January 31, 2007
When Chickens Come Home To Roost
It seems to me the entire span of George W. Bush’s tenure in office has been one long game of Three Card Monte.
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January 24, 2007
The Biggest Dick In America
Does anyone else want to kill Dick Cheney? I mean put both hands around his fat, fleshy windpipe and just choke the life out of the bastard? Or get not-quite-falling-down drunk and shoot him in the face with a shotgun? How about hang him from the end of a good, sturdy rope and film it all with a cell phone camera? Maybe just waterboard him once a day for every American who’s been killed or wounded in Iraq…
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January 11, 2007
The President, In The Library, With The Plan
Little more than one year ago, on November 30, 2005, the Bush administration unveiled to great fanfare a glossy, red, white, and blue publication entitled, National Strategy for Victory in Iraq. The president made a big speech to the midshipmen at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, MD, where he said, among other things,
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January 3, 2007
The “B” And The “S”
A couple of stories had various jaws flapping today, neither of which reflects too well on the media, the punditocracy, or the so-called leadership position of the United States in world affairs. In one, certain quarters are up in arms over the cellphone camera recording of Saddam Hussein’s execution to which I linked yesterday. In the other, presumptive 2008 Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama is learning quickly the calculus of celebrity in the modern age.
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January 2, 2007
Best Laid Plans
So much for New Year’s resolutions.
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December 30, 2006
It’s A Wrap
As the Year of the Fire Dog prepares to trot off, wagging its oblivious tail and bearing its friendly, sloppy grin for another twelve year jaunt through the cosmos, I am making a note to leave 2018 open. Should I be graced with life the next time a Year of the Dog comes bounding into view, I believe I’ll find it far more bearable with nothing too important on the schedule, as opposed to this waning year, when I’ve been stymied at every turn. So, goodbye Dog, and good luck.
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December 6, 2006
The Man In The Mirror
The Baker-Hamilton Commission, more popularly known, perhaps, as the Iraq Study Group, released Wednesday its report on what outgoing Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld once famously called “our adventure in Iraq.” At present, others might call it a civil war, a quagmire, a complex situation, or any number of other, less charitable things, but the commission’s statement for the record (available in 160 softbound pages for $6.57 at Amazon) called it “grave and deteriorating,” near-chaos, something on the precipice of “humanitarian catastrophe.”
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November 29, 2006
Taking A Different Tack
I could have titled this post “Not Staying The Course,” but I like to feel I’m more positive than such a heading would indicate.
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November 20, 2006
Dancing In The Dark
Amid the increasing dishabille of our efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, and no whiff from the Bush administration of a comprehensible strategy for dealing with the brouhaha fermenting of North Korea’s and Iran’s nuclear brinkmanship (not to mention India’s or Pakistan’s), our newly minted Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, Democrat from California’s 8th district (San Francisco), is about to introduce viewers at home, and those paying attention abroad, to a new perspective on the threats we face in the world today.
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November 8, 2006
Where We Stand
America may well have woken this morning to, as the ever-annoying David Brooks wrote in the New York Times, “No Tsunami,” but yesterday’s elections returned control of the U.S. House of Representatives to the Democrats, and depending on the outcome of two races that remain undecided, the Democrats will either also control the U.S. Senate, or the upper chamber will be nearly evenly split between them and the Republicans.
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