I admit it. I spent the entire holiday weekend ignoring the news.
That means no CNN, no blogs, no e-mail - nothing. I did scan a newspaper a few times just to make sure the world wasn't collapsing, but that's it.
It felt great, but my news vacation gives a current events columnist like myself quite a difficult task.
I could scour the Internet for a provocative story, but instead, I'm going to take the standard end-of-the-year cop out - a political year in review.
Similar to how the year is ending, 2005 started out poorly for the president.
On Jan. 7, it was revealed that the White House paid political columnist Armstrong Williams $240,000 to promote the No Child Left Behind Act in his columns and on his syndicated talk show. Note to the government: I'm open to similar offers. For a quarter of a million dollars, I'll even call Bush a better president than Washington, Lincoln and the Roosevelts combined.
The president picked up some steam by getting his cabinet confirmed, but shortly thereafter, it was discovered White House press corps member James Guckert - a.k.a. Jeff Gannon - was splitting his time between covering the president and his side job as a gay male escort. Guckert - who wrote for the right-wing Talon News Service and GOPUSA - somehow was able to get past a very thorough background check without his secret identity being revealed. I'm sure his slanted coverage had nothing to do with that.
In March, the infamous Terri Schiavo fiasco took place. This included Sen. (and doctor) Bill Frist's false diagnosis of Schiavo via videotape, the emergency midnight session of Congress and President Bush flying to Washington during the middle of one of his many vacations to sign a bill sending the dispute into federal court.
For the vast majority of Americans, these actions were seen as an intrusion of the federal government into a private family matter; most saw through the GOP's attempt to gain political points from the poor woman's death.
As a side note, Sen. Frist received videotapes from across the country of people asking the good doctor to give them a diagnosis - hopefully he did better with them than with Schiavo.
May 1 brought an end to the president's push for the destruction ... err, privatization ... of Social Security. At the end of his 60-day campaign, a whopping 64 percent of Americans disapproved of his handling of Social Security. Though his propaganda war failed miserably, he did manage to scare more elderly people than any president since Herbert Hoover made a "Soylent Green Proposal" for solving the Depression.
On May 31, Vice President Dick Cheney declared that the Iraqi insurgency was "in the last throes." I think that ties the president's "Mission Accomplished" speech as the best foot-in-the-mouth moment of the administration.
Back in January, the president learned that it looks bad if you pay the media to shill for your agenda, so in June the administration tried the next best thing - selective editing. Prior to the G-8 summit, the administration was caught pressuring negotiators "to delete language that would detail how rising temperatures are affecting the globe, set ambitious targets to cut carbon dioxide emissions and set stricter environmental standards." Is it getting hot in here, or is it just me?
That only takes us up to June. That's right - this was only half of the bad news for this year. I didn't even touch Iraq, John Bolton, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay's indictment, the Supreme Court, the tragedy of the government's response to Hurricane Katrina and the indictment of Cheney's chief of staff.
It's been quite a year, but I'm sure there's a lot more in store for us in 2006.
Write to Steve at
nawarainthedn@hotmail.com
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