I’ve been very much out of it since Tuesday morning, when I woke up to a fever, chills, a blistering headache and exhaustion. It was so bad that I wasn’t able to sit up long enough to email my boss until nearly 1 p.m. Yesterday was better, though I couldn’t do much more than lie on the couch.
I’m trying to get back into my writing groove this morning, but it’s not going well. I have a lot of opinions about things I’ve seen on the news, but I don’t have the energy to construct my arguments with the appropriate rigor.
So I’ll just make a few quick observations and then engage myself in an attempt to get some paying work done.
Mood music:
[spotify:track:2R1HDqY6bSdb7G5mYbcItD]
- David Petraeus’ extramarital affair. The headlines are full of this one. The former CIA director and revered general made the mistake many powerful people make when too many people tell them their poop doesn’t stink: He cheated on his wife. I feel badly for his family and hope they can move forward. I hope people don’t forget the good he did in breaking the Iraqi insurgency so that we could end the war. I also hope my more conservative friends stop subscribing to the bullshit notion that the timing of his resignation was meant to scuttle his testimony regarding the September 11 attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya. People are trying too hard to find a conspiracy where none exists.
- Glenn Beck’s “God really sucks” statement. Conservative commentator Glenn Beck reacted to Obama’s re-election with this incoherent statement:
Man, sometimes God really sucks. I got up yesterday at 3:00 in the morning and I knew. And I couldn’t sleep and I started to say my prayers and I got up and kneeled down by the edge of my bed and I knew that — or I suspected that my mind’s not God’s mind, and the peace and the comfort that he had given me and so many of my friends was not about an election. God’s about a bigger picture than an election or a candidate. God is about the freedom of mankind. God is about the Constitution, which is a divinely inspired.
I agree that God is bigger than an election or a candidate, that He’s about freedom of mankind. But Beck says that after questioning God’s will. I’ve despised his whiny tirades ever since his show on CNN Headline News. I’d be happier if he’d just go away now.
- Secession petitions now filed for all 50 states. North Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas and Florida each had more than 25,000 signatures for secession from the union, the threshold needed to trigger an official response from the Obama administration. A lot of people are calling this a movement. It’s not. What you’re seeing is a stunt that repeats itself every four to eight years, especially when a lot of people are unhappy with a presidential election result. Move along, now. There’s nothing to see here.
I sometimes imagine the conversations I’d be having with my friend Sean Marley over this stuff had he not passed on 16 years ago.
Chances are that he’d disagree with everything I just wrote here. He always loved a good conspiracy theory, especially those that fit his libertarian ideals. I miss those arguments. Sometimes.
