{"id":287,"date":"2007-01-04T07:52:17","date_gmt":"2007-01-04T13:52:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php\/2007\/01\/04\/287\/"},"modified":"2007-01-04T07:53:27","modified_gmt":"2007-01-04T13:53:27","slug":"287","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=287","title":{"rendered":"Happy New Year. Hand Over Your Wallet."},"content":{"rendered":"

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<\/a>, an angel will lose its wings and fall to earth.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Into that void of hope strode 2007. How quickly things changed!<\/p>\n

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”<\/font>] 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!!!”<\/font>] , combined to form a miracle: a truly democratic, progressive [“Heeeeeeeeeeeeeeelp”<\/font>] government, and a year in which the dwindling U.S. force — now down to 150 — suffered not a single casualty.<\/p>\n

Likewise, the 2006 Christmas sales numbers for Al Gore’s film, “An Inconvenient Truth,” [“Pull thy ripcord, Jeremiah!”<\/font>] shocked Detroit, the energy companies and Washington into an unprecedented effort to fight global warming [“I’m going in! I’m going in!”<\/font>] . President Bush’s now-famous shirtsleeves stroll down Pennsylvania Avenue [“A Jimmy Carter reference…hey, where the hell are my wings?”<\/font>] 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!”<\/font>] . 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.<\/p>\n

Of course, some problems remain. The refugees who fled North Korea after Kim Jong-il’s suicide still need meaningful work [“Assuming the position!”<\/font>] . 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!<\/em>“<\/font>] . 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!<\/em>“<\/font>] .<\/p>\n

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!<\/em>“<\/font>] . 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…”<\/font>] , 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…<\/em>“<\/font>] , 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”<\/font>] .<\/p>\n

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”<\/font>]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,20,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-287","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-war","category-democrats","category-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/287","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=287"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/287\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=287"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=287"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=287"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}