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| FREE PETE BUT KEEP BUFFY PAGE 2 |
| So the media is just eating up the tearful parting of families at airfields and docks across the U.S. My favorite one took place down in San Diego when a ship recently put to sea. There was a young wife holding a 28-day old baby, saying goodbye to her husband. They had been married a little over a year, they said, and the serviceman kind of laughed and said he was used to it but it was harder on his wife. This kind of thing would have been hard even in peacetime, right? Deployments are usually 3 to 6 months and obviously can be extended. The kicker of this little holiday tearjerker, quietly mentioned by the serviceman himself, was that he was leaving on a previously scheduled deployment! If OBL had never been born and Iraq was the 51st American State, this ship would still have sailed that day. A very real human interest story is turned into a lie, while giving the facts. Journalism schools must be proud. Any old school journalist would know to get the same effect by simply setting the story up as "routine deployment takes new urgency" or something like that. Hideous crap. Speaking of hideous crap, how about these whorebait shows on tv? The humorous "Joe Millionaire" is a good example. The "Joe Millionaire" show should be a brilliant twist. I bet colleges which allow drinking on campus must shut down when this show is on. You've heard it already: 20 women are flown to France to try to hook up with a guy they are told is a millionaire. The trick is that he isn't. They like to say he's a plumber or something, but apparently he's a tall, dark, handsome male model of some sort. FOX News is on record as saying a lot of the women are some form of actresses as well. The twist is at the end he's revealed as a "poor man" to the woman who competes the best and "wins his love"... I can hardly write that with a straight face. Would it be impolite for me, in my feverish condition, to point out that these women are portraying dirty, rotten, gold-digging whores? That perhaps they are, in fact, just that? I LOSE I.Q. POINTS JUST HEARING THE COMMERCIALS FOR THESE SHOWS! To top all this off my wife came to bed last night and told me she read that this looks like the last season for "Buffy". She wasn't clear if this meant the last season Buffy actress Sarah Michele Geller would be on, or if the whole show might vanish. Either way, it's a traumatic thing for me. A few years ago I suffered an injury which pretty much put me in a chair for a couple of months, 24/7, and the nature of this injury made simply holding a book agony. It was horrible and seemed endless, and "Buffy The Vampire Slayer" was the only reasonably intelligent, funny, and sophisticated show on the air. One might say we bonded, me and that show, and in the three years since that period television has dropped in quality to a shocking point. Now this... Will it never end? I cast about with every communication device at my command to try to see where this is all going, and what drives it in the directions it seems to be headed. Friends collect guns and stockpile computers, cellphones now explode into a raucous mix of blaring noise and flashing lights that remind me of nothing so much as the flashing lights atop a police cruiser in full pursuit. What have I done this time, I wonder? Then it comes to me, once again, as it has for so many years. I know what sacrifice is needed to set the U.S. and perhaps the entire Western World back on a reasonable course. The commissioner of Major League Baseball needs to make Pete Rose eligible to be in the Baseball Hall Of Fame. It's just this simple. There is a lot of hot air about Rose needing to admit that he bet on baseball, which automatically makes him ineligible I might add, but that's all crap and everyone knows it. In reality, he's obviously guilty of breaking rules up to and including betting on baseball, and he's been thoroughly punished for that. The only real question is: Did Pete Rose bet against his own team? That would be unforgivable and should lead to his total banishment from baseball employment for life - BUT EVEN THAT SHOULDN'T KEEP HIM OUT OF THE HALL OF FAME FOR WHAT HE DID AS A PLAYER. It's just that simple, and perhaps that's the problem. Lawyers don't make money off simple solutions. Pete Rose needs to be in the Hall Of Fame. Once that takes place, the rest of the world will be released like hostages from the imprisonment of irrationality, at least for a while. Free Pete, but let's keep Buffy. |
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