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Sunday, January 31. 2010
Ghosts and the President
Wright-Patterson Air Force Base is haunted. Saw it on Ghost Hunters Wednesday Night. Why in the world could the Air Force allow the TAPS crew to sneak on base? Actually, TAPS was invited by the Air Force and received clearance from the Pentagon to do an investigation.The episode was all right, but I was hoping the investigators would stumble upon the bodies of deceased aliens. That’s the trouble with expectations; life rarely ever lives up to them.
My nephew Dan and I once got into a MySpace discussion about something, the subject of which was soon forgotten as we veered off into whatever tangents came along and believe me, Dan and I can spur each other’s tangents!
Dan, from what I recall (I don’t feel like looking it up), has no expectations for anything, writing that if things weren’t great he wouldn’t be upset and if things were going good he could choose to be happy about it. Dan appears to be a bit of a nihilist existentialist. He might disagree with that, but if he is a nihilist Dan has no expectations of my opinions of him so he wouldn’t care or react.
I’ll make sure Young Dan reads this so he can correct me in case I’m wrong about him. Maybe he’ll write a reply, which would be good. When Dan disagrees with me he does it so cogently and with such erudite precision, it is not only a good read, it makes me think, “huh … he might be right.”
Of course I would never tell him that, to let him know he was right about something and possibly smarter than me. Nirvana forbid.
Here’s a brief aside, a tangent if you will. Since about 1989 I’ve felt a need to explain that the Nirvana mentioned above is not the Seattle rock band. In fact, my use of it isn’t even correct if one wants to refer to its spiritual origin (Absolute Truth). But I’ll keep it there anyway!
Actually, it’s probably very appropriate.
So, back to Ghost Hunters. I was hoping, and am always hoping, to see a ghost show up on the cameras. Not just the infrared thermal imaging cameras, but one of those night-vision equipped cameras. A real ghost smiling for the cameras. Hasn’t happened in all the episodes I’ve seen.Sure, they’ve had unexplained visages on those thermal imaging cameras, and I’ve thought, “Huh, could be a ghost!”
And they’ve had disembodied voices replying to questions asked by the investigators or telling the investigators, in shades of The Amityville Horror, “Get Out!” Now that can scare the crap out of someone, me at least. I’ve read the book and saw the original movie twice!
But, so far, no ghost smiling for the camera. Why is that? Are shameless self-promoters and media hounds forbidden from becoming ghosts? I’d like to come back as a ghost, smile for the ghost hunter cameras and play some insane pranks on people, you know, tickle someone’s toes, tap them on the shoulder. I’d be a great ghost. Casper, but with a naughtier attitude!So, the real deal here was going to be about President Obama’s first State of the Union Address. Wednesday Nights are usually spent watching three hours of Ghost Hunters, hoping one day to see the smiling face of a ghost show up on one of their cameras.
But, because of President Obama’s speech, I had to miss the first hour of Ghost Hunters. The president knows how to give a speech and this one was great. Of course all the Republican naysayers disagree. Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor who can’t seem to use nine-eleven often enough to promote his agenda, even got on FOX and claimed the president never addressed national security.
Actually, the president spent more than ten minutes talking about it and referenced it about a dozen other times during his speech. Gotta wonder if Giuliani actually watched the speech.
The Republicans in the joint chamber of the Capitol never applauded and John Boehner, the house minority leader, looked absolutely on the verge of rage. Eric Cantor, the little congressman (and Republican Whip) from Virginia, looked dumbfounded as usual. One of these days he’ll lose that deer-in-the-headlights look.
In his first year as president I’d say Barack Obama has proven to be a bit of a wimp. He had a huge majority in Congress, sky-high approval ratings with the American public and he didn’t get health care done. Obama wanted to be the nice guy and try to improve the political atmosphere in Washington. It didn’t work. The Republicans signaled from the beginning they were not going to play along.
While President Obama tried to create a political scene of bipartisanship, the Republicans were taking out all the stops to discredit and smear him. And their tactics, played out primarily by the teabaggers, worked. To this day these nutcases call Obama both a Socialist and a Nazi! Boggles the fuckin’ mind but not one TV pundit has pointed out the absurdity of it. The teabaggers insist Obama is a Socialist and a Nazi because the name of Hitler’s political party was the National Socialist Workers Party.
They of course don’t mention that Hitler’s internal enemies, other than Jews, were capitalists, liberals, communists and socialists. One just needs to read anything Hitler wrote or the text of just about any speech and figure out neither Hitler nor his party were socialists.
Americans, many of us, sadly, choose to remain ignorant for expediency. Why get the facts when the jingoism and sound bites sound so appealing. Then there are the racist attacks on the president, none of which have been refuted by Republicans. President Obama had the high ground.
Barack Obama should have used his bully pulpit to bully health care reform through Congress — with the public option. Obama had more political capital than any president since Ronald Reagan and he squandered it.
Playing nice sounds like a great idea, but if the other side doesn’t want to play then it’s time to kick’em in the balls and let’em know who rules the roost.
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