Friday, April 01, 2005
What're those opthamologists up to?
I have three almost completely unrelated things to say today, but coincidentally, they all bear at least tangentially on opthamology. (And before someone picks on me, no, I'm not entirely clear on who's an opthamologist and who's an optometrist; I think opthamologists in general can do surgery and prescribe medications, while optometrists do more measuring and prescribe eyeglasses, but if I'm wrong, don't worry, the difference isn't germane to any of my points.)
First off, I think doctors, on average, are fine people. I find it upsetting when they get sued for not being entirely perfect (by Monday-morning quarterbacks who sometimes take YEARS to decide what doctors might have done wrong), and it seems very wrong to me that 'punitive' monetary damages can be levied against them in civil courts (you can punish damage done intentionally, and you can punish criminal negligence, but you punish those in CRIMINAL court and prison terms and fines are imposed by the state in the name of all of us, not by any lawyer who sees a chance to earn a big commission). I sent an email via Senator Dole's website a few weeks ago asking when civil lawyers got the right to usurp the power of the state by 'punishing' doctors and collecting huge commissions for doing so (I was reading about her bill to cap noneconomic damages in OB/GYN malpractice suits which got filibustered in 2004 and hasn't been reintroduced in the present 109th Congress, and I thought I might ask why they should be capped rather than cut to ZERO). Perhaps it is too broad a question; I've not gotten an answer. Anyway, doctors can earn lots of money but they had to be awfully smart and spend ever so long in school to get there, and they generally have to work long and irregular hours to earn it, so I think they deserve to be well paid. No one ever complains that there are too many doctors around. And to connect to my other two points, some doctors are opthamologists.
Now there's one opthamologist I don't like at all. His name is Bashar al-Assad. He may be smart, and he may have studied for a long time to become an opthamologist, but he's not fixing any eyes these days. He is now the 'President' of Syria, a poor, corrupt, state-terror-sponsoring dictatorship which is still trying to become important enough to earn the spot in the Axis of Evil that Iraq is vacating. I don't have much to say about Bashar al-Assad today other than that I'm pleased at the continuing news from Lebanon (that doesn't seem to be making the news much lately) as Assad's troops and secret police accelerate their departure, with their tails between their legs, under pressure from the soft speech of our President, the big stick he probably won't even have to use on Syria, and the huge prodemocracy demonstrations they're calling the 'Cedar Revolution'. (There's something the United Nations is good for, by the way: people talk a lot there in order to sound important, and sometimes they even write things down. Back in September 2004, when the insurgency in Iraq was going strong and it looked like we'd be bogged down in Iraq and never get back on the offensive in the War on Terror, the French were running off at the mouth with words they never expected to have to back up, but some smart American was actually listening (bless him for staying awake when France speaks) and got them to sign a document, Resolution 1559, calling on Syria to leave Lebanon. Who knew? I sure didn't hear about it. Surely the Syrians weren't going to take it seriously, hey, it was only the U.N. But a Lebanese patriot named Hariri heard about it, thought, here's my chance, resigned his position and started calling on Syria to get out. Still no big problem for the Syrians, their troops in Lebanon comfortably outnumbered the Lebanese Army (which, along with Lebanese politics, they controlled with their secret police), and America's hands were still tied by the insurgency in Iraq. True, they had no credible substitute for their current puppet 'Lebanese President' whose term was running out, so they just extended the term of the current puppet (unconstitutionally) and tried to assassinate one of Hariri's associates to keep the rest of them intimidated. Then came President Bush's second Inaugural Address, the media went wild accusing him of wanting to be the 'World's Policeman', saying, what, you are going to use military force to support any prodemocracy movement in the whole world? The antiAmerican Left was scandalized at this 'breach of international norms', this unilateralism, this, this... well, I'd call it the use of certain SELF-EVIDENT TRUTHS as the basis of a practical foreign policy, but the Left had lots of other things to call it, none good. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure I never heard our President back down one bit, he just let the Left scream itself hoarse, and by the time their voices recovered, they had something else to rant about.
