Two Days of Obama at My House

Two days of Obama has already led to a major development at my place. I've been watching the news. I haven't gone so far as to turn on CNN since it's going to take a lot to convince me they do more than say the same thing over and over again until they finally figure out what's going on.

I've been watching MSNBC because of Rachel Maddow and Keith Olberman. Tonight I actually changed the channel from Stephen Colbert's rerun of last night to look at Countdown.

For the last several years, watching the news was so annoying that I refused to turn it on. Not even PBS. I became one of the huge percentage of Americans getting our news from Comedy Central and on home pages when logging on to check our email. I get the NYTimes on the weekends so there were headlines to ignore on my dining table. I read Newsweek at my shrink's office. And, of course, I read a few blogs.

Those blogs may very well have put all our dynamic IP addresses in the NSA records. Perhaps my mother wasn't a worry wart when she suggested that the FBI was watching me. Certainly Sarah Palin's people were checking closely enough on minor bloggers to leave that ridiculous comment with the non-working links back when I said something about the Weathermen connection.

I'm sorry to say that until yesterday I thought the NSA was a fictional secret organization that lived only on Stargate SG-1. On that show, the NID (National Intelligence Department) and the fictional Uber Evil Senator Kinsey who becomes Vice President are dedicated to the proposition that The End Justifies the Means that they piss off all kinds of advanced civilizations - not to mention fucking over ordinary people as a matter of course. They are such spectacularly paranoid, small minded, money grubbing tyrants that it never entered my mind the could be as real as, say, Dick Cheney.

Now the minute I turn on the news again, I hear those paranoid tyrants are actually real. When I turned to Velvet in disbelief all he could do was roll his eyes.

Sadly, I have been around this planet long enough to remain unfazed by the news that George W, Dick and the gang were spying on ordinary citizens, much less journalists. I hope there is a full investigation, indictments and all that - but you know, I haven't paid attention to the news in so long that I was perplexed by the choice of George Mitchell to be our new Middle East Envoy. For a moment, I thought he was John Mitchell from the Committee to Re-Elect The President who engineered Watergate. Actually, I didn't remember his name was John. I remembered Martha Mitchell, looked at George Mitchell and thought, "That's odd." He didn't seem nearly as old as he would have to be to have been involved in Watergate, but John Dean was appearing on MSNBC tonight and looked damn good. I could have sworn both Watergate Mitchell and Martha were dead, though, yet there stood a distinguished looking fellow named Mitchell.

Those Watergate guys turn up in the strangest places anyway. Given that G. Gordon Liddy was on MacGyver it's no wonder I was completely thrown off by the NSA, NID, Stargate SG-1 and Dick Cheney - especially since MacGyver is Col. Jack O'Neill.

This matter of Menopausal Stoner Confusion is not nearly as entertaining as the time I mixed up Caroline Kennedy and Maria Shriver and thought the governator's wife wanted to be the next senator from New York. I only had them confused for a minute, and besides, when you look at the congress as a whole, Maria Shriver might as well be a Senator as anyone else.

That the real, live Vice President of the United States is so bad he might as well be a comic strip villain is no laughing matter, even when you're high - although Jon Stewart's comparison of Cheney to Blofeld was pretty funny. I'm not ready to give up Comedy Central's version of the news just yet.