Byzantines tried it a couple of centuries ago (when “shall” was the hot word among the nobles and clergy) and we know how THAT ONE turned out: The Fall of Constantinople makes “Saw VI” look like a haunted hay ride!

The biggest problem with DUMB (Oh, how to pick just one! It’s like rummaging for the last Twix in a big crystal bowl of Milky Ways and Snickers while trick-or-treating, isn’t it?) is its bare-faced, pig-headed stubborn blatantness. Hate to get personal here, but come on! A goodly portion of America is deeply offended by the blanket-law bill-dumping practices of the veteran incumbent Democrat leadership.

There ought to be a law against littering Capitol Hill like this. But we figure THAT law won’t be enacted until after Pelosi and the other ghosts of the 111th Congress are exorcised in the 2010 elections.

All right! Forget about these real-life nightmares! Let’s get down to some pumpkin carving, skeleton-hanging, and don’t forget to drop a few lumps of dry ice in a tub of water for good effect.

Halloween is a time for plain fun. Who wants the ghouls of the DNC scaring us out of our wits with their wicked games, anyway?

Rosh Hashanah begins at sundown. It is the Jewish New Year. And, like any other change of the year, one is called on to look back at where we were, and at the same time, look forward to where we’re going.

Lately, much has been made in the mass media about the tone set by conservative and libertarian activists. As one should expect, the most widely broadcast images reflected demagoguery, which left-wing commentators used as evidence of intolerance and hatred, rather than focusing on what caused the emotions in the first place.

That’s a given. Because this is politics. And it is not new.

When President George W Bush was in office, Democrat demagoguery exceeded and expanded old boundaries of acceptability. Fast-forward to the present, and liberty-minded Tea Parties and tax protests are doing the green thing: recycling old Democrat demagoguery!

Is it good? No. Anger and passion are never far from hot-button issues, but boundaries of taste and respect were put in place for a reason.

Is it unpatriotic? No. America is blessed with a fountain of tolerance and freedom, and has never yielded to authoritarianism. Using nazi symbolism as an eye-catcher in protests is tasteless but not illegal.

Ironically, legal or civil efforts to suppress the rights of protesters is more likely to vindicate the authoritarians of the past than obnoxious protesters waving paper signs decked with swastikas.

What’s concerning is the boundary of taste and respect being shoved completely out of view by Democrats. Former President Jimmy Carter seized hold of the spectre of race and has wielded it as a weapon. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has gone much further:

“The Speaker is now likening genuine opposition to assassination. Such insulting rhetoric not only undermines the credibility of her office, but it underscores the desperate attempt by her party to divert attention away from a failing agenda,” Jeff Sessions said in a statement.

The Democrats have taken unacceptable actions to keep the dying healthcare debate on life support. But their tone is likely to be adopted and recycled by their Republican opponents. And then what? Shall we have to bear lectures on the barbarity of the modern political discourse? Or witness a conflagration of more and more demagoguery?

As the Jewish New Year heralds a year before the next general election, we earnestly hope and pray our patriotic demagogues on both sides of the aisle turn away from garish sign-waving and name-calling. And, that our conservative and libertarian friends will invest their energies in a real grassroots effort to halt the growth of authoritarian government and educate the people about sound fiscal policy, commonsense legislation, noninvasive regulation, and responsible politics in Congress.

Shana Tova!

On this day, 8 May 1945, now 64 years ago, our brave soldiers finally crushed the greatest tyranny in world history.

If you know a World War II veteran, be sure to thank him for his service to his country and to the four generations born in freedom since then.