The Rant

Every time I look up, I shake my head so much I feel like a tennis ball. I just finished watching a show on my newest addiction — Link TV, the independent television network out of San Francisco that might be even more knee-jerk liberal than I am, albeit much more serious. The network aired the recent Australian news story about phase II of the Abu Ghraib prison debacle, showing a whole new set of photographs and videos that are much more disturbing than the first set.
I’m sure some kind of beam went straight from my television to the FBI, and unless I have just missed it, the major American broadcast news media have made little mention of this. Imagine that. It showed some horrific — really horrific — images of prisoners not only tortured and bloodied and shot and hooded and forced to masturbate in front of chuckling U.S. soldiers, it also showed some who had been killed. Of course, when I flipped to one of the major networks to find out if they were reporting on it, the main story was whether or not people would be able to continue living their lives here if they lose their Blackberry personal digital assistants. Imagine that. Then — THEN — I read one tiny paragraph buried in a newspaper in which the Pillsbury Dough Boy, er, Scott McLellan, made a statement about the Dubai Ports World deal, letting us all sleep better at night by reminding us that Bush didn’t make the decision to let the firm control our major ports but instead learned about it from the news (!!!). Now, bear with me, because I’m a little late in the game catching up on all of this, but am I missing something here? Someone walk me through this, because I’m not the brightest bulb on the tree sometimes and I’m much more focused on the man who duked it out with police in Little Rock the other day after he tried to steal a sheep from the zoo and was walking around with it in a big can. So is this true? A company owned by the government of the United Arab Emirates is going to run the ports in six of our major cities, including New York City, in the midst of the worst West/Middle East relations in history, and the president of the United States found out about it on the news? Forget whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing to hire them. Worry more about what else might be going down that he might not know about. Let’s see. The terrorists in the Middle East despise our allies there and they just tried to blow up the largest oil plant in Saudi Arabia, but it’s okay to have our Middle Eastern allies come control our already far-too-vulnerable ports? This is a bit like rebuilding the World Trade Center towers and placing a bull’s eye on every side and a billboard that reads, “HERE WE ARE!” I’m in no way anti-Arab or anti-Muslim or anything like that, and I still say if everybody involved in this culture clash would just drop a few hits of ecstasy, ALL of this shit would end. But it seems to me that somebody here isn’t quite playing with a full deck. But that’s just my opinion. And the fact that Bush found out about this, uh, fairly important matter from news reports after it was a done deal is almost unbelievable. Oh. Right. What am I saying? It’s totally believable. Well, except for that little matter about him not reading newspapers. But I’m tired of writing about him. I’ve been trying not to let him take up that much space in my thoughts and I’ve been doing pretty well. So on to bigger and better things. I just read that someone spent a lot of money on a study to see if black people are more afraid of bird flu than white people. How someone can make the bird flu a racial issue is something that’s going to take a lot of time and thought to figure out.