The rash of bomb threats, according to media accounts, was perpetrated by two others, also current students, both girls. They haven't been named and, as juveniles, won't be.
Fry 'em all, dammit. (Figuratively speaking, of course.) We plan go to tonight's town meeting anyway, even though this episode presumably has come to a close.
After catching local TV news coverage of those happenings, I watched Pres. Barack Obama field questions from lawmakers and economists at the end of yesterday's "fiscal responsibility summit." My first reaction was that it's refreshing to have an engaged, articulate President who displays an IQ above the freezing point of water.
He also had the confidence to grant the floor first to Sen. John McCain, who probably meant to challenge (respectfully) the President's agenda, but who ended up practically endorsing the election results:
"Your helicopter is now going to cost as much as Air Force One. I don't think there is any more graphic demonstration of how good ideas have cost taxpayers an enormous amount of money."Now there's a guy with a big ol' basketful of symbols and a severe shortage of substance -- I mean, a third-grader could come up with a "more graphic demonstration" of government waste. Had McCain won in November, I can imagine him suggesting that homeowners could fend off foreclosure by riding bicycles, turning off lights and taking short showers.
Despite my staunch opposition to some of Pres. Obama's policies, it's clear to me that the American electorate (such as it is) chose the more able leader.
It could be worse, of course -- much worse, and I'm not talking about John McCain. This is what his former running mate said in a recent interview:
"Obviously something big took place in the media. We’re going to seek and we're going to destroy this candidacy of Sarah Palin's because of what it is that she represents. Very frightening, I think, what the media was able to get away with, this go around."Another Republican trying to pass off symbols as substance. Another elected official blaming the big, bad media for political failure and personal incompetence -- a sure sign, as Jack Cafferty said last week of Sen. Roland Burris, that "you're out of bullets."
A few simple-minded conservatives can't help singing right along with Palin, whining that there was no justification for turning her into a political piñata -- and I say that the media, collectively, actually short-armed its coverage. She deserved far more scrutiny and parody than she got, but we can be thankful, at least, that this vacuous vamp was exposed in plenty of time to sabotage the ticket.
I've had it up to here with symbols. I'm tired of hearing that so-and-so's speech was "short on details" when the loyal opposition has nothing substantive or credible to offer. Tossing rotten chestnuts and clinging to infected ideologies, regardless of source or subject, won't get the job done.
Just ask Americans who followed experts' advice to "stay in the market" -- and whose retirement savings now are worth less than 50 cents for every dollar invested 16 months ago. Even those with 12-year-old money are right back where they started, or worse.
If "free trade is fair trade," then someone needs to give me a better explanation of how that philosophy squares with our crushing trade deficit. If wholesale deregulation is so bloody brilliant, then how did our markets' biggest players (and more every day) end up in the toilet? If government handouts to individual citizens are profane but government bailouts for failed corporations are sacred, please tell me again -- exactly which brand of capitalist whimsy is that?
If organized labor is committed to "improving the lives of working men and women," just how are those lives improved when plants close and jobs evaporate, due in large part to unions' terminal greed? And with a national landscape that includes food lines in Wilmington, Ohio and 24% graduation rates in Detroit, how can any politician or captain of industry have the unmitigated balls to whine, to pander, to traffic in symbols?
The words of Henry David Thoreau:
Policy differences aside, I see this President as one our nation's "sane moments" -- which means, by intelligent contrast, that purely partisan or contrarian opposition is implicitly insane. To be sure, anything resembling unquestioning, categorical support of the administration's agenda is likewise addled."No face which we can give to a matter will stead us so well at last as the truth. This alone wears well.
"For the most part, we are not where we are, but in a false position. Through an infirmity of our natures, we suppose a case, and put ourselves into it, and hence are in two cases at the same time, and it is doubly difficult to get out.
"In sane moments we regard only the facts, the case that is. Say what you have to say, not what you ought. Any truth is better than make-believe.
"Tom Hyde, the tinker, standing on the gallows, was asked if he had anything to say. 'Tell the tailors,' said he, 'to remember to make a knot in their thread before they take the first stitch.'
"His companion's prayer is forgotten."
I call bullshit on make-believe political rhetoric that gives short shrift to the facts, the case that is. I don't care if it comes from McCain or Obama, Schumer or Gramm, Limbaugh or Franken. It's time for The People to set fire to these folks' carefully tended ideological gardens -- along with our own -- and drag the powerful into our world.
First, however, we must start telling the truth about what we see -- if we don't, we're no better than they are.
