I couldn’t help noticing that the Jan 2012 Good Housekeeping cover reminded me of this scene from Total Recall. It’s wrong but I couldn’t stop myself. A little contrast adjustment and …
TWO WEEKS
For those who haven’t seen Total Recall:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXEK4XqL5rw#t=52s
(Embedding disabled for some reason.)
http://youtu.be/m8sifpUxFwQ
I don’t remember exactly where I saw it, but I recently saw a clip of someone complaining about the wasteful spending of the US government, where one of the examples of waste was how we we are going to waste money restoring the Statue of Liberty. And I’m thinking to myself “yeah, what do we need that thing for…wait a minute, did you just say the Statue of Liberty?”
The Statue of Liberty! Sure, it’s just a huge bronze statue, and it’s technically wasteful to spend money restoring it when we could just… not restore it. But come on, The Statue of Liberty is like–it’s like the hood ornament on the United States of America, which I guess would make New York the hood. Which seems kind of appropriate. But anyway… We have to keep that thing in good condition. Have you ever seen a car where someone has ripped off the hood ornament, and where the owner never bothered to replace it? It looks trashy! You expect a car like that to be rusting out and have bald tires too. Even if it’s a nice car, your imagination adds rust and dirty oil when that hood ornament is missing, with the special plastic hole where it used to be, and the spring safety tension release wire inside… if you’re old enough to have seen a hood ornament you know what I’m talking about.
While “beater car” might be a fairly decent analogy for the current state of financial affairs here in the US, the least we can do is have some pride and basic maintenance. Or maybe we just don’t like that she came from France and welcomes foreigners? Maybe.
So we elected Obama, and it’s turning out even for his most ardent supporters to be a bit of a disappointment. I’ll admit, I voted for him, even though I figured his message of “Hope” was way, way too broad to really be true. Hey, he promised us Hope, and that’s exactly what he gave us, much to the evident glee of those who hate him.
But there is a bright side! You see, it’s OK for everyone to hate Obama, left wing liberals and hardcore conservatives alike. And now Obama is doing some very bad things, or rather, tacitly making permanent some very bad temporary things done by previous administrations. He now officially approves of torture, indefinite imprisonment of Americans without due process, warrantless wiretapping… that bastard! But think, if we had a Republican president, all of these would be acceptable to some people. Don’t agree? Well, you’re wrong. All of these were started under the Bush administration.
When our good old friend W. thought it was OK to detain Americans without due process, that was OK. Now that Obama has signed it into law with the approval of both houses of Congress, suddenly it’s an offense against all that is decent.
When W’s administration started recording Americans’ conversations willy nilly, it was all we could do to get someone to investigate it. What was the first thing Obama did? Officially let the phone companies off the hook. [no pun intended. hey that’s kinda funny.]
We don’t even *talk* about torture these days. That’s apparently acceptable to everyone.
I should probably wrap this up in a nice summary here, and recap my point: it’s a good thing we elected a black Democrat because now conservatives are permitted to object to gross violations of fundamental American values by our own government. But I’m just getting too angry to think so I’ll just go now.
Be here 
now