And then came 30 January, and the Iraqis voted. I hope every good Republican already knows plenty about that, so I won't go into it, except to say that suddenly it was obvious to everyone (except most leftists) that the insurgency in Iraq had failed, and a time would soon come when President Bush could decide which took fewer troops, pacifying Iraq alone, or pacifying Iraq AND the insurgents' armory, treasury, and sanctuary, Syria, simultaneously. Now, the Syrians aren't leftists (they just get plenty of sympathy from every antiAmerican group around the world because they're vocally antiAmerican, too), in fact, their Baathist party traces its heritage directly back to Nazi efforts to build an antiWestern fifth column in Egypt during World War II, so they understood that their position had suddenly weakened considerably. They had Hariri to the west stirring up Lebanese nationalism and actually getting some press coverage even in France by pointing out that Syria had made a naked anticonstitutional power grab by extending the term of the 'President', and to their east Iraqis were stepping up, defying and turning in insurgents, streaming into the Army, National Guard, and police forces, freeing up American troops, while President Bush was smirking (oh, how the leftists love to point out that smirk! Me, I like to see it, it is as if MY President was saying directly to me, "I've got the answer") and softly telling Syria it should stop supporting terrorism.
So this was the critical point for revolution vs. 'stability' in the Middle East, and it shows the appropriateness of the President's long-term strategy for winning the War on Terror. Remember how the Left loves to shriek that the invasion of Iraq had nothing to do with the War on Terror, there were no WMDs in Iraq, this was an optional and not a necessary war, we could have waited, given the inspectors more time, etc.? I don't think any of that was important to the President. Sure, he thought there were WMDs there, and getting them out of Saddam's hands would be a good bonus, but his thinking was more direct: America is at war, we must stay on the offensive (because a 'Fortress America' can't make itself safe from individual fanatics without curtailing civil liberties to a degree Americans would never accept), the CIA, FBI, and State Department (to the extent that the State Department ever supports a Republican president) were gearing up for a long-term war on Al Qaeda cells and finances, and most of our military was going to sit idle? (Leaving lots of troops in Afghanistan would have been a waste; you can't use huge armored formations to chase small units through mountainous terrain (that's why DOD Secretary Rumsfeld has been pushing 'transformation' all this time, to make the military more agile), and we couldn't send any troops at all into Pakistan without embarrassing President Musharraf, who has enough problems with his own Muslim radicals.)
The way forward was pretty clear even to me: invade a Muslim nation, preferrably an influential Arab one with a large, educated population that wasn't too mountainous. And then do our best to stay out of the way while they reshaped their nation, with all the Muslim world watching. They'd have to build a new government to maintain order, and they'd have to build a legitimate, popular government (or we would just suppress it easily, being right there), and best of all, they'd have to develop an ARAB governing philosophy which could combat Islamic terrorism, because they'd have to build their new government while under siege by the same radical Islamic elements we were at war with; the radicals would have to come out and fight our army, and they'd have to stay and fight the new government, too, or be exposed as a dead end in Muslim philosophy, unable to win a war of ideas or hold territory. Even I knew the Arabs would get it right eventually (I actually expected we'd have to set up forts in the desert and let them experience anarchy for a while, and sweep away five or six failed governments first), but our President was right in his Second Inaugural: people will choose freedom when they get a chance, and they realized they had that chance on their first try!
Iraq was a perfect target: we were already sort of there, patrolling the no-fly zones to protect the friendly Kurds in the north, Saddam was regularly shooting at our planes anyway, Iraq is historically second to none in influence in Muslim culture, why, they even had some experience with democracy, a weak fragile democracy lasting only from about 1920 to 1950, true, but in the Middle East, that is a comparatively GOOD record. Best of all, all the diplomacy had already been done, you'd think... 16 Security Council Resolutions, and Saddam was still cheating and obfuscating and defiant. Most of his people hated him, all his fellow Arab states feared and loathed him, no one would regret his dispatch to the ashbin of history. So we finished the diplomacy with that 17th Resolution, a clear ultimatum, in diplomatic terms. Then came the whole sad story of Chiraq and de Villepin stabbing Colin Powell in the back and organizing the Security council against an 18th Resolution, and maintaining that 'serious consequences' in the 17th Resolution didn't mean military force. I won't go into that here; suffice it to say that everyone with half a brain knew that Saddam Hussein was an outlaw and we (or anyone else) had a right to take him down, unilaterally or not. (And by the way, I expect I or any other veteran would've approved all the sleep deprivation or bright lights necessary to get from him the truth about the fate of M. Scott Speicher, the still-missing pilot we think Saddam was holding after the first Gulf War.)
