Happy New Year. Hand Over Your Wallet.
By Mitch Berg
Every time the Strib’s New Years’ editorial makes a muted plea for a monolithic socialist state or a vacuous apology for the vapid left, an angel will lose its wings and fall to earth.
As we say farewell to 2007 and hello to 2008, it’s appropriate that we take a moment to reflect on events of the past year. That a single circuit around the sun could have brought so many welcome developments would have seemed incredible a year ago. Remember the sadness of that season? The deaths, in cruelly quick succession, of Frank Stanton and Gerald Ford? The prospect of a winter with virtually no snow? The Iraq Study Group had found almost no reason for optimism in the war; polar bears were endangered; Israel was proposing a new settlement in the West Bank; James Brown was dead.
Into that void of hope strode 2007. How quickly things changed!
No one could have foreseen the sudden surrender of Osama bin Laden. His dramatic arrival at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, with his hands up and his BlackBerry at his feet, turned the tide of what we used to call the “war on terror” [“aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagh”] and certainly earned him his recent designation as Time’s Person of the Year (albeit deceased). The rapid unraveling of the Iraq insurgency, and the speedy consolidation of power by Iraq’s first female president [“Someone grab my harp!!!”] , combined to form a miracle: a truly democratic, progressive [“Heeeeeeeeeeeeeeelp”] government, and a year in which the dwindling U.S. force — now down to 150 — suffered not a single casualty.
Likewise, the 2006 Christmas sales numbers for Al Gore’s film, “An Inconvenient Truth,” [“Pull thy ripcord, Jeremiah!”] shocked Detroit, the energy companies and Washington into an unprecedented effort to fight global warming [“I’m going in! I’m going in!”] . President Bush’s now-famous shirtsleeves stroll down Pennsylvania Avenue [“A Jimmy Carter reference…hey, where the hell are my wings?”] before delivering his State of the Union address last January showed that he finally understood the nature of the threat [“Hang on! It’s going to be a bumpy landing!”] . And while the arctic summer ice has yet to recover, the federal initiative to outfit polar bears with FEMA pontoon boats offered a temporary fix and won world admiration.
Of course, some problems remain. The refugees who fled North Korea after Kim Jong-il’s suicide still need meaningful work [“Assuming the position!”] . Fidel Castro’s renunciation of communism has created a troublesome brain drain in Miami as Cuban-Americans pull up stakes and move back home [“Did he just write the communism will recify its own excesseswhoooooaaaaaaaaaaaah!“] . And the passage of national universal health care threatens to extend the average U.S. lifespan and put more pressure on the Social Security system [“This place is so crowded from all those British cancer patients who died on the waiting liwhoaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!“] .
Even so, a country that can make college free for any student with a 2.5 grade point average or better can do just about anything [“Did they just devalue college, and at the same time raise the demand curve to the point that no person can afford a higher education without government assistance, all the while utterly socially devaluing all non-college-track vocationsaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagh!“] . We’re proud to live in a country that, in a single year, brought peace to Sudan and Somalia [“Isn’t that a conservative value…hey, I still have my wings…”] , gave free HIV medications to anyone on the globe who needed them, made abortion permanently legal but completely unnecessary [“ISn’t that a complete logical inversion, making a good free and ubiquitous but then assuming that people will have the infinite common sense not to use is Heeeeeeeeeeeeey, wheeeeere did my wiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiings gooooooooooo…“] , and established a national endowment to prevent domestic abuse [“Oh, take my fecking wings. The notion that you can spend money to prevent something like domestic abuse – something we don’t even entirely understand – is just too stupid to think about. I’m walking home”] .
And of course, the Twins’ victory in the 2007 World Series speaks for itself. [“Welcome to the Metrodome. No, I have no wings. Just a pitchfork”]
January 4th, 2007 at 8:21 am
Unglaublich ist, daß jemand zahlend erhält, diese Scheiße zu schreiben.
Ich meine die Zeitung, nicht den Blogger.
January 4th, 2007 at 8:56 am
Ja, Sie haben recht.
Die einzige frage; welche Editor schriebt diese Scheißstück?
Na ja; es will eine lange zwei Jahre sei. Für blogging danke ich immer Gott; ohne’s würde ich bald verrückt sei.
January 4th, 2007 at 10:20 am
Mein Gott!
January 4th, 2007 at 10:21 am
Ach du lieber!
January 4th, 2007 at 10:21 am
Schnell!
That’s about the extent of my comic book German.
