It is raining and has been for nearly 24 hours. It is the kind of rain that just keeps coming down. No wind, no thunder, no lightening; just rain.
The gloom around me mirrors my state of mind. It would be better, today, if I weren't such a news junkie, because then I wouldn't have listened to the President's speech and the subsequent commentary last night, nor would I have watched the morning news. But listen and watch I did.
The President is in such a terrible predicament. He is damned if he does and damned if he doesn't. In order to lay out his Afghanistan initiative, he had to remind us that the people who flew into our buildings and killed 3,000 people had been dispatched from that far away country.
That reminder had the desired effect on me as I sat and tried to actually visualize how many people that really is. It made me angry all over again. We have to do whatever is necessary to prevent such a thing from happening again. We must.
But we have been trying to do that for 8 years straight! We have taken some wrong turns, made some questionable detours into Iraq and under-sourced the Afghanistan forces. The Taliban is stronger than ever and the perpetrators of 9/11 are probably not even in that country anymore. And now we have to deal with Pakistan and the terrorist-haven it has become. So now we have to send reinforcements in to finally get the job done. We must.
But wait a minute. At $1M per troop per year, those 30,000 additional soldiers are not going to pay their own way. How do we pay for this surge? We need money that we don't have to pay for healthcare reform and unemployment benefits and stimulus programs. Where are we going to get MORE money that we don't have? And even if we do what we have been doing to solve all our other enormous problems -- charge it -- who's to say that any of it will actually work? Many have tried and many have failed.
So I woke up this morning feeling the proverbial weight of the world on my aging shoulders and turned on the news. OMG! Now the last hero of our modern world, the icon of golf, the epitome of professionalism and wholesome family values, the pride of Asians and African Americans and all minorities, has fallen on his ass. Another woman -- one with about as much class as the spikes on his work shoes -- has taken him down. What is wrong with these men!? The history of the world is littered with powerful and important men being toppled by their own testosterone. Is it really that overwhelming, that irresistible?
The final light went out of my day when I read my own son's Facebook update and he took a shot at the woman for keeping all those text messages and voicemails in order to set up "another icon." He was probably thinking of Mike Tyson or Kobe Bryant or...
No mention of being disappointed in Tiger's lack of marital integrity or even in his obvious poor choice in paramours. Nope. Once again, blame the harlot, blame the media, blame El Nino, blame anybody or anything but Tiger.
I think I'll go to bed.
Sleep tight!
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