“A relief.”
“Yes, like crapping your pants.”
That should sum up George W. Bush’s departure tomorrow. I wouldn’t care if the inauguration was the Second Coming along with a burning bush, the parting of the Potomac, tastefully-done pillars of salt, Maccabees, Purim and Genesis (not with Phil Collins): George W. Bush has left this country with a vast landscape of scorched philosophical, spiritual and physical earth. In my darkest corner of my heart, I find more good in Richard Nixon’s evil persona than in Bush’s good old boy emptiness.
I hope Obama can start to bring the ship of state around to a calmer, more rational course, but it’s going to be awfully hard given what Bush and his puppeteers have left for us.
Not to mention what we allowed the stupid bastard to do and be conned into doing. Maybe he can stay locked in his now-gated community and start reading Tom Clancy as fact.
Please, George, please don’t let the door hit you in the ass Tuesday.
Our soon-to-be-ex-president makes a live speech to family and friends at 8 p.m. Eastern time. Guess he needed a sympathetic laugh track .
Just the other day, MSNBC ran parts of his press conference in defense of his presidency. The national lack-of-command-of-his-faculties authority defended the federal response to hurricane Katrina, noting that 30,000 New Orleans residents were rescued from their rooftops.
Let’s see. Thirty thousand people recovered from rooftops, as opposed to evacuating them – and thousands of others stranded in the city – before the hurricane. That doesn’t sanctify the federal response. It does, however, speak volumes of the courage of hundreds of military helicopter aircrew who risked their lives to rescue the victims of criminally stupid municipal, state and federal government officials.
Enjoy your speech, Dubya. If there was any justice on January 20, you’d get nothing more than a car ride to the train station so you could buy your own train ticket home.
Bush Number 2. Stand by please.
Since Dubya and his wife are moving to a gated community in Dallas, let’s also honor the late Patrick McGoohan by installing giant bouncing weather balloons in Bush’s new neighborhood. Given his coordination and sense of logic, there’d be a pretty good chance of success.
The first newspaper managing editor I ever worked for died last Friday (01-09-09). After two years in his newsroom, I found myself with little respect for him as a manager or a journalist. I can’t speak for him as a family man, but I do remember several incidents concerning him that still leave a bad taste in my mouth 17 years later.
One that still galls me is when I covered the Southmountain Mine underground explosion in 1992.
After two days of waiting in barely above-zero weather to see if men had died, and of watching certain people parade around for publicity, I returned to Bluefield. The managing editor had saved a copy of an Associated Press wire photo from the site where I was in the background. He dressed me down because I wasn’t wearing a tie.
That was one of the minor episodes.
The man, in my estimation, worried more about making his community look good (and, by extension, making himself look good to the community) than doing good for the community. I know of one example where he suppressed a story because it would have exposed a family member to public questions of why that family member might have, at best, ignored a criminal financial transaction.
The reporter writing his obituary (not the link above) was also a personal acquaintance from the period. His effort lived down to my expectations of him. Perhaps he’s expecting either that the man will be coming back from the dead, or that he’ll get the job.
I’m sorry for the man’s family.
I can say that he did inspire me by his example . . . to avoid following his example at all costs.
A presidential welcome for USS George H.W. Bush
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20090110/D95KGCRG0.html
“What do you give a guy who has been blessed and has just about everything he has ever needed?” asked President George W. Bush from aboard the Navy’s newest ship. “Well, an aircraft carrier.”
It’s always disturbed me how the naming of American aircraft carriers got away from the old system of naming after American Revolutionary War and Civil War era battles and warships and drifted into naming after congressmen and presidents, even when some of those presidents deserved remembrance.
This one just smacks too much of dumbass son trying to give daddy a birthday gift. Not to impugn father Bush’s own wartime bravery but, if they were going to name it after a wartime naval pilot, how about Edward O’Hare or Jimmy Thach or Richard Best or Wade McCluskey or legions of others who made decisive and fundamental contributions to wartime survival?
