Travel plans and parting shots

• Sorry I haven’t been blog­ging much recently. Greg and I have a big trip that we’ve been plan­ning for and as the day has got­ten closer, the details have mul­ti­plied expo­nen­tially. But it’s just going to be a dandy trip — 10-day cruise to the British Isles with two days at the end in Lon­don and two more in Paris — so I’m hop­ing to get in some travel blogging.

  But I haven’t had any chance to get in my vital two-cents (equiv­a­lent to four Euro cents) on the biggest things going on. So can I just say this about that (or these about those)?
  

• Re: the Newsweek deba­cle — Quick rhetor­i­cal ques­tion: You hear a story in a Chi­nese news mag­a­zine that evil, ter­ri­ble Com­mu­nists in China are flush­ing the Bible down the toi­let as a way to tor­ment Jew­ish and Chris­t­ian pris­on­ers. What’s the first thing that pops into your head? —» How could any­one — no mat­ter how evil they are — flush a gigan­tic book down the toi­let? It just plain wouldn’t go. Not even if you ripped pages out at a time. You would have your­self one jammed toi­let, and I’m think­ing if I’m a prison guard that’s not a chance I’m will­ing to take no mat­ter how grat­i­fy­ing a ges­ture it is.

  This is one of those cases when peo­ple are mak­ing me feel like I must be a rocket sci­en­tist. If I’m a jour­nal­ist and I hear from a polit­i­cal pris­oner and sworn enemy of my coun­try a story that includes phys­i­cally impos­si­ble infor­ma­tion, I’m pretty sure I’d decide it wasn’t true. All by myself with­out check­ing experts, I would decide that. I know — I’m so smart some­times it’s just crazy.

  (Kid­ding aside: does any­body think that the guys at Newsweek and all their legacy news-buddies have the slight­est idea of the dam­age they caused? Do the riots that killed 15 peo­ple — let alone the enor­mous hos­til­ity through­out the Mus­lim world, which now refuses to believe that the story was false — mean any­thing to them? I haven’t seen any­thing to indi­cate that it does. Which is dis­gust­ing, actually.)

• Re: fil­i­bus­ter­ing the fed­eral judges — It’s almost worth the whole issue just to hear Demo­c­ra­tic sen­a­tors try to bom­bast every­one about the dig­nity and tra­di­tion of some­thing as ludi­crous as a fil­i­buster, whereby half of this august body gets to stick its fin­gers in its ears and go “La la la. I can’t hear you. I’m talk­ing. La la la. I’m read­ing ‘Great Gatsby’. La la la.” And espe­cially now when it never even gets that far and half the august body says, “Don’t you do that or I’ll stick my fin­gers in my ears and go ‘La la la’!”

  But I’ll be fair: it’s not the fil­i­buster, of course. It’s that Democ­rats don’t want to vote on the judges because … well, because they can’t think of much else to do to throw their ban­tam weight around, I guess. So they’ve picked a fight over this and now they have to add all the usual “We’re good, they’re bad, this is impor­tant,” stuff to jus­tify it. It’s still just about power, and the funny part of that is that the Con­gres­sional Repub­li­cans seem like they’ll do any­thing for this minor­ity except spit-shine their shoes.

  And to be fair (again — that’s twice now!), the inanity isn’t all on one side. Since I men­tion when I’m get­ting tired of obvi­ous talk­ing point stuff, I’ll be the first to say I’m get­ting tired of the new expres­sion “an up-or-down vote.” A what? Up or down? Who comes up with this? What other kind of vote is there — side to side? Come to think of it though, maybe we should insti­tute one of those. I think it might solve the whole prob­lem. The Democ­rats obvi­ously want to vote on whether these guys are right or left. I think we let any­body who wants to vote side to side, and the grown-ups can vote up or down.

See? That’s bril­liant. Okay, time for me to go to England.




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