Politics
I don’t know why I haven’t heard more about the “Cone of Silence.” I chuckle every time I think of John McCain sitting under it in a room by himself.
It brings to mind THIS.
I can just all-too-easily picture McCain under there when the hostess comes in to tell him it’s his turn to go on stage for his interview. He sits there going “What? … What?” in a bewildered Maxwell Smart voice.
In fact the more I think of it, the more I’m convinced that John McCain IS Maxwell Smart.
Let the meme go forth.
I was at a Revolutionary War re-enactor event just a couple of weeks back, and I had a … well, call it a re-epiphany.
Some years back, while watching my friend Carl Buell, a natural history illustrator, paint a prehistoric scene, I had the original epiphany. I compared what Carl was doing with a brush with what I did with a camera, and I realized this: No matter how good I am with a camera, there are things in my photos that get there by accident.
A picture of a trail through a bower of fall colors might contain a bright red leaf lying in the leaf-strewn duff on a forest floor, and yet that particular leaf might never catch my attention, either before or after I took the picture. I might have the picture printed and framed for 30 years over my desk, and never notice that specific leaf.
For a guy who gets nervous when he has to call in to work and tell somebody he’s going to be five minutes late, I have a hard time even imagining what it’s like for a doctor to tell a patient he has cancer.
And yet they do. And I doubt they sugar-coat it. After Sen. Ted Kennedy’s recent diagnosis, I’d bet Kennedy and his family heard it in blunt terms that same day. A doctor came right out and said “You have a large tumor in your brain.”
If I was the patient, I know some part of me — the wishful part that wouldn’t want it to be true — would desperately NOT want to hear it.
Continue reading “A Sunny Optimist, Darkly, on Planet Earth”
Yesterday Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, presented 35 Articles of Impeachment on the floor of the House of Representatives.
And today I can’t find it on the mainstream media at all, anywhere. ABC, CNN, MSNBC, even the BBC has let readers down.
I have found a very brief story on Reuters, but it makes the point several times that the effort is not expected to go anywhere.
Bob Fertik, President of Democrats.com, said: “Some might question why Congressman Kucinich has done this now. My question is why 434 other Congress Members have not done it before. Despite the uncountable and unspeakable crimes this administration has committed, George Bush and Dick Cheney remain in power and immune from prosecution. Congress must impeach Bush and Cheney now – before they further abuse their power by pardoning [everyone involved] for all of their crimes.”
Some of my oldest friends have asked me to never again say anything bad about our dear, honest, never-made-a-mistake, never-told-a-lie President Bush in the emails I send them, so I’ve laid off that poor misunderstood Christian patriot-in-the-White-House in recent writing.
But hey, doesn’t mean I can’t snipe at McCain 🙂
See, it’s okay because everybody knows we brainless liberals hate America and don’t understand normal values. So, this just in — A senseless hate-filled liberal attack piece on that valiant war hero John McCain.
Continue reading “Left Behind: McCain’s Ex-Wife Misses the Rapture”
In reply to my post about a yearned-for speech by Barack Obama, David Harmon made a couple of worthwhile points in the comments. I started to reply to them, and — typical for me — I couldn’t seem to express my thoughts in just a few words. My answer ended up being post-length rather than comment length, so I decided to just make it a separate post.
David said:
In some happy alternate universe, this is the speech given by Barack Obama on the night he formally accepts the Democratic nomination to be the party’s presidential candidate.
Barack Obama:
One of the major issues of this presidential campaign, for all of the candidates, has been the war in Iraq. Yet in speaking of the war, and of so many other issues – issues of security, economic issues, issues of the global environment – we have continued to react to emergencies now before us, rather than taking a more thoughtful, proactive approach, to foresee and avoid potential emergencies to come, and to foresee and help create the countless opportunities which may lie in our future.
Ben Stein, actor and, uh — I almost said comedian, but he’s not that funny — former host of “Win Ben Stein’s Money” and former speechwriter for President Nixon, is turning out to be a serious nutcase.
And I don’t mean “lovable nutcase,” like dear old Aunt Clara from Bewitched who collected doorknobs. I mean malignant, nasty SOB nutcase, an enemy, in his own way, to core American values.
I know whenever you hear “American values” you automatically think of family-related stuff, like raising your kids right and staying married to the same woman (or man). Saying the Pledge and honoring the soldiers, eating watermelon at the county fair.
But science is a core American value too, one that stretches back to before the founding of the nation. Ben Franklin is known as a scientist, for instance. Thomas Jefferson is less known as an experimentalist but was no less a rigorous rationalist and scientific thinker. Wilbur and Orville Wright are quintessential American heroes.
Everything is deep. Everything.
The simplest thing you can imagine – a grain of sand, or the fact that you have five toes on each foot – is filled with unimaginable complexities.
Even something as simple as sunlight, taken for granted for thousands of years by humans, turned out, once someone invented the prism, to be a mix of colored light. Strange to think that when you look into a bright white light, you’re also looking into a bright blue light. And a bright red light. A bright yellow light, and so on. But you are.
Light is deep, and so is everything else.
Wheaton College, Wheaton, Ill., requires faculty and staff to sign a faith statement and adhere to standards of conduct in areas including marriage. This is, after all, the origin-place of evangelist Billy Graham and the home of the globally evangelistic Billy Graham Center.
It’s also the place that made national headlines on Feb. 20, 2003, when it lifted its then 143 year-old ban on student dancing. (Whoa! Next thing you know, they’ll be apologizing to Galileo.)
It would be weird to work or go to school in such a place, don’t you think? And yet some choose it, you have to believe deliberately. It does have a pretty respectable academic history.
Here’s a young man (I guess; he kept his identity a secret) who became an atheist halfway through his college years at Wheaton (he just graduated in December), and chronicled the journey in a blog called “Leaving Eden.”
Nov. 29, 2007: “Now is the time when all of my final papers and projects are due, all of which must be from a Christian perspective. Before I started I thought, no big deal, I know what the Christian perspective is, and anyway it’ll be kind of fun using words that I haven’t used in a long time, like sanctification, eschatology, spiritual discipline– not to mention the whole language of Wheaton evangelicalism that I worked so hard to become fluent in. / But man, it sucks. It actually makes me feel a little bit ill to have to do this.”
