The Sun'll Come Out..
Quick Injury Update: I took my oldest to the dentist after I posted yesterday. Turns out he pushed his two front top teeth in a little bit. The dentist was worried about fracturing higher up, so we had to go to an oral surgeon and get a full face panoramic X-ray taken, which was actually kind of cool. The oral surgeon determined that everything, while horribly discolored, swollen and ugly, was fine. No needles, no intervention and no stitch in his lip. One relieved Pops here.

And so...

Ronald Reagan used to have quite a reputation for being an optimist. Of course it's easy to look on the bright side of things when you're completely divorced from reality (and I'm talking about his pre-Alzheimer's presidency here), but we'll let that slide for now.

The Gipper, however, has nothing on Russian president Vladimir "Pollyanna" Putin. He doesn't let the nasty old vagaries of life get him down. Let's say, for instance, a bunch of twisted, gutless cowards mow down an entire schoolful of Russian children. Does Vladimir get all weepy-faced and mopey? No sir! He comes right out and effectively abolishes democracy in Russia!

See that? Life gave him lemons and Glad Vlad made himself a big ol' pitcher of lemonade that he doesn't have to share with anyone.

Seriously, touch it and he'll kill you. He's ex-KGB.

Look, maybe I'm making out to sound worse than it is. All he's asking for is the authority to appoint all regional governors, to create and massively fund a super-powerful anti-terrorism intelligence agency (not a secret police force, no), a limit on the number of political parties and finally (this is the best one) "the State Duma, parliament's lower house, should now be elected solely from party lists".

The details of these "lists", who would make and approve them, who would confirm the eligible, all that is sort of foggy at the moment, but I think most of us can see where this is going.

Ah, one-party rule. You know after the fall of the Eastern Bloc nations and then the election of Vicente Fox in Mexico ruining the fun down south, I was getting sort of nostalgic for some old timey political shenanigans at the expense of the common man. Right now the only one-party states of note we've got left are China and Cuba, but China's in the process of selling its soul to Nokia and Cuba, well... Castro can't live forever.


Here's my favorite quote:

"The will of a single person is imposed on the whole of society," echoed Communist party leader Gennady Zyuganov. "What he is looking for is the usurping of power."

When the Communists are going "No, that's too far!" you know you're dealing with something special.

Why is it that no new democracies can ever figure out the whole checks-and-balances thing? One crisis or one charismatic leader (or some combination thereof), especially in the early days, and away it all goes. I can't help thinking we might have dodged a bullet with that George Washington guy. If he'd been just a little more base and venal, we'd be Bolivia right now instead of us.

Ostensibly this Russian "reform" (an ironic term) business is all in the name of security following Beslan. In that light--and as disturbing as all of that is--I think maybe our good cousin Tony Blair over there in the UK might want to start leaning in the oppressive-crackdown direction. Not only would it shore up his steadily degrading political position, but then he might be able to keep people from dressing up like Batman, scaling a wall at Buckingham Palace and refusing to come down all in the name of some fathers' rights group.

I'm all for my brothers in dadhood getting their message out, but it's a good thing that guy didn't have an H-bomb in his utility belt, that's all I'm saying. That would have made dads everywhere look really bad.

I guess we can rest assured in the knowledge that if that guy had olive-colored skin, dark hair and a beard, we'd be seeing pictures of him falling from a great height with several more holes in his body than he started out with.

So terrorists, take note: superhero costumes are the way to go.

This post on the Narcissus Scale: 2.9


Pops

- posted by Pops @ 10:23 AM