I Might Have To Take My Shoes Off

My buddy calls me yesterday, during the game.

I don’t answer the phone.

He calls back later.

S. comes looking for me. “Can you call him back? That’s the second time he’s woken me up looking for you.”

I pretty much only talk to my parents and my brother on Sundays – years of working on the phone during the week have resulted in my designating Sunday as a day without talking on the phone unnecessarily.

I call my buddy back during a commercial. He is spitting fire as he tells me “somebody threw a shoe at the president.” My mind is elsewhere – the Atlanta Falcons had already won their game, and I was dozing off during the one-sided mismatch between the lackluster Denver Broncos and the highly motivated Carolina Panthers.

“What shoes?”

“Didn’t you hear about this? It’s got to be all over the news.”

‘Didn’t I tell you I was watching the game?”

My lack of interest in any details ratchets my buddy’s level of exasperation up. His impatience is literally dripping from his voice as he tells me “an Iraqi reporter at a press conference in Iraq threw his shoes at President Bush! Can you believe that? This shit is crazy.”

There is silence, because I am trying, while I am listening to him, to see what happened on the last play. I move to pick up my remote to rewind the action, but realize it will be a waste of time until I hang up the phone.

“So the president got hit with a shoe.”

“Man,” my buddy yelled, YOU DON”T THROW STUFF AT THE PRESIDENT! He’s the president. He’s a head of state. I’m not talking about people off the street – this guy was a member of the press!”

In the middle of a nice, quiet, relaxing Sunday afternoon, I’m supposed to be worried about George Bush? And after I think about it for a minute, I add Barack Obama to the list – I can’t worry about him all the time either.

I don’t know what triggers my response, but it is sudden and unrestrained. “WE BLEW UP THEIR ENTIRE COUNTRY AND WE EXPECT TO BE GREETED WITH OPEN ARMS? What did we liberate? I’ve been following this closer than you have, I guess.

We blow up everything. We wipe out a big chunk of their economy. We kill people by the thousands.

THEN we show up and tell them we will help them rebuild everything we just blew up. Waste a HUNDRED BILLION DOLLARS – do you hear me – A HUNDRED BILLION DOLLARS doing a half-assed job of that, and now we’re leaving. Oh yeah, and we had no business doing any of this in the first place. I’d be feeling real good about America right now if I was that reporter.”

“But it’s the PRESIDENT, man. The PRESIDENT of the United States. You just can’t do that.”

“Why not? He wasn’t in the United States. That’s their country. We don’t run shit over there.”

“Man, you’re crazy. You DO NOT do that to the president of the United States.”

Our American government plays at a kindergarten-level of diplomacy, a kind of posturing at international relations pomp and circumstance we revere as if we really mean the things we say, while we are very, very likely to be killing someone, somewhere, in secret, at this very second.

Our rhetoric speaks of spreading justice and democracy around the world when what we practice is a doctrine of control of sovereign nations and what we perpetuate is the continued existence of global inequality. If even one tenth of what has gone on in Iraq had happened here, millions of us would have choked to death by now on our own rage at the inhumanity and barbarism of our attackers.

Thank God my buddy didn’t call me back during the Dallas Cowboys-New York Giants game.

I might have had to take MY shoes off – and I wear size 15.

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Measuring The Drapes At The White House

Barack and Michelle Obama took a spin around the White House today with George and Laura Bush. I'm not usually one for photos, but man, it sure looked good just seeing these two walk through the door.

I guess John McCain was right - they were already "measuring the drapes" at the White House - along with setting up a top shelf "transition" website called change.gov, selecting a few key staffers, holding a press conference, and compiling an exhaustive list of items that could be changed immediately, by executive order, without going through Congress, in the first few days of the Obama presidency.

Not bad for the first six days as president-elect.



I'll give him a gold star if he makes it back home in time to help his daughters with their homework.

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Thinking Out Loud

Barack Obama finally has an enemy he can fight to the death.

He has had to handle Hillary Clinton and her husband with kid gloves ever since South Carolina, when they brought race to the forefront of his campaign. He has had to ignore the ghosts of Bill Clinton’s past. He has had to remember Hillary was a woman.

But now that John McCain is the target, campaigning for Obama should be lot easier - if they will ever get this thing started. Right now is like the two week hiatus leading up to the Super Bowl, when each league's champions, who have been playing their hearts out week after week, suddenly get too much time off.

When are they going to get on with it?

My best buddy and I talked on the phone Monday night about the state of the American political theater in the aftermath of Barack Obama clinching the Democratic presidential nomination. Now that we were a couple of days beyond Hillary Clinton’s last gasp since she suspended her campaign on Saturday, we could focus on the championship bout ahead between Obama and John Mccain.

The conversation rambled back and forth between Obama’s strengths and McCain’s weaknesses for awhile before the war in Iraq and the price of oil took over.

“Man,” my buddy said, “I don’t know – doesn’t look like gas is going to come back down anytime soon, does it?”

“Didn’t you tell me your retired uncle went back to work in the Pacific Rim for his old oil company?”

“Yeah – he said the money was too good.”

“Dude, the oil industry’s got incentive to drill new wells now that the price is up. I mean, think about it – the price of gas has been about the same for almost twenty years. It had to go up sometime.”

“You’ve always been an idealist!” my buddy exclaimed. “I’m telling you, man, the price is too damn high! It’s got everything going up. Food, building supplies, plane tickets – man, this thing is ruining the economy. You add this war on top of it, nuclear weapons in the Middle East, global warming – you know, I’m not sure if Obama really needs to be getting into office right now.”

As soon as that last sentence left his mouth, my mind went into overdrive. “Well, he couldn’t have picked a better time to run. McCain is the weakest candidate the Republicans have had in years.”

“You think McCain is weak?”

“Well, not – come on, we all know he’s a tough guy, but right now it’s about party politics, and McCain…McCain, he’s not the one the party wanted. Which is why he’s having trouble raising any money.”

“I guess they figure he’s probably not going to win, so why throw good money after bad? They are Republicans.”

“Makes sense.”

My buddy was rolling now, his conspiratorial bent beginning to show. “Bush and Cheney are probably packing their shit, packing and laughing all the way back to Texas.”

“Cheney’s from Wyoming.”

“Wherever the hell he’s from, they’re probably high fiving each other. No, hold up – they’re fist bumping each other! They’re probably saying ‘we’re getting out of here just in time!”

The old saying “birds of a feather flock together” is true – I am in some ways more of a conspiracy theorist than my buddy is. “Dude!” I yell. “THIS is the okie doke! They set Obama up! They put up the weakest guy they can with a straight face, then don’t give him any money.

How could McCain win with no money?

Then everything goes to hell in a hand basket – no jobs, gas $10 a gallon, Iraq is a mess, illegal immigrants coming out of the woodwork, everybody mad at Obama – then the Republicans come back with their REAL candidate in 2012 like the knight in shining armor!”

There was a few seconds of silence on the line. “Man, I think this campaign stuff has gone to your head,” my buddy said. “You need to get out more.”

“Come on, I’m just thinking out loud.”

If I was true conspiracy theorist, paranoid, fearful, suspicious of everything and everyone, I’d have to do some research on this. Although this lull in the drama that has held the nation’s attention for the past five months is a much needed break, it will be times like these when Obama’s campaign is most vulnerable to the idle minds in the public as well as the press who have overrun the devil's workshop.

Are there really two whole months to go until the party conventions?