Friday, November 20, 2009 in Lewiston, Maine
Harry Truman gave them hell. Sarah Palin gives them agita.
The Associated Press unleashed 11 fact checkers on her new book, "Going Rogue," for a thoroughly tendentious critical examination. Newsweek, the influential liberal magazine of opinion, published a cover piece damning her to the outer darkness, balanced by another piece damning her to the further-outer darkness. The conservative-leaning New York Times columnist David Brooks called her "a joke."
Dear Sammy Sosa:
Are you happy with yourself now? Are you more confident and self-assured? When you look in the mirror, do you like yourself better, now that you are white?
As you know, photos taken of you at an awards show earlier this month have the whole country talking. Last time we saw you, you were a brown man from the Dominican Republic, star slugger for the Chicago Cubs. Now you are white, facing the camera with a complexion strikingly reminiscent of Dracula's.
The Obama administration has chosen the wrong New York venue to try five co-conspirators in the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States. Instead of a Manhattan courtroom less than a mile from the site of where the World Trade Center stood, the government should have chosen the Bronx Zoo, because a zoo is what will be created when this terrorist trial is held.
"Hey, Barack. It's me, your heart. It might be all the White House pickup basketball games or the imminent prospect of nationalizing American health insurance, but I'm feeling better than ever.
"Well, at least since the primaries. Remember those students fainting at your campaign events? They'd stand there for hours to get a glimpse of 'the one they'd been waiting for.' Then, BAM! Down they'd go! That was awesome and HILARIOUS!
The massacre at Fort Hood will likely lead to backlash against Americans of Islamic faith and Arab descent, and test the limits of this country's capacity for religious and ethnic tolerance. A lot is riding on how well we exercise restraint.
U.S. Army Chief of Staff General George Casey summed it best when he commented in a recent television interview, "Our diversity, not only in our Army, but in our country, is a strength. And as horrific as this tragedy was, if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that's worse."
With gasoline at a little less than $3 per gallon, Maine sends 9 percent of its domestic product to foreign countries. At $120 for a barrel of oil and gas at $4 per gallon, it's 12 percent. At $150 per barrel for oil and gas at $5 per gallon, it's 15 percent. The International Energy Agency expects the percentage of domestic product consumed by oil to double by 2030. With energy at 30 percent of Maine's domestic product, Maine is uninhabitable.
They killed a killer last week.
I kept waiting to feel something when news came that John Allen Muhammad had been executed in Virginia. As a staunch opponent of capital punishment, I wanted some nugget of remorse at the knowledge that the government had taken his life.
But Muhammad's 2002 sniper attacks hit close to home. He terrorized millions of people in the greater Washington area, where I live, made us fear to gas up our cars, walk in parking lots, wait on buses, made my grandson scared to go trick-or-treating, even wounded a friend of my youngest son.
Government and military officials have issued statements since the shooting rampage at Fort Hood, Texas, that have nothing to do with the reality of what occurred, what is occurring and what our enemies would still like to have occur all over the United States. Listening to them leads to the conclusion that these people were handed talking points because they are all saying pretty much the same thing; that we shouldn't jump to conclusions, stereotype or give in to paranoia.
This is in response to comments made by Angus King that appeared in the Sun Journal on Oct. 23.
I agree with Gov. King. Maine needs more electric generation, both for the technical and economic efficiency it can bring and for the dispersed economic development in rural areas it can induce. However, wind power, is not how to do it.
It is the duty of every pundit to be all-knowing on what the recent elections mean for the future of American politics. They may have only three dots to connect — and two dots may have been state-level contests mostly about local issues — but the confident ones plot detailed maps of political change.
Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the Army psychiatrist who killed 13 of his fellow soldiers in a rampage at Fort Hood, is a most unlikely victim of post-traumatic stress disorder.
He never experienced any combat-related trauma. He had never even been deployed overseas. Yet, he had barely stopped shooting his victims in cold blood, chasing the wounded to finish them off, when the media rushed to their copy of the "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders."
A sampling from the Web: "Why are these Muslim invaders allowed to carry on freely in this country ... protected by outreach, Obama, and PC mental illness?" "Simply put, most Muslims in non-Islamic countries have an evil axe to grind and a scurrilous hidden agenda." "Muslims should be deported from this country! They offer nothing to Americans!"
By now, the script should be disturbingly familiar. Whether in the Middle East, or increasingly in America, a fanatical Muslim blows up or goes on a shooting spree, killing many. This is quickly followed by "condemnations" from "Muslim civil rights groups," such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). We are then warned by the president and some newspaper editorials not to jump to conclusions, or to stereotype. Yasser Arafat wrote this script, which he used with great success throughout his bloody career as a terrorist.
Trade and globalization — when not referencing blockbuster sports transactions or raucous street protests, debates over these abstract terms can give Ambien and Jack Daniels a run for their money as a cure for insomnia. Of course, that's the problem — the rules governing what we buy and sell are now playing such a decisive role in almost every major policy that we're falling asleep at our peril.
