We can all understand the emotions of a boy who is trying to get his hand into a cookie jar. In principle, there's no difference between those emotions and the impulse that attracts bees to pollen. It's an impulse that we rely upon because, without pollination of our food crops, we would literally starve to death.

Thus, not only can we understand the impulse that drives a boy who is trying to get his hand into the cookie jar, but we also have reason to expect it, and to be ready for it. At some stage in his boyhood, a boy also begins to anticipate events. He knows that even if he isn't caught in the act of taking a cookie, there will eventually be a reckoning. The unauthorized withdrawal of one cookie from the jar will demand a downward adjustment by exactly one cookie of the official level of household cookie prosperity.

Now, as adults we can appreciate the importance of the level of household cookie prosperity, but this kind of analysis is too cold and calculating for a boy. A boy is supposed to anticipate and respect the feelings of other members of the household, and if he cannot anticipate those feelings, then it is his duty to at least respect them when they are paraded in front of him in an open display of raw pain.

On Inauguration Day, what did we see on the faces of at least two members of the American household? Oprah Winfrey and the Rev. Jesse Jackson, two people who make it their business to stay tuned into the feelings of their fellow Americans, had tears on their faces. Barack Obama, they saw your boyish hand in the cookie jar, and it broke their hearts. You can try to put some fancy rhetorical spin on the events of that day, but all of us know what we saw. A real man would have respected the feelings of the household. A real man would have let the cookies remain in the jar, pulling out an empty hand, refusing to complete the inauguration, and stepping aside so that Lyndon LaRouche could have become President.