Copyright © 2009 Frank Lynch.
Copyright © 2009 Frank Lynch.
Me: Frank Lynch Home These are my mundane daily ramblings.
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Wasn't that a decade. Please, sir, I don't want some more. I wish you all a happy celebration, and a very good 2010. Dick Cheney is a liar. You knew that, I knew that, and Eugene Robinson does the public service of dissecting Cheney's statement to Politico on Obama and terror. Cheney obviously helt some comfort that Politico would prnt his statement without disinfecting it in the same article.
Swearing allegiance to the party, not the country. Representatives Hoeskstra and King are doing a dandy job of politicizing the Detroit terror attempt, aren't they? Complaining that Obama was too slow to say anything to the public, when it took Bush nine days to speak about Richard Reid? No matter what Obama does, it must, by definition, be wrong. This is out and out shameless behavior on their parts. Complete jerks. Cheney needs a shibboleth. Obama isn't using the phrase "war on terror" enough to suit Dick Cheney, and Cheney is inferring from the silence that Obama isn't treating this as war. The more mature of us, however, know that silence doesn't necessarily mean a situation doesn't exist; it may only be unremarkable, as much as Cheney wants to hear the formula. The fact that there's so little in the Gospels about what Jesus wore doesn't mean he was naked, if you get my drift. (Note to Lynn: it's not enough to love your husband, you also have to repeatedly say it.) It's obvious Obama is actually taking this more seriously than Bush did. So har he hasn't proposed invading any countries which had nothing to do with the Detroit attempt. Although an attack on South America would be peachy keen, seeing as how they stole our name. Further, he gave the American people a briefing yesterday that included information he'd learned just yesterday. An openness with the American public is something that was sorely missing from the neocons' prior "you can't handle the truth" approach. In related news, I hope you saw Rachel Maddow last night: she did the kind of old-clip gathering that Jon Stewart has become famous for: noting Tom Ridge's criticism of putting the Detroit perpetrator through our criminal justice system rather than military courts, she dug out film of Ridge's high praise for the way thet Bush Administration did the same (criminal court trial) for Richard Reid, the shoe bomber. And AG John Ashcraft's trumpeting the criminal court conviction of the aforesaid. What was good for the gander is apparently not good for the goose. Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
The head of the TSA is not responsible. That's because there is no head of the TSA, thanks to Senator Jim "Waterloo" DeMint. Heckuva job, Jimmy. It's amazing that the broader truths about Joe Lieberman aren't sufficiently self-evident to the world that John Nichols has to write this. But apparently they're not: Lieberman will still be consulted by the Sunday talk show hosts, as if he has some special intelligence that we all need to be enlightened by.
Fortress America. The Christmas terrorist attack on the flight to Detroit brings me back to the elephant in the room. And by citing "the elephant in the room," I obviously mean a topic which no one wants to discuss. Maybe it has been discussed and hasn't gotten my attention, I don't know. But I think we need an open, honest, well-publicized discussion about the value of human lives versus the values we have in the Constitution and the Declaration regarding our values as a nation. I'm a firm believer that our country is not defined by the flag or purple mountain's majesties; or even a sense that we're exceptional or chosen by God. I doubt it would surprise many of you if I told you I think we were lucky to happen upon a continent so flush with natural resources, and insulated from the conflagrations which European countries experienced, thanks to their being so close to each other and so techy. The point is this: there are false positives and false negatives. Allegedly our friend from Nigeria was a false negative: we should have put him on the no-fly list, and didn't. The original story was that the warning from his father didn't have enough details to merit that escalation. But the discussion doesn't need to rely on the specifics of this case. How low do we set the bar, such that we close the drawbridge over the moat, and feel that we haven't set the bar too low? It became a joke line after nine-lem, that "The Terrorists Have Already Won!" But that doesn't mean the topic isn't worth discussing. How many body frisks do we initiate before we become some sort of monster? Warming up. The hibernation from the flu or whatever it is I have is slowly ending, and yesterday Ab and I went in to Manhattan to see the Kandinski at the Guggenheim. Luckily there are still a couple weeks left, because I didn't make it that far.
Have yourself a xenophobic Christmas. John Hinderaker has a Christmas anecdote for us all... I can't tell if it's a set-up when he mentions his son's new apartment, "in a complex that is inhabited largely by Somali immigrants," who then notices that the car parked next to his "with its motor running and people inside. As he got closer, he saw that there were four Somali men inside the parked car. That seemed a bit odd." Seriously? You've raised a kid without a basic understanding of probabilities, such that he thinks it odd that in a neighborhood with a lot of Somalis it would be odd to encounter a group of Somalis... together? As if it would be normal for a couple Somalis to be in a car with, say, immigrants from other continents. Sheesh. These people need to get out more. The Hinderakers, that is.
Why are Republicans so upset with the sweetheart deals in the health care reform bill? If the health care reform bill has sweetheart deals for states like Nebraska, the GOP shouldn't be upset. They could have stopped it. Any of 40 GOP Senators could have stopped it, in a blink. All they would have had to do was make Nelson's vote to end cloture unnecessary, by voting to end cloture themselves. That's all it would have taken. Less government waste, Senator Coburn. You could have done it! But no, the entire GOP caucus believes in waste so much that they guaranteed it would be part of the bill. They guaranteed it. Don't blame the process, gang, unless you point to yourselves. The "waste" wouldn't have been there if you didn't elevate Nelson's importance.
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