The Weather and the Nightly News Commentary

God must think this is a practical joke, but I ain’t laughing. The last six years lived out West, we were in a drought. Forest fire smoke clogged the summer air and the snowpack was so skimpy that at best there would only a few weeks of backcountry skiing each winter. Last year I moved to the Midwest and today they’re still skiing out West. In Utah, they’ll ski till July 4th! (for a picture of snowback in mid-March see: http://photos1.blogger.com/img/71/2620/640/IMG025.jpg ). The snow in the Upper Midwest was sorry this winter. We’d get a good base then it’d rain and we’d have to start all over again. I only got out a couple of times on skis. It's now in the 90s and quite humid. I’m in withdrawal.

On another matter, Senator Dick Durbin overstated things when he compared the treatment of detainees at Guantanamo Bay to that dished out by the Nazis, Soviets and Pol Pot. His words are especially unfortunate because it got Bush’s chubby-cheek propaganda guru’s mouth running. If I believed in reincarnation, I’d wonder if Karl Rove weren’t a new manifestation of Joseph Goebbels. This time around it appears he’s eating a little higher on the hog (Goebbels was quite skinny). Rove and Goebbels both spout (or spouted in Goebbels case) nonsense that people believe (or believed), directing their respective nation down a destructive path. No doubt, Goebbels was worst than Rove, but that doesn't make Rove a saint. The other day Rove boasted that Republicans saw the savagery of 911 and prepared for war while Democrats prepared indictments and offered therapy sessions for the terrorist. It’s a good soundbite, but an outright lie. He’s only partially right on one point. The Republicans did prepared us for war, but only partly. (Remember this war doesn’t require any sacrifices by John Q. Public.) Then they went to war in the wrong place and against the wrong people. Sure, Iraq had a bad leader, but so do many other nations. The war was suppose to be against those who attacked us and the one thing that seems evident is that Iraq didn’t have anything to do with 911 (and, by the way, there were no stockpiles of WMDs either!). Secondly, Rove is wrong about the Democrats. Too many of them bowed to White House pressure which allowed Mr. Bush to conduct his splendid little war in Iraq at a time when we didn’t have things under control in Afghanistan. Now, the war is out of hand. In my opinion, Afghanistan was a war in our national interest. Iraq wasn't. As for the detainees in Guantanamo Bay, let’s at least have enough humanity to treat them with respect. Applying the Golden Rule seems to be the least a President who wears his Christianity on his sleeve would expect from the men and women in uniform under his command guarding the detainees. But then, maybe that's the problem. His Christianity needs to get off his sleeve and out of his soundbites and into his heart and actions. Enough ranting!