Current Affairs

I don't want to excuse Pat Robertson's bonehead remarks, but does anybody remember there being a media firestorm when this former Clinton aide wrote a Newsweek article calling for the assassination of Saddam Hussein?

The name of Casey Sheehan has been invoked by so many people for their own reasons that it seems only fair that we at least know who he was. (Be sure to follow the links within the article, too.) I would have loved to have known the young man. I wonder how many of Cindy Sheehan's hangers-on really admire such a committed soldier, not a child who was stolen from his mother, but a rational adult who knew exactly what he was doing and why.

The top three in Fort Wayne radio these days: 1. Oldies rock, 2. Country, 3. Talk, which is a change (hat tip to Nathan, whose noticing of it called my attention to it). But talk fatigue isn't just happening here. This is the one year in four in Indiana in which we have no elections at any level, and people are probably taking a needed break from politics.

Mitch makes a good point about the dangers of declaring war on abstract concepts (see original post and his comments here). I'd certainly agree when it comes to trying to right wrongs that are more or less part of the human condition. Neither poverty nor hunger, for example, are likely to ever be "defeated," no matter how many villains we think we've found.

Apparently we want much more gossip and much less real information. That's one way to look at the drop in circulation of magazines like Time and Newsweek and the surging sales of People. But another is that people are continuing to abandon filtered news -- processed and presented by gatekeepers -- in favor of finding their own on the Web. Since gossip is by nature fluff that doesn't matter and doesn't have to be true, there is really noting to "filter."

Let's be honest now. Cindy Sheehan was never just "a mom in a chair waiting for George Bush." Yes, we should sympathize with the mother who lost her son in a war, but once she decided to make a public spectacle of her grief, she put that grief into the service of other agendas.

I was a crossing guard in junior high school, because it got me out of some classes a few minutes early. I tried not to let the power go to my head, but a lot of my fellow guards were petty tyrants. So were most of the hall monitors. Hassling their classmates ("You're not allowed to be here. Where's your pass?") while basking in the reflected glow of real power was about as good as it got for them. I think a lot of them must have ended up in airports.

With the 60th anniversary of Fat Man and Little Boy here, it's only natural to see comparisons of World War II and the war on terror. This essay on Hiroshima is one of the most thoughtful, insightful and troubling.

Ouch, this hurts: "The evening news, a tradition born at a time when evening newspapers were important, has one of television's oldest audiences."

President Bush has asserted himself over the gobbledygook-pushing bureaucrats in the administration who have been trying to change the name of the War on Terror to the Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism.