Salutations. Apologies for the wait.
Sometimes, the spirit just doesn't move you to write, even when there's such delicious things to write about. Like the Republican debacle ... er ... debate a few days back, in which all 10 candidates invoked Saint Reagan and Brownback, Huckabee and Tancredo all claimed that they don't believe in evolution.
I really don't understand the hagiography around Reagan. The Reagan Myth nicely illustrates what a horrific turd of a presidency the Reagan administration was. Note the 110 comments after Cherie Miner's piece, many of them adding to Miner's littany of Reagan's misdeeds. But in the end, I guess you can't blame the GOP candidates for comparing themselves to him. What other relatively recent GOP president can they idolize? Nixon? Poppy, the one-termer? Our current Caligula? Clearly, Reagan's the only option. And in a way, even I can agree with it. After all, when Reagan made the mistake of getting us involved in a protracted civil war in the Middle East and got a bunch of Marines killed, he did the smart thing and brought the troops home. But that's neither here nor there, ace, and it hardly makes up for the Rape of the American Dream that is the Reagan legacy.
Hey, speaking of GOP idiocy, remember back in the 1990s when the Republican Congress shit a brick over the Clintons having top fundraisers over to the White House for state functions? Apparently, that's no longer a big deal.
But the best bit about the Queen's visit had to be when the president flubbed his mentioning of the Her Majesty's last visit, accidentally saying "1776" before quickly correcting himself with "1976." He then actually winked at the Queen. Check it out:
And, her "we are not amused" reaction:
Odd that the cable news so breathlessly reported Mickey Rooney's faux pas in kissing the Queen's hand, but failed to mention the wink. In their defense, though, they certainly didn't let Bush's remark go by unnoticed. And actually, it was a pretty funny moment, whether or not the Crowned One agreed.
Of course, the other big news right now is the F-5 tornado out in Kansas. Hellacious. I was living out in Missouri when the town I was in got hit by a much smaller twister, and even that was no fun. The freight train noise, the easy splintering of thick trees, the sheer randomness of the destruction — everything you see those horrified tornadoo survivors talking about on the news — is all true.
Kansas' governor, Democrat Kathleen Sebelius (seriously, Kansas has a Democratic governor. She's pretty popular too.), complained that clean-up was going to be difficult, since the National Guard was mostly over in Iraq, and that further disasters would be, well, disastrous because of that. Out in Washington, Tony Snow snarked, "If you don't request it, you're not going to get it."
Lovely. Except, of course, that Governor Sebelius had mentioned the shortages to the president last year when he visited Topeka. It's business as usual in D. C. The old adage apocryphally attributed to Lenin says it best, "A lie told often enough becomes the truth."