Demagoguery for Dummies How to Convince People You'Re A Saint, Despite Explosive Evidence to the Contrary

How can a demagogue who boasts of kidnapping and killing and whose woeful misjudgment has reined down death and destruction on his own country be hailed as a saint? Is this demagoguery for dummies or what?

How can the Lebanese people, proud descendants of the Phoenicians ? first to trade widely on the Mediterranean and resourceful developers of our Arabic numerals ? be completely duped by this inept practitioner of argumentum ad populum.

The hobgoblin has hijacked their government, shouldered aside their army, and subjected them to their most deadly and destructive disaster in recent times. And yet his picture and his praise seem to be everywhere, except, of course, on the Israeli side, where is he is considered the equivalent of Osama Bin Laden and a lawful candidate for sudden admission to death's door.

And, even in the wreck his judgment hath wrought, he now has the temerity to cast himself as a savior who will rebuild Lebanon and gets off to a dramatic start by having his terrorist org pass out 12,000 smackers in, ironically enough, US dollars, to families whose homes have been destroyed.

Meanwhile, just to keep the devastation in the active hopper, his outfit insists, in defiance of the UN cease fire, to disarm, saying that, at least for now, it's "not an option."

Thankfully, Nasrallah faces a challenge to his credibility that isn't going to disappear. Now that his displaced advocates are making their ways home to the death and destruction that they recently knew as their families and homes, they are faced with inescapable proof that he may be just the opposite of the saint they adore.

Grudgingly, they may finally see that he may more correctly be seen as the opposite of a saint.

Certainly, he can mollify them in their loss, as the Roman emperors once passed out bread to the starving masses. But even he cannot bring back the dead, and the many lost loved ones are bound to rankle in the bereaved families.

Can his demagoguery, dumb in its choices and flagrant in its guises, possibly continue to dupe the people whose lives he has so grievously and irredeemably devastated?

It is his war on the truth and their peace with it to call him to its court and its justice.

Ours is but to observe if the people of that unnecessarily wounded nation can set aside their misguiding passions and turn out to be just too darn smart for the deadly dummy.

Tom Attea, humorist and creator of http://NewsLaugh.com, has had six shows produced Off-Broadway. Critics have called his writing "delightfully funny," "witty," with "great humor and ebullience" and "good, genuine laughs."