January 4th, 2007 at 11:04 am
Excellent!
January 4th, 2007 at 11:12 am
Yeah, and I’d like a 2007 Mercedes S65 to magically appear in my garage. Hell, I’d like a BIGGER HOUSE to magically appear that can house my children’s vast collections of their favorite toys, all delivered home in my wife’s and my matching S65’s. Which are parked right next to my 2007 Honda GoldWing and Yamaha FJR1300, which is on the other side of the garage from our 2007 Honda Odyssey (gotta have something to take both kids and luggage).
Oh yeah, all of which I have plenty of time to enjoy since I retired in March of 2007 at the ripe old age of 37
But hey, if you’re going to dream, dream big!
Whoever wrote that dreck should have titled it “DFL List to Santa Claus” Someone gets PAID to write that for a professional newspaper?
Unglaublich.
January 4th, 2007 at 1:55 pm
Frau Blucher!
January 4th, 2007 at 9:52 pm
Tim66: Funny!
My whole contribution are the two words (well 4 I guess) I remember from 8th grade German: der bleistift and das buch. Very pathetic when I think that my Grandpa was a German immigrant and that’s all I know. I could maybe still learn, however…maybe it isn’t too late…ha! My husband has been to both Germany and Italy and he preferred the sound of German being spoken…it wasn’t so “affected” or drawn out and dramatic I guess you could say. Hard to explain.
January 5th, 2007 at 8:20 am
Colleen informed: “Very pathetic when I think that my Grandpa was a German immigrant and that’s all I know. ”
Maybe if you checked the transcripts from the Nuremburg trials. Just a thought.
January 5th, 2007 at 7:53 pm
I see angryclown, that you didn’t make a New Year’s resolution to be an reasonable (and amusing) human being…instead you’ve decided to stick with the same old thing: an execrable piece of crap. My grandpa came over when he was 12. He was a young husband and father farming in northern Minnesota during WWII. He was the kind of man you have probably never met and certainly never will be: honorable and hard-working, quiet and dignified.
I know I shouldn’t take your bait, but, man, I can’t stand you.
January 6th, 2007 at 2:15 pm
Bill C-
I think you need a ’77 HD Sportser to go with all those Jap two wheelers. I just happen to know where you might find one . . .
January 6th, 2007 at 3:05 pm
My apologies, Colleen. Apparently you came to your fascist leanings on your own, rather than from your family.
January 7th, 2007 at 12:03 pm
For three months, nothing.
Suddenly, angryclown comments all over the place.
Did you get laid off at the sheltered workshop again?
January 7th, 2007 at 12:22 pm
At least he resisted the Nazi cliche.
January 7th, 2007 at 3:11 pm
Admit it, you missed Angryclown! Truth is, Mitch, in the aftermath of the election, Angryclown just didn’t have the heart to comment.
Let’s face it. On the best day your commenters aren’t exactly sparkling with insight and eloquence. For Angryclown to match his wits with people like Eracus, Terry and Colleen, et al. – who are 50 percent deficient in that commodity – is admittedly less than sporting. To have done so in the aftermath of what must have been a devastating repudiation of your deeply felt, though poorly thought-out, Wingnutanschauung, however, would have been like shooting farm-raised quail. It just wouldn’t have been right.
January 8th, 2007 at 2:21 pm
Admit it, you missed Angryclown!
Well, in a sense, sure!
Truth is, Mitch, in the aftermath of the election, Angryclown just didn’t have the heart to comment.
Well, you hardly needed to. The GOP screwed itself by acting like Democrats.
Let’s face it. On the best day your commenters aren’t exactly sparkling with insight and eloquence.
And into that stew you prance, strewing petals of crabgrass!
For Angryclown to match his wits with people like Eracus, Terry and Colleen, et al. – who are 50 percent deficient in that commodity – is admittedly less than sporting.
Dunno, Clown – I think Terry had you pretty well dialled in. But perception is, indeed, reality…
To have done so in the aftermath of what must have been a devastating repudiation
Nah, it confirmed what I felt in 2000, when i backed Forbes; Bush is too moderate, and he ran a party that ran too hard for the center.
would have been like shooting farm-raised quail.
How do you do that in NYC, anyway? Corner them and shoot them 41 times?
January 9th, 2007 at 6:53 am
Heehee! Republicans need to be nastier and unreasonablier! Bigger tax cuts for the rich, more losing wars, additional cities washed out to sea! A cut in the minumum wage maybe? Yeah, that’s the ticket!