Sunday, January 18, 2009

A Thought While Watching the Pre-Inauguration Concert From Washington...

Gee, my country is happy today.

• Posted at 11:23 PM · LINK

Another Good Question

Christopher Hayes connects the dots on our new attorney general's statement that waterboarding = torture and Dick Cheney's admission that he ordered waterboarding.

• Posted at 12:36 PM · LINK

Today's Video Link

A bunch of funny people tell what Monty Python means to them...

• Posted at 3:43 AM · LINK

Early Sunday Morning

George W. Bush says he doesn't care about the polls or his stunningly-low approval ratings. Does anyone believe that? Why all these self-serving exit interviews if he isn't trying to get them up a tad before he goes off to claim his post-presidential financial rewards from all the corporations he made rich?

Here's one contradiction, and I'm not the first person to point this out. Asked about regrets and mistakes, he always mentions the "disappointment" of not finding Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq. Now, on one level, that shouldn't be have been a disappointment. That meant that the sanctions and peaceful methods of disarmament had worked and that Saddam Hussein was not as grave a threat as some thought. Isn't that kind of a good thing?

Before we invaded, there were those saying it would be like Waco; that the madman would set his compound on fire and just start killing everyone if he was going down. People were afraid ol' Saddam would use those Weapons of You-Know-What before we could secure them and that a lot of our soldiers would die as a result. Shouldn't we be relieved that that didn't happen? As it was, way too many lives ended without W.M.D. in the mix.

In any case, Bush has said on several occasions that he would have ordered the invasion even if he'd known there were no Weapons of Mass Destruction there. So, uh, then what was the problem with not finding any? If we would have gone to war anyway, then the main effect of not finding W.M.D. is that George W. Bush was embarrassed. He looked clueless and reckless and uninformed as a leader. That "disappointment" is not about the people who were killed or about the destruction or about the fates of the U.S. or Iraq. It's that George Bush looked foolish.

Pressed by Charlie Gibson to name a regret in connection with Hurricane Katrina, Bush mentioned no regret that his appointments had turned FEMA into such an ineffective agency, no regret that New Orleans had been a lake for a couple of days before he even seemed to recognize that people there were dying and needed help. What he said instead was...

I've thought long and hard about Katrina. You know, could I have done something differently, like land Air Force One either in New Orleans or Baton Rouge? And then your questions, I suspect, would have been, "How could you possibly have flown Air Force One into Baton Rouge, and police officers that were needed to expedite traffic out of New Orleans were taken off the task to look after you?"

Look at that reply. It's not about the people who suffered. It's about criticism of George W. Bush, defending the fact that he did a flyover days later and didn't land and stage a proper photo-op to show concern. He thought long and hard, sure...about which course of action would bring him less criticism. For that matter, most of the praise — self-praise and external — for his actions on 9/11 have to do with him giving good speeches, standing on the rubble with his arm around a fire fighter and vowing to bring Osama to justice. It's amazing how many people still count that a high point of his presidency, despite the lack of follow-through.

America is very, very happy to be rid of this man. And while his approval rating may be upped a bit in the future just because we're a forgiving people, I doubt it will climb much. Can anyone imagine anything that could happen that would make the handling of Katrina seem competent or even compassionate? Can we gin up any scenario that will make people say, "Thank God Bush left us that deficit"? Toppling Saddam might eventually look like a wise course of action if Iraq becomes a stable democracy but that's not likely to happen...and if it does, it'll be because of grand diplomacy and engineering by Bush's successors. Even then, I think most Americans will conclude the gains are not worth what they cost us.

I don't think we're going to see Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld (et al) charged with war crimes. That would mean a trial that would involve quizzing Senators, many of them Democratic, about what they were briefed about and why they didn't stop this or that. The Bush administration ain't the only ones culpable...and Obama has way too much to do to disrupt the Senate like that, to say nothing of alienating a lot of needed allies there. We may just have to settle for Bush and his guys going down in history as men who destroyed everything they ever touched. Except Halliburton.

• Posted at 2:37 AM · LINK

Hey There, It's a Childhood Fave!

This one got completely by me. I walked into a DVD store the other day and was surprised to see that a favorite film of my childhood — Hey There, It's Yogi Bear — had been released on disc. Had I known this, I would have beaten a few drums in advance. It wasn't the kind of film to make Mr. Disney worry but I was a huge fan of Yogi and other Hanna-Barbera shows at the time it came out — 1964 — so I enjoyed the hell out of it.

I saw it at the Picwood Theater, which is no longer there...but when it was, it was near the intersection of Pico Boulevard and Westwood Boulevard in West L.A. Here's a photo of the Picwood taken, I assume, shortly after it was built in 1946. By the time I started going there, it was no longer a free-standing building as in that picture. On one side was a bowling alley that was connected to the theater. On the other was a building that kept changing tenants...and one of those tenants was, for several years, the Blue Chip Stamp redemption center that I wrote about in this post.

And if you're going to click around this site, you can find more info about the movie, including a video clip of its best sequence, over here.

Since I'm throwing out memories: I think Hey There, It's Yogi Bear was the first movie I ever attended without my parents. They loved me but not enough, I guess, to sit through that one. Some time in June of '64, I went with my classmate Valerie who lived a few blocks away and was about to move to another city, far far away. So it was kind of a "going-away" day with Valerie. My folks drove us to the Picwood, gave us cash for tickets and popcorn, and dropped us off. Then they picked us up when the film let out and drove us over to Valerie's house, where they left us so we could go in this great Highboy swimming pool she had. I think the water was about two feet deep and the pool was about ten feet in diameter...so you couldn't do a lot of swimming in it. But we got into our suits and splashed around for a while.

Valerie's parents were away so we were all alone there in the pool. Suddenly, surprising the heck out of me, Valerie suggested that since we would probably never see each other again after that day, we ought to really see each other and take off our swimsuits. I refused and she withdrew the suggestion. Why did I decline? Well, remember I was just a little more than twelve years old at the time. If she'd offered a few months later, I would have been interested.

Here's an Amazon link via which you can order a copy of Hey There, It's Yogi Bear. And here's a link via which you can purchase A Man Called Flintstone, which apparently came out on DVD at the same time, and which I didn't like nearly as much as Yogi's film.

• Posted at 2:16 AM · LINK

January 17, 2009 • Current • January 19, 2009