Like cancer, once a terrible idea gets a foothold somewhere, it immediately spreads. The hos 'n bros ub Oklan' bring de Ebonics, 'n now it be spreadin' to New York.

It's still in the gestational stage right now, with "community advocates" urging the Big Apple's baked public school system to embrace Oakland's lunacy. To their credit, Chancellor Rudy Crew and the New York City Board of Education are resisting the calls. "[Ebonics is] unworthy of serious consideration as an approach to achieving educational excellence" Crew said.

But that's only for now. Inexorably the pressure will build, the educracy will get on the bandwagon, the Clinton Education Department will join the push, and lonely school officials like Chancellor Crew will either yield or be toppled. Ebonics will sweep the nation, and the ignorance of black American schoolchildren will grow apace.

Nonsense like "black English" is actually a tremendous boon to the school choice movement as an illustration of just how incompetent, corrupt, politicized, and racist the public education monopoly has become. Yet it receives favorable press, while parental empowerment is still dismissed as "religious kookery" and is stifled by buttinsky liberal judges (as in Wisconsin just this week).

And this, in turn, points to the proper anti-Ebonics strategy. Namely, that this idea and its adherents need to be denounced in the loudest and most visceral terms for the racist, anti-educational doggerel it really is. Ebonics is nothing but Black Klan extremism, for which unfettered school choice is the best antidote.

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Just as the corpulent Shannon Faulkner flamed out of Virginia Military Institute after barely a week, so two of the four female cadets who elbowed their way into the Citadel last fall, courtesy of the Supreme Court, have cut & run.

The two women in question, Kim Messer and Jeanie Mentavlos, claim to be the victims "criminal assaults, sadistic illegal hazing, and disgusting incidents of sexual harassment." If their charges are true, then it is clear that the Citadel's male majority has not done its institution any favors, both on general principle and in terms of restoring its male-only status. The last thing they needed was to create martyrs, and that is precisely what they may have done. It certainly cannot be said that Messer and Mentavlos fled in tears because they were too fat to do a sit-up, a la Ms. Faulkner.

However, in this day & age of hyper-political-correctness, it is very easy for any woman to fabricate sexual harassment charges and be taken seriously (just ask Michael Irvin) - especially a woman in so high-profile a situation as being the first to break the gender barrier at a famous military academy. The conspiracist might wonder whether or not it wasn't the plan all along to join and then quit and lodge these charges, thus further discrediting the targeted institution - maybe even shut it down. And, regardless of the veracity of the women's claims, if they did have their clothes set afire and were forced to ingest cleanser, are these atrocities just because they were perpetrated upon women? Isn't that unacceptable behavior no matter WHO is its victim?

Whatever the specific intent, the RESULT of this episode has been to further damage the image of the Citadel, male-only institutions, and the military as a whole. Planned or not, those smiles on left-wing faces are all too real.

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For those interested in the respective directions in which the two major parties are headed, consider the circumstances surrounding the selection of their new national committee chairmen. The Republicans had a spirited, 8-man contest that went to six ballots before Jim Nicholson, a Coloradan, Vietnam veteran, and aggressive conservative, emerged as the victor. In stark contrast, Bill Clinton had three prospective chairmen turn him down before, ironically enough, Colorado Governor Roy Romer finally succumbed to Bill's desperate pleas to become the next fall guy for the avaricial cesspool the DNC has become.

Two months ago I called the 1996 election the ultimate pyrrhic victory for the Democrats. Once again, I TOLD YOU SO.

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In his fiscal 1998 budget, President Clinton is plotting to SLASH MEDICARE BY OVER A HUNDRED BILLION DOLLARS! SENIOR CITIZENS, LOCK & LOAD!

Actually, Clinton is planning on screwing doctors and hospitals instead. But the facts didn't matter during his Mediscare onslaught, so why should they here?

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Nelson Mandela has his knickers in a knot. It seems that the Clinton administration is threatening to impose $82 million in sanctions against his ANC-dominated junta if he goes through with his intention to sell terrorist Syria $650 million worth of tank firing-control systems, and he's angrily denouncing the United States for "interfering in South African internal affairs."

I don't know which is more choice: that Mandela is bent out of shape at American meddling when he and his clique liked it just fine when it worked against their enemies, or that the same bunch of liberals who put Mandela in power now all of a sudden don't like what he's doing. But seven years ago during his ticker-tape tour of the U.S., Mandela quite publicly declared his alliance with the likes of Fidel Castro, Yassir Arafat, and Muammar Ghadafi, so can his desire to arm Hafez Assad really be a surprise?

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Protesters burned tires and threw stones Thursday in cities across Haiti, demanding the resignation of the U.S.-installed prime minister. A young man was reported killed when security guards fired on a mob that stormed a food warehouse in the northern city of Cap-Haitien. The mob then attacked the precinct police station, which they ransacked after the police officers fled.

Trouble in paradise? But I thought Bill Clinton had restored Haitian democracy, fed every Haitian mouth, and wiped away every Haitian tear - how can this be?

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The Clinton administration has switched its backing of Russian top dogs from the diseased Boris Yeltsin to the "brash and ambitious" former paratroop general and national security chief Alexander Lebed. Or at least it HAD; Lebed jumped the gun this week on what the Clintonoids wanted to keep (what else?) secret by announcing his intention to crash Clinton's inauguration. "General Alexander Lebed has not been invited to President Bill Clinton's inauguration on January 20^th by the White House or by the U.S. inaugural committee. He hasn't, he hasn't, he hasn't!" whined U.S. Embassy spokesman Richard Hoagland. Nevertheless, Lebed will be there.

My guess? Hillary wanted a bedmate while Bill was involved in his

menage a toi with Barbra Streisand and her boyfriend. Meanwhile, the White House will dump Yeltsin for the commie de jour instead. You know their saying: "to thine own self be true - but no one else."

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Bill Clinton wants to give states more than $750 million a year to provide health insurance to more children. Senate Democrats said covering the nation's 10.5 million uninsured children will top their agenda.

Apparently nobody has told them that (1) it is despicable to push socialism using kids as human shields, (2) they're not going to get away with gutting welfare reform via the back door, and (3) they're the MINORITY PARTY and accordingly DON'T GET TO HAVE AN AGENDA.

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In another last-ditch effort to pull victory from the jaws of defeat, Representative Benjamin Cardin (D-MD), the new ranking MINORITY member of the House Ethics Committee, released a private, year-old memo he managed to steal from the staff of House Speaker Newt Gingrich in which a top GOP strategist, Joe Gaylord, urged Republicans to defend Newt by stepping up their own ethics attacks upon Bill Clinton and Democrat enemies in the House. Cardin tried to suggest that this is "proof" that Gingrich tried to "improperly influence" the ethics process.

Never mind that no such thing was ever done. Never mind that this is precisely the gambit that Democrats have been running in reverse for the past two years. And never mind that Mr. Newt should have followed Gaylord's recommendations to the letter. If he had, he might have avoided this mudbath, and dirtbags like Cardin wouldn't have had a forum for their ill-gotten innuendo.

But it's never too late to make up for past mistakes. Go for it, gentlemen.

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After Bill Clinton draped the Presidential Medal of Freedom around the neck of the man he described, not too long ago, as an "evil, evil man," wouldn't it have been great if Bob Dole had shaken Willie's hand, smiled - and then hauled off and kicked Clinton in the groin? I can hear Dole's opening remarks over Bill's writhing form now: "Mr. President, I talked with Dennis Rodman the other day, and he asked me to pass something on to you. I told him it would be a pleasure. And I was right."