“When I was a kid, we said that we were precluded from going to certain neighborhoods because of the color of our skin … Now the neighborhoods are the neighborhoods of ideas, you’re not supposed to be there because … of the color of your skin.” ~ Clarence Thomas
Well this just sucks, because I so wanted to change the world. And off the top of my head, my changes would have included:
1. No long-haul truckers would ever be allowed on the Interstate. In fact, we would do away with them and go back to rail and only short-haul trucking. Driving would then become pleasurable again, not to mention that we would be less dependent on foreign oil.
2. All attractive women with nice hooters would be required to wear low-cut tops and no-bra.
From Iraq. Well, it’s an Op-Ed piece, but based on his fantastic reporting.
It is said that generals always fight the last war. But when David Petraeus came to town it was senators – on both sides of the aisle – who battled over the Iraq war of 2004-2006. That war has little in common with the war we are fighting today.
I may well have spent more time embedded with combat units in Iraq than any other journalist alive. I have seen this war – and our part in it – at its brutal worst. And I say the transformation over the last 14 months is little short of miraculous. . . .
This leads us to the most out-of-date aspect of the Senate debate: the argument about the pace of troop withdrawals. Precisely because we have made so much political progress in the past year, rather than talking about force reduction, Congress should be figuring ways and means to increase troop levels. For all our successes, we still do not have enough troops. This makes the fight longer and more lethal for the troops who are fighting. To give one example, I just returned this week from Nineveh province, where I have spent probably eight months between 2005 to 2008, and it is clear that we remain stretched very thin from the Syrian border and through Mosul. Vast swaths of Nineveh are patrolled mostly by occasional overflights.
We know now that we can pull off a successful counterinsurgency in Iraq. We know that we are working with an increasingly willing citizenry. But counterinsurgency, like community policing, requires lots of boots on the ground. You can’t do it from inside a jet or a tank.
2. The good Reverend Wright, Obama’s spiritual advisor for 20 years, was originally a Muslim?
After many lectures like this, Obama decided to take a second look at Wright’s church. Older pastors warned him that Trinity was for “Buppies”–black urban professionals–and didn’t have enough street cred. But Wright was a former Muslim and black nationalist who had studied at Howard and Chicago, and Trinity’s guiding principles–what the church calls the “Black Value System”–included a “Disavowal of the Pursuit of ‘Middleclassness.’”
3. I found this site called Mom Logic which describes itself as a site for “thinking moms who don’t have time to think.” Nothing special that I haven’t seen on a dozen other mommy blogs out there, but I did find this “guess which celebrity mom is wearing that shoe” game a little weird. Who knew moms harbored “foot in show” fetishes?
4. Katie Couric is leaving CBS News early? I never watched her. Along with a lot of other people I hear.
I’m not a very good Catholic. It’s not something I am proud of, but at the same time it’s not something that bothers me very much. I guess that even after all these years I am still trying to figure things out in this regard. I can’t explain it any better than that, so for the moment you are just going to have to be satisfied with that explanation. If you care at all, which you probably don’t.
Anyway, while I am not a very good Catholic, I do appreciate and respect those who are. There are some good “Catholic” blogs out there that I read now and again and when I do I always leave them better educated, more enlightened, and very entertained.
The Anchoress is one of those good Catholic blogs written by someone who is a very good Catholic. She’s also a very good writer. Extraordinarily good, really.
I haven’t been reading her long so I missed this wonderful essay about the funeral of John Paul II when she first posted it, but she is so enlightening as to the Catholic faith and so entertaining in the way she tells it, that I thought I would link to it so you could enjoy it too.
Check it out.
UPDATE:
See, this is the kind of bad Catholic I am. This cracks me up.