So the critical point came after the January 30th vote in Iraq: would a prodemocracy movement spread in the Middle East? President Bush's assertion that the Iraqi people would stand up had been borne out, but could neighboring nations turn on their illegitimate dictators? The answer is, yes, eventually. Any little sign of weakness or misstep by those dictators will be magnified by the world's scrutiny, and once they slip, they have no legitimacy to fall back on when the landslide begins against them. Hosni Mubarak in Egypt slipped at least to some degree, arresting a street demonstration leader and having to back down and promise real elections when the Secretary Rice put the heat on him by cancelling a trip to Egypt, but I don't know much about the details on this and I want to get back to Bashar al-Assad and HIS slipup, because it has to do with opthamology.
Bashar's father, you see, was the famous Hafez al-Assad, who with Saddam set the standard for maintaining power and repressing a whole nation with only a small power base of one's own. We've all heard how Saddam kept the power in Iraq in Sunni Arab hands even though Iraq is about 20% Sunni Arab, 20% Sunni Kurd, and 60% Shiite Arab. But the Assads were managing it with an even smaller demographic base: they're Alawites, members of a minority culture which comprises only about 10% of Syria's population. So they have to be very good at repression of democracy. Hafez was very good at it. He's the man who gave the name to "Hama Rules", which the blogosphere uses to describe the power of the state in the Arab world, the delimiting factor is, "are you capable of playing by Hama Rules, or not?" The implication is that the Bush Administration was going to have to be able to use naked violence to get credibility in the Middle East. Hama was a small city in Syria which revolted against Hafez al-Assad, and he surrounded it and pounded it to rubble with artillery, killing 20,000 people and in effect saying, "we play for keeps around here." Thing is, Hafez had two sons, one he was grooming to succeed him, and one that he allowed to go off to Europe and study opthamology. When the elder son died (I think it was given out as being a traffic accident, but cause of death of political figures in the Middle East is a very political matter; people who one might think could have been assassinated or murdered by secret police get "killed in traffic accidents" suspiciously often), Hafez had to call the younger son back to be his heir apparent, and he didn't have enough time, by all accounts, before his own death to retrain Bashar in statecraft and "Hama Rules".
So there was an opthamologist running Syria, and all his subordinates were seriously worried about Syria's position after the Iraqi vote. Bashar might have stepped into his father's shoes and shown himself to be a born dictator like his father and, with skill or luck, secured his position, but having spent most of his life preparing to fix eyes, the odds weren't on his side. And he did screw up. He either allowed paniced subordinates to kill Hariri, or he had him killed himself (no one in Lebanon, outside of maybe Hezbollah, takes seriously allegations from the 'blame Israel' crowd that the Mossad killed Hariri in an incredibly subtle play to promote Lebanese democracy by killing its leading proponent). Hariri's death is what brought 1.3 million Lebanese (out of a population of 3.4 million) into the streets to demand Syria withdraw from Lebanon and take its secret police with 'em, and it is working!
Here's some more impact of opthamology on the situation in Lebanon: it is a great time (for males at least) to have good vision in Lebanon. I'm trying to get into this blog community, and one common thread running through every right-wing blog on the net these days seems to be headlines reading, "Hot Chicks March for Freedom in Lebanon" or the like, with pictures of same. I'm not going to try and put pictures here, but I'll link to somehere . (Click on the 'here', if you're new to html links, if it doesn't work, blame my inexperience.)
