After watching George Tenet flog his book on Meet the Press last Sunday, I worked up a fantasy scenario in my head that sort of put things right for me. For this scenario to work you have to believe or at least picture heaven and hell. I imagined all of the Iraqi war dead including all the American soldiers lined up outside hell. The war dead would be sent down from heaven at the moment of Tenet’s death to greet him as he approaches the gates of hell. Tenet would be compelled to look each of the war victims in the eyes, (that is if they have eyes left in their heads) before he is allowed to pass them by. After he looks each of the victims in the face, he will then be allowed to burn for all eternity in the fiery pits of hell for his role in starting a pre-emptive war that never needed to be fought against an impotent regime that posed no imminent threat to the United States.

In none of the interviews that I have watched has George Tenet ever mentioned the victims of the Iraq war, the blood that has been spilled as a result of his ineptitude and that is unforgivable. The fact that he will make money and thereby profit on the bodies and blood of this useless, endless, horrible, tragic war is sinful and immoral and I can not for the life of me understand how he can sleep at night or look at himself in the mirror. He must be a sociopath like OJ Simpson or Ted Bundy, able to compartmentalize his crimes and therefore justify his sins.

USA Today writes that President Bush’s choice to head the Consumer Product Safety Commission once worked as a lobbyist to block state “fire-safe” cigarette laws. Yes, you read that right folks, the man who would be in charge of looking out for your rights as a consumer once worked as head lobbyist for the National Association of Manufacturers. Michael Baroody, argued against state requirements that would help cigarettes extinguishes themselves if left unattended (if you fell asleep while smoking for example). I wonder what his main argument was against the state laws on this, perhaps that if you woke up suddenly you would want your cigarette to be lit and ready so you wouldn’t have to go to the trouble of re-lighting it in your drowsy state? You know how hard it can be to manipulate your lighter when you first wake up? It’s so much easier to have that cigarette lit and ready to go! That seems like an ideal background for a consumer advocate working for “the Man” as a lobbyist. Hmmm…wonder how big a contribution the National Association of Manufacturers and for that matter Baroody himself gave candidate George W. Bush when he was running for President? Just another example of political patronage undermining good government at the hands of this administration.

Television has deteriorated so badly that I’ve just about given up. Morning TV is at an all time low. This morning on the Today Show Meredith Viera actually asked Cameron Diaz how she became such a self-confident young woman. Hmmm…let me think, perhaps the fact that she has a perfect figure, is gorgeous, once modeled and is now a highly paid movie actress would that maybe boost your ego and self esteem? I’m thinking that might do the trick. Now, if she posed that same question to a rather unattractive, short, overweight yet supremely self-confident Jr. High School student, I would be glued to the television. Men and women are dying in Iraq and Afghanistan, Darfur and the Sudan every day, New Orleans is still struggling to rebuild itself, Kansas just suffered a devastating tornado that wiped out an entire town and the National Guard can’t adequately respond because our resources are strained by a war that won’t end and NBC’s morning show is wasting time talking to some empty headed actress? The other morning Meredith Viera wasted what seemed like 10 minutes of prime time talking to some stupid kid who posted a video on You-Tube asking people to call him on his cell phone just to talk. Who in the hell cares? I don’t. I don’t give a damn who calls this kid or why he did it or how big his cell phone bill is as a result. I just don’t. And I can’t see the relevance of the story other than the fact that if one main stream media outlet picks up a story like that they all seem to do it just because they have to copy each other. It’s such a waste of time. It’s like TV is numbing our brain so we don’t have to think about all the really important and difficult things that are wrong in the world and how badly this President and we are all handling it all or not handling it.

The only good news I can see lately is that the Republican Party really is crumbling and disintegrating. The signs are all around us. At the Republican debate the other night when all ten of those old white men refused to mention Bush’s name and the way they kept saying Reagan’s name over and over like it was some kind of mantra that would give them some mo-jo. As if. The Reagan years were a special hell for me just like the Bush years but at least in the 90’s there wasn’t a war on and there wasn’t a daily death count, Ronnie at least spared us that. He just drove up the deficit to then record amounts, until a Democratic President dug us out of that hole…now look. Everything old is new again. We’ll have a Democratic President again but oh what a mess there will be to clean up. 2008 can’t come soon enough.