Things I Don't Understand, Part 3

It has been a while since I wrote about things I don’t understand, and since I had the chance to read an old, long-forgotten Lewis Grizzard book, I thought it would be a good time to write Volume 3.

Our Fascination with Celebrity White Trash.  Yahoo! Entertainment News has ten (TEN!!!!) links to stories detailing the Britney Spears – Kevin Federline divorce.  Shit.  Eleven. There is an entire section of Yahoo! Entertainment News devoted to FULL COVERAGE: BRITNEY SPEARS.  I will not link to that page unless they link back to mine.  I wasn’t able to find a single story online today about the failure of a proposition which would have placed limits on Eminent Domain in California, but Britney is everywhere.  And just to show you how fickle the American Public is…I was also unable to find any stories about the upcoming TomKat nuptials. Mmmmmmaybe the whole Britney Divorce Cataclysm ain’t such a bad thing.

The Marine.  Who the hell green-lighted this little gem of a movie?  Oh, wait.  It’s produced by Vince McMahon.  Never mind.  (Side note: As a screenwriter, I hesitated to ask “who the hell”, and had edited out “the hell”, in case I should ever find myself pitching to that producer and he or she didn’t have much of a sense of humor.  I put it back in because it’s not likely that I will ever pitch to Vince McMahon.  Ever.)

Why We Aren’t Out Of Iraq Yet.  I mean, shit, the Democrats won the mid-term election on a platform of “End Bush’s War NOW!” and they’ve had control of Congress for oh, 25 hours as I’m writing this.  Why are we still fighting in Iraq?  I’m opposed to the war in Iraq, too, but it’s not that simple, is it?  Announce that the troops will be home by 1 November 2007, and you’re almost guaranteed to get 2,800 more of them killed before it’s over.  They’ll be lame ducks in the extreme sense of the word, unable to achieve anything more lasting than a desert tire track.  I have a suggestion for getting them home safely and quickly: without any advance notice, have the troops simply bug out for Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, all at once, and as fast as they can go.  It took what, five days to get to Baghdad from Saudi and Kuwait in 2003?  And that was when they were going towards the people shooting at them.  I bet they can get the hell out of Iraq in two days, three at the most, without getting anybody killed at all.  We should probably tell our folks to leave behind the hammers and saws and paint brushes they were using, though, because the Iranians are going to need that stuff to finish rebuilding where we left off.