In the middle of last week, the National Association of Professional Pundits was in a projectile sweat about the lack of military success in Afghanistan. They were, for example, heavily engaged in having a good horse laugh over the Northern Alliance troops traveling on horseback.
Thursday night, President Bush reminded the country why we were in this thing; how many of us are already involved (including a standing "O" for America's postal workers); what the rest of us can do to GET involved; and what it is going to take to be successful.
Friday, word came that the Northern Alliance was, in fact, having great success and had taken the city of Omar Sharif (having advanced, apparently, from the mountains above Maria Ouspenskaya).
By Sunday, the pundits had done a complete one-eighty and was in Full Consternation Mode about why President Bush had suggested, on Saturday, that the Northern Alliance should not try to take control of Kabul.
In a five-day span the buzz went from "We aren't we winning the war?" to "We're winning, why are we holding back?"
Tough crowd to please.
Going back to President Bush's speech for a moment, you already know that it was ignored by all the broadcast networks except ABC. PBS, which is supposed to put the public interest ahead of petty programming considerations also decided not to carry the speech.
Here in Washington, DC a case could have been made there might be some degree of viewer curiosity surrounding a major speech; by a sitting President; before a live audience of thousands of people; during a war. WETA ran, instead, a riveting episode of ... Antiques Roadshow.
I don't care if PBS runs 18 hours-a-day of the original "Riverdance" (the first one, not those sequels "Lord of the Prancer", "Lord of the Dancer" and "Vixen") during its next membership drive, you should never give them another dime.
NPR is still OK, though.
The Great Apologizer, Bill Clinton, was busy last week, as well. On Wednesday night he told an audience at Georgetown University, according to Joseph Curl's reporting in the Washington Times, that "the nation is 'paying a price today' for its past of slavery and for looking 'the other way when a significant number of native Americans were dispossessed and killed.'"
Thus, a former President of the United States made the same moral equivalency argument which caused New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani to - properly - return that check to the Saudi Prince.
The pundits did not find Clinton's remarks sufficiently abhorrent to chatter about. Maybe they just don't care what Clinton says any more. Maybe we can return Bill Clinton to the Saudi Prince.
On Friday, Clinton voluntarily turned in his license to practice law before the Supreme Court of the United States. In the aftermath of Clinton's losing his right to practice law in Arkansas for five years and paying a $25,000 fine for having lied under oath, the Supreme Court would have likely have sent a guy around to pick Clinton's license up anyway.
That suspension and fine, remember, was part of the non-plea bargain plea bargain which was just one of Clinton's last-days-in-office activities about which we also once cared.
A GREAT Secret Decoder Ring today. Pictures. Links. Explanations. And a really sweet Catchy Caption of the day.
A note about Veterans Day. The Mullings suggestion du jour is this: The Defense Department should invite civilians to send in their e-mail addresses. The Pentagon should do a blind match with e-mail addresses of service members around the world, and tell us who we got. Then, as we approach the holiday season, young service men and service women can have a pen pal - an e-mail ally - in the States.
Armistice Day, which got its name by Congressional resolution in 1921 and became a federal holiday in 1938, celebrated the end of World War I. In 1954, a proclamation by President Eisenhower - who had some standing to do this - officially changed the name to Veterans Day in honor of all who have served.
As previously noted here, the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1919 was not, at the time, known as the end of "World War I," but the end of "The Great War."
In 1919 we didn't know we were going to have to number our World Wars.
On the other hand, numbering them is probably better than calling them "Great."
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