I loved watching Tom when I was a kid. I loved watching Tom even more than I loved watching Dan Akroyd parody him on SNL. Nobody smoked more than Tom, except maybe Edward R. Murrow.
And so, in memorial, here is an archival video of two of my heroes:
OK, I am right now watching our own President Gomer meeting Prime Minister Brown, live at Camp David, and he is blathering on about the Tyrany of Poverty, Tyrany of Lack of Education, bloodthirsty ideologies we need to nip in the bud...
And he actually said (I paraphrase here, but look up the actual quote later) that we and the Brits are fighting against a bloodthirsty bunch of folks who want to drive us out of certain parts of the world where they want to impose their ideology.
Uh....You mean the Muslims who want to drive us out of THEIR part of the world so that they can have the opportunity to EXPRESS their OWN ideology THEMSELVES as opposed to submitting to the unrequested "liberation" which has resulted in an ongoing and appearantely endless occupation designed to impose OUR ideology on them at the cost of their oil resources? An occupation, I might add, which has been at a very high cost in blood and treasure to all parties involved.
Holy crap.
And before you point that stupid finger, this is not BLAME AMERICA FIRST, nor is it unreasoning hatred of George Bush. It is not hatred to realize he is an idiot with less than a thimbleful of understanding of the enormous consequences of his actions.
Did he just say, "The challenge for Gordon and me is to write a chapter, the first chapter in this struggle." We are FOUR YEARS into a war you yourself expect to last DECADES and you're only now starting to think about the FIRST CHAPTER???? And then he went into a riff of jokes about the reporter's age who asked the question.
"People who kill innocent men women and children to achieve political ends are evil." That's a quote. Does that mean he understands his own evil or that he considers that all of the people he has killed in this "ideological struggle" to be guilty?
George, you keep telling us how serious this war is, so show us how serious it is by taking it seriously and stop cracking jokes with the press corps.
We don't care that you and Tony Blair used the same toothpaste but Gordon Brown uses a different one. Nobody is laughing at your jokes but you. A very large percentage are crying.
Whenever George Bush laughs, the world laughs a little less.
Here's a nice video montage of some of the more statesman-like comments uttered by our President. Laugh or cry at it. Which you do shows a lot about who you are and how seriously you take his impact on our country.
When I was growing up we used to celebrate the 4th as the birthday of our democracy. The day we declared independance from a king who ruled his people unfairly and who was above the rule of law.
The day we declared ourselves a nation of laws and not of men.
And this 4th of July, distracted by the pretty bursts of firecrackers, how many will notice or even care that Scooter Libby had his sentence commuted and that Bush is considering a full pardon for him?
Don't forget, that this is the President who campaigned on bringing dignity and honor back to the White House. Who professed to love the law and who swore not only to defend the Constitution against all enemies both foreign and domestic but to actually follow the rules laid out in that sacred document.
Don't forget that this president was asked by the Pope to confer life imprisonment on a converted Christian murderer who had repented her sin, and felt remorse for her crime...but the then Governor of Texas felt the law was the law and he had a sworn duty to uphold it...the just sentence of death had to be carried out.
I ask you, if Paris Hilton had to go back to jail, why shouldn't Scooter Libby? Scooter Libby, whose crime was to obstruct the investigation into the crime of outing an active CIA covert operative engaged in gathering intelligence on Weapons of Mass Destruction during a time of war. A man who has never exhibited the slightest remorse for this crime, nor repented of his efforts to subvert the very democratic processes his President has sworn to uphold.
They are all criminals. They are all thugs. They are contemptuous of everything real American Democracy is supposed to represent.
They need to be removed from office. They need to be held accountable for their crimes. They need to be punished.
If they are not, there is no longer an America to defend.
