An Inconvenient Truth

We finally managed to rent Al Gore's marvelous piece on global warming (things come very slowly to Bonners Ferry). I didn't think much of the cartoon characters, and I also thought his personal experiences with tobacco were more or less irrelevant, but all in all I think it was a great movie, well done, convincing, frightening, intelligent and I hope motivating. There is no doubt we have a serious problem, never mind what big oil and others want you to believe. Compare Gore's presentation of global warming with Bush's reading of My Pet Goat and you will have a good idea of what we missed when we let the Supreme Court steal the election from Gore (speaking of a day of infamy). Can you imagine how different things would be if Gore had actually been given the Presidency which he rightfully won? It makes me sick just thinking about it.

Gwyneth Paltrow (I think that is her name), a kind of silly movie star, made some rather silly statements about preferring to live in England rather than the U.S. I gather she likes the life style better and feels more comfortable there (which obviously is her opinion and her business). I guess among other things she suggested the English are more intelligent and talk about interesting things instead of just money. Person to person I doubt the English are more intelligent, but I bet they are better informed about world affairs and probably in general are much better conversationalists. What I found the most amusing about this non-tempest in a non-teapot was the response of some of the American news people. Man! You might have thought she dropped an atomic bomb on MSNBC! How dare she criticize the U.S. (where she has made so much money). They virtually accused her of treason or even worse. It was an overreaction the likes of which I have never seen before. You might have thought she was the Queen of England calling us all barbarian cowboys (which, of course, is pretty much what the English probably do think of us). How our MSM can take an absolutely petty, trivial, unimportant comment by such a really unimportant person and turn it into a media frenzy is beyond my comprehension. But it was amusing.

How is it that everyone keeps talking about troop withdrawals, training Iraqi forces, turning over responsibilities to Iraqis, getting out of Iraq either sooner or later, leaving them with a viable democracy, and blah ba blah ba blah, but no one seems to comment on the permanent bases we are building there? Somewhere I saw the other day that we currently have 55 different bases in Iraq which are to be consolidated into seven. This is in addition to the Vatican sized Embassy we are constructing at a cost of over half a billion dollars. Do we really intend to vacate these bases and allow the Iraqis to turn them into Boy Scout camps or Universities? I don't think so. As I have said repeatedly I do not believe the Bush/Cheney administration has had, or has ever had, any intention whatsoever of pulling our troops out of that unfortunate country, not as long as one drop of oil remains. Why is this never mentioned? Or if it is mentioned it is always denied? Do you really think the Democrats are going to insist that we give up our military presence in Iraq? Both Republicans and Democrats keep insisting that we will stay until Iraq can manage its own affairs which obviously is going to be never, at least never in a form that will suit our interests. As in the case of Vietnam we are going to have to be driven out, almost certainly an inevitability.

Various people keep asking, "Is George W. Bush the worst president ever?" Why do they even bother to ask?

It appears more and more likely that Hillary is going to run (as a faux Democrat). If she were to win do you think the President's husband would have any influence over the ship of state? Or would he just arrange dinners and Christmas trees and stuff? Oh, please.

Once when Winston Churchill was attending a meeting his secretary noticed his fly was open and sent him a note to that effect. Winston sent it back, saying, "not to worry, dead birds don't fall out of the nest." We are all going to be dead birds in our nests unless we come to our senses and demand our leaders do the right things by our planet, now rather than later.