What could be more boring than hearing yet another pundit tell us that something is wrong? It's summer still. The young folks are either trying to get the last laugh out of August, or they're already in "back-to-school" clothes. The parents are trying to squeeze in one more family vacation before Labor Day, and businesses are hoping that "back-to-school" will mean back in the black.
Yet the folks in Washington seem oblivious of vacation time. Even our president has been "working" on his vacation (whatever that means to him...) and his latest press conference probably did nothing more than to show that when the president speaks, people still listen - even if we all know that nothing of value will emanate from his mouth.
The end of summer is not supposed to be a cynical time, is it? It's usually more of a wistful time when we think about all the plans we had before summer that were going to somehow get accomplished during summer that we now see are still incomplete and unfulfilled dreams as summer begins to melt away. Perhaps the leadership in Washington is feeling a little wistful about what
they haven't accomplished.
President Bush mentioned the goals and dreams of the Iraqi people as the goal of our strategy in Iraq. Perhaps for him, accomplishing goals and dreams for people outside this country is a way of preventing the accomplishment of goals and dreams within our own borders...do it over there so it doesn't happen over here, just like fighting terrorism abroad?
But cynicism is rampant in our little home world these days. The great nation of the United States of America is spending itself into bankruptcy to "stay the course" in a region of the world that has not benefited by our presence. While spending ourselves into bankruptcy, and mortgaging our future, the rest of the world looks on with general smirking, hoping for the fall they see ahead for us, or with looks of alarm, worrying that nobody else will come forward to assume the burden once carried easily by this leading nation of the Free World.
And our leaders point fingers at others, claiming they are the ones causing the problems, and, furthermore, we're not going to deal with them until they stop causing problems. Our pundits on both sides of an issue point to the other side as the problem, trying to score points in a nonsensical game of one-upsmanship, while never actually addressing the reasons why a particular issue can have more than one side validly.
So, summer doldrums in which we activate our comatose minds with so-called "summer reading" blockbusters that spell out crazy scenarios ad infinitum are now relying on the real thing. It's as if the scriptwriters in Washington are simply playing out their secret novelist ambitions with real characters in real situations, and we're going along with them.
Okay, I guess my summer doldrums have turned into real cynicism, too. But it's not my fault - they started it. Are we there yet? Do I have to sit by him?! I forgot my bathing suit. You left the bathtub running, didn't you? Did you lock the front door? What do you mean "no liquids"?!
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