Sopranos

This was a response I posted to an article demanding that the David Chase tell the public what his ending meant and whether Tony died:

Get a life! In this day and age nobody can respect somones artistic integrity. No one can let the material speak for itself. Media and simple minded people in need of a quick fix demand a full explanation of anything any artist, musician, writer does. Think a while and come up with your own interpretation using YOUR OWN brain power. I know thats tough for a culture of people who are told exactly what and how to think, but give it the old college try.

I know its rare for this medium to make people think beyond surface deep, but thats what this series was often about. It was not about people getting whacked, although the action was great for entertainment, it was about a deeper examination of the pschye of a fascinating person, who in many ways embodied America.

Im sure Tony would demand to know what happened to him as well.

Gitmo and Gitmo-er

I love the Bush administration sometimes. By love I mean I love there little clumsy missteps, like watching a two year old stumble over a hard wood floor; occassionally their little toes hit the floor first and occassionally their little pudgy heels hit the floor first, making for a wobbly and sometimes hard to watch attempt.

With the ruling at Guantanamo today we are reminded that like always this administration is too incompotent to even implement their own disastorous guidelines. They came up with this 'unlawful enemy combatant' status, and then DIDNT bring charges against detainees as unlawful enemy combatants.

I can't help but think of the scene in 'Dumb and Dumber' when Harry bets Lloyd that he is going to get him to make a bet.
Harry didn't realize what he had just done, and It's clear that this administration and this 'justice' department didn't realize what they had done either.
Of course any student of logic would point out that this is a 'weak analogy' and therefore irrelavant in making a comparison that this administration is incompotent like the characters in that movie; I agree...
Clearly the actions at Guantanamo(holding people without charge, without representation, all while being tortured and abused) are not a comdey, but a tragedy.

The Ever-Suspicious lover

The Neo-con inner circle that was the driving force behind the Iraq war is a lot like a jealous and suspicious girlfriend. In that I mean the girlfriend is constantly checking up on her boyfriend, wondering where he's at, who he's with, if he's thinking about doing something harmful to her. In the end however she is just crazed with jealousy because she is cheating herself. She is sitting at home scheming to do bad things, and because she is, she thinks her partner must be gettin his freak on too.

In this analogy of course, cheating actually means accumulating stockpiles of weapons or violating human rights or plotting to increase your never-ending power and force your views of what is right on everybody else. We have accused the regimes we deem enemies of doing this since the dawn of the Cold War era. The soviets were our mortal enemies and were constantly plotting to get us like Boris and Natasha plotting to get 'Squirrel and moose'. Of course this proved to be silly. While their desire was equivalent to ours, their abilities were grossly over estimated to the detriment of our own international involvement.

In the last decade or so the inner-circle of the Cheney-Bush group that lead us to war in Iraq was the group looking for enemies. They were a group that traded weapons with angry Islamists in the middle east, lead death squads in Central America, gave money to fascist dictators in South America, ignored or aided brutal dictators in Africa and oh yeah, weren't exactly doing good things for the home economy or human rights. I can only conclude that they, like the jealous girlfriend, assumed that if they were doing such absurd things, someone else must be doing them too. And so the great dangerous enemy in the Middle East grew.

However as clumsily as a jealous lover, these Neo-cons did not think things threw and approach their boyfriend's infidelities with proof. Instead they accumulated as much circumstantial rushed 'evidence' as they could and tailed them to an address they found in a cryptic e-mail.

If it is not clear enough, Neo-cons looked in convenient places for intelligence reports and unreliable sources, all with the preconceived idea that Iraq had WMDs and was going to use them at any moment. In reality we were the ones whose attack was imminent.

Hopefully the American people will look at these jealous lovers with a bit more skepticism the next time they tell us their boyfriend is cheating.

Pelosi in Syria

Nancy Pelosi may or may not have made a good choice by traveling to Syria last week. One thing is for sure, she disobeyed the Bush administration by going there and speaking directly with its head of state. The Bush administration and many conservatives have lambasted her and their official stance seems to be that she overstepped the bounds of legislative power by attempting to set her own foreign policy. A similar argument is being made as we speak on the abilities of Congress to "micromanage" the war by creating stipulations for supplemental war funding.
This argument makes me smile. Only in this day and age could this administration and supporting congressional conservatives alike become angered with someone in Government for widening their power outside of norms and constitutional standards, and without a hint of Irony. This is the administration that everyday attempts to expand the power of the executive in every single sector in ways much more damaging to the American people than anything any Democrat in congress has done. They are not the ones who redefined executive power to allow torture and undetermined lengths of prison confinement without charge or oversight. They are not the ones who held all night congressional votes to allow a disgusting healthcare law literally written by greedy drug companies to pass. Republicans love to sit in there enormous glass skyscrapers and hurl 1,000 pound stones at the democrats. I just hope the Dems step up and fight back and that the media points out the flaws in the Republicans superficial criticisms. That may be however, wishful thinking.