If to name it after an American politician, how about George Marshall?
Or even better – go back to the old system. The names were supposed to remind us of our history and values and sacrifice – not to be birthday or Christmas presents.
being a Palestinian civilian and being hit by Israeli ordnance.
http://www.ifcj.org
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t like seeing civilians of any stripe being hit by rockets, missiles, bombs, cluster munitions, artillery fire, mortar rounds or any other ordnance. But I’ve seen a commercial twice in the last three days from the International Federation of Christians and Jews about how I should drop everything and call a toll-free number to show my support for Jewish victims of Hamas rocket attacks. The commercial states that these rocket attacks are not widely reported in the media.
Funny thing: I’ve been well aware of these attacks for years now.
I’ll do one better. I’m blogging now to show my support for civilians in Israel, Gaza, Jerusalem, Lebanon and associated areas who have to endure rocketing, bombing, shelling, suicide bombing and other violent acts, no matter what the source of the ordnance.
As for ‘eye for an eye’? In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man may be king but he still has lousy depth perception.
As a history major, I look at Saturday’s news and remember the following:
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Balfour issued his
letter in support of a Zionist homeland in Palestine, as long as the native population was not adversely affected, like that was a consideration since 1917.
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Israel, despite its political leadership’s claims that it is not a colonial power, joined quite willingly with England and France in 1956 to support seizure of the Suez Canal and, as a bonus, seize control of the Sinai and expand its borders beyond the 1948 lines.
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Also, despite its claims of non-colonial stances, most Israeli governments have, at best, paid little more than lip service to the concept of withdrawing settlements in Palestinian territory and, at worst, actively encouraging settlements as a non-governmental way of expanding Israeli hegemony beyond the 1948 borders.
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Hamas and Hezbollah, while understandable reactions to Israeli imperialism (yes, imperialism), are really no better than successive Israeli governments in promoting any sort of rational solutions to the region’s problems. Both sides, however, are skilled practitioners of the ‘eye for an eye’ school of dispute settlement.
- I have real concerns about a country conducting a foreign policy based cynically on the Old Testament.
- On top of that, the mainstream Arab leadership across the region has done little to ease the situation under which Palestinians have existed . And when militant killers organize in resistance to the state of Israel, do you expect ? After all, look at the Stern Gang and Irgun and ask what is the fundamental difference between them and Hamas/Hezbollah?
Perhaps it is time for the world community to allow both sides of the current troubles to be isolated and fight each other to the death. On second thought, perhaps it’s time for all parties to the events of the last 92 years to own up to their contributions to those events and to bring hard rationality and justice to the region.
Both sides of the region’s inhabitants are equally responsible for killing and maiming civilians.
Most European nation-states are also responsible for persecution of Jews over the last several centuries and to that persecution’s peak in World War II.
The U.S. certainly has done little to head off Israel’s territorial expansion since the 1960’s, except to offer a confused series of initiatives and momentary successes of rationality lost in subsequent, emotionally confused shows of support for ‘Judeo-Christian’ values and perfunctory nods to ‘good Islamics’ victimized by the actions of ‘bad Islamics.’
And, when we all watch the news, hear the U.S. veto U.N. efforts to put Israel on the spot, and watch as Israeli aircrew flying American-made helicopters and jets bomb and strafe Gaza today, it’s hard to say that America is committed to a just peace process in the Middle East.
And what have the Arab nations done in practical terms to ease Palestinian suffering?
I enjoy a good comic book movie as much as the next American male. That said, I have never watched a comic book movie that talks so much and says so little.
‘Sin City’-style cinematography, several fight scenes, a naked Eva Mendes , and Samuel L. Jackson couldn’t even save it.
I damn near spent ny New Year’s Eve passed out in a theater, and I wasn’t even drunk.
‘Howard the Duck’ was better than this.
