Here’s a little light reading. I’m gonna leave that to you to figure out on your own.
Things were looking up today – the Red Sox moved to a record of 5-1, solidifying their perch atop the AL East, with Papi launching one and Papelbon and Beckett having great pitching turns in the home opener at that lovely cathedral of baseball on Yawkee Way. If you can’t tell, I’m feeling a little nostalgic for Boston.
The good day, however, was not to last. I noticed that Barbara Ann Radnofsky, our presumptive candidate for US Senate against Kay Bailey Hutchison, only got sixty percent of the vote in today’s runoff. She was running against Gene Kelly, an 80-year-old guy from San Antonio who makes no campaign appearances and accepts no political contributions. He has actually procured the nomination in previous cycles on nothing more than name recognition.
I saw that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has taken a cue from American politicians in the presentation department. I can’t dig up a picture of it, but he was in front of a banner that said “Nuclear Power is the right of all Iranian citizens” or something like that. He’s learning! He also told Christian Amanpour that the people that she interviewed earlier in the day that would really like the Iranian government to invest in infrastructure so they can have jobs and food were “imaginary” and “mythical.”
Earlier in the day, I saw Rumsfeld tell the media that he can’t keep up with the “mythology that comes out of [the media].” This was during a press conference where Joint Chiefs Chairman General Pace was defending Rumsfeld against the calls of three former generals for Rumsfeld to resign.
Then I saw Ann Coulter tie herself in knots as she ran up against the new, fun internal argument among American conservatives – immigration. No one on the right knows if they should be traditionally pro-business and fall in love with Bush’s guest worker program or if they should be the newly-chic xenophobic type of Republican.
Ann just said “Stupid people will elect Democrats who will raise their taxes and surrender the war on terror.”
Let me tell you about the war on terror. I have come to the thinking that the existence of Israel prevents the Middle East from devolving into one giant sectarian battleground. If everyone in the Middle East got together and tried to destroy Israel, it would probably be a successful campaign, but it would require maximum X-Treme teamwork. And Israel would take a serious chunk of the collective asses on its way down.
So that happens, and then what? The Shi’a figure out they don’t like the Sunnis, and nobody likes the Wahabists or the House of Saud, and Hezbollah and al Qaeda and Hamas wouldn’t hang out long before they started fighting, and then you’ve got roughly 1/6th of the world’s population in open war with each other. The Palestinians, well, they would figure out that a great deal of Arabia isn’t all that interested in them.
I could be wrong, and its certainly possible, but I’m of the opinion today that, while Israel is irritating to the Arab nations of the Middle East, its more the idea of Israel that bothers them. Most Arab countries have deep-seated resentment of the US and the UK over all the colonization and how we just carved out a new country without really asking anyone. If I came downstairs and found a crackhead asleep on my couch, I’d be mad at the crackhead, but I would sure as hell want to know who let him in.
Not that Israel is a crackhead. I suppose if I found Jerry Seinfeld going through my fridge I would be similarly upset.
Ok. There’s always tomorrow to look forward to.
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