It's not often I'm afforded the opportunity to simply spout off, at least not in only 500 words, but Christmas must've come a little bit early this year….

Luke Scott is a wing-nut. A jack wagon. Someone who, and maybe this is the real issue, people listen to solely because he can hit a ball that measures between 9 and 9.25 inches in circumference and weighs between 5 and 5.25 ounces really hard and really far. Once every four times. So he fails thrice as often as he succeeds, but somehow his "opinions" get more credence, have more weight, than, oh, I don't know, the President's.

Who is Luke Scott, you might be asking yourself? He's a serviceable left-fielder/first-baseman for a dreadful baseball team just north of here. He had a career year last year, batting .286 with 27 homeruns and 70 RBI's. For his career, Scott has hit a lot closer to .250 than to .300.

So, like I said, he's serviceable.

He's not, mind you, a scholar, an investigator, a political scientist or even much of a reader. But he does have an opinion, one popular with certain lunatic fringe elements in this country, and because he gets paid to hit leather balls with wooden sticks he gets listened to.

News flash, Luke Scott, and all you other jerks: the President of the United States of America is a United States citizen.

Period. End of story.

It's so pointless a debate that I'm boggled we're still having it. I'd say go online and check out the president's birth certificate, but what good would it do? (Here's a good picture of it anyway: http://static.politifact.com.s3.amazonaws.com/graphics/birthCertObama.jpg)

If someone is so set in their beliefs that those beliefs actually become dogma, then all opportunity for intelligent discourse is lost.

And that, sadly, is where we are, ten years into the 21st century.

Who'd've thunk it? We can decode the human genome. We can keep people alive aboard the International Space Station for more than a year at a stretch. We've created Labradoodles and fish that glow in the dark. We can pause and restart live professional football, anywhere in the world, in glorious high-def.

But more and more, we have arguments based primarily on who can hold their breath the longest, on who can shout loudest, on who can most adroitly avoid pesky things like "facts" and "evidence" or, even better, re-couch those facts and evidence as "part of the conspiracy," on who can simply stand up to reason and logic and well-thought discourse and counter with fear and hate and glib, snarky, sneery one-liners.

Proving something no longer means a damn. Not if I simply "believe" otherwise.

Bravo.

It took a while, but the age of reason finally died.

Happy Xmas and best for the New Year; should be a humdinger.

So maybe, just maybe, when you're making your New Year's resolution in a couple weeks, think about things like tolerance, being open to new ideas, looking at the other side of the coin, considering a well-reasoned argument that doesn't go along with what you believe, just for the simple joy of doing it.