Now we come to my third opthamology point for today. I recently became aware that NC House Speaker Jim Black is an opthamologist. A newspaper I read, can't remember if it was the News and Observer or our own Roanoke Rapids Daily Herald, had nice pictures of him actually working with patients. As I said way back at the beginning of this post (you've forgotten, haven't you? I need an editor to combat my long-windedness), I think doctors are generally good people. Certainly I don't mean to imply that the study of opthamology can turn one into a bloodthirsty dictator like Bashar al-Assad, or cause him to brutally oppress people when he only has, for instance, 49% of the NC House vote on his side yet runs things anyway, I just thought it was interesting. (My psychologist told me I'd best keep my parallel-drawing in check lest people think I was a wild-eyed-black-helicopter-paranoid. I know sometimes my satire and irony is too subtle.) Today my beef with our Speaker/opthamologist is just with his organizing a committee of lottery proponents to draft a bill authorizing a state lottery and get it voted on next week. Some people are saying that creating a committee only of PRO-lottery politicians and having them meet behind closed doors to write the bill is antidemocratic, since no one will know how they come to decisions no matter how good their eyesight might be, because of the closed doors, you know. Personally, I don't see the sense in demanding that people who are going to vote against a lottery anyway have input into the bill's drafting, but that's just me, maybe I'll learn better. I plan on writing more about why I oppose a lottery some time soon, but for now I just want to make a suggestion for the bill-drafting committee: absolutely keep it behind closed doors. For that matter, get all the pro-lottery lobbyists in there too, to make sure they can help with their input. Close the doors securely, and let them have, maybe once a week or once a month, a drawing where the winner gets to come OUT of their meeting room. And pipe in, every 10 or 15 minutes, a 30-second ad telling them that lottery players drive around with better-looking women in their convertibles than non-lottery-players, and lottery players are much more likely to burst into happy song-and-dance routines at their local convenience stores than dour non-lottery players, you know, things like you see all day every day on TV in lottery states (can you tell I lived in Maryland before I retired to NC?).
So I'll end this post, and hope to see what, if anything, people found interesting or provocative in it. And for those who may say I'm implying that Jim Black is a wicked behind-the-scenes power broker for a minority regime like Bashar al-Assad is, I may have to point out that this post can also be interpreted as a call for Bashar al-Assad to be brought up in criminal court for murder rather than just sued in civil court, or as a rallying cry for more pretty young ladies to turn out for lottery protest marches. Me, I'd like to talk to anyone who agrees with any of those three propositions. The Halifax County Republican Party needs YOU!
First off, I think doctors, on average, are fine people. I find it upsetting when they get sued for not being entirely perfect (by Monday-morning quarterbacks who sometimes take YEARS to decide what doctors might have done wrong), and it seems very wrong to me that 'punitive' monetary damages can be levied against them in civil courts (you can punish damage done intentionally, and you can punish criminal negligence, but you punish those in CRIMINAL court and prison terms and fines are imposed by the state in the name of all of us, not by any lawyer who sees a chance to earn a big commission). I sent an email via Senator Dole's website a few weeks ago asking when civil lawyers got the right to usurp the power of the state by 'punishing' doctors and collecting huge commissions for doing so (I was reading about her bill to cap noneconomic damages in OB/GYN malpractice suits which got filibustered in 2004 and hasn't been reintroduced in the present 109th Congress, and I thought I might ask why they should be capped rather than cut to ZERO). Perhaps it is too broad a question; I've not gotten an answer. Anyway, doctors can earn lots of money but they had to be awfully smart and spend ever so long in school to get there, and they generally have to work long and irregular hours to earn it, so I think they deserve to be well paid. No one ever complains that there are too many doctors around. And to connect to my other two points, some doctors are opthamologists.
Now there's one opthamologist I don't like at all. His name is Bashar al-Assad. He may be smart, and he may have studied for a long time to become an opthamologist, but he's not fixing any eyes these days. He is now the 'President' of Syria, a poor, corrupt, state-terror-sponsoring dