"Can't we all just get along?"
The headline on this post is not only the title of today's installment, it's there for the person or persons that are frequently searching this site for audio mp3s of Rodney King saying that. Sorry, we don't have any. But thank you for visiting The Dagley Dagley Daily several times a week in your quest just the same. You're obviously looking under every cyber-rock, and persistently, as is the person who keeps searching this site for an mp3 of "Rocky Top" (none here; we respect intellectual-property rights).
When a gunfight breaks out in the chambers of the elected government of a place that calls itself "the capital of the world," leaving two people dead, one an elected official, and hundreds of others, including children, severely traumatized, it's time to ask Rodney King's question once more, even if we know the answer is, "Obviously not." It's time to try harder to be civil to each other, and to take what steps we can toward a more civil society.
To that end, today I'm going to do my part by agreeing with not one but two prominent conservatives.
I agree with New York Times pundit William Safire, who applauds yesterday's 400-12 vote in the House of Representatives to overturn the FCC's recent rule change that would have made it easier for huge media conglomerates to get even bigger, and harder for everybody else in the media who isn't a huge conglomerate. Despite the overwhelming lopsidedness of the vote, it is expected to be vetoed. Safire advises against that.
And I agree, after some consideration, with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who says it was his decision to release photos of the bodies of Uday and Qusay Hussein.
I don't agree, however, with CNN's decision to keep showing the "purported bodies" (as they put it) over and over and over all day.
Speaking of civility and civil society, one of the great champions of that cause was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom yesterday: writer and former Czech President Vaclav Havel, who is misidentified on the Medal of Freedom site as the current Czech president (that would be Vaclav Klaus), and misidentified as widowed (he remarried after his first wife, Olga, died). The New York Times reports that Havel is writing again, something he didn't have much time for as president.
posted by Janet Dagley Dagley @4:02 PM
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24.7.03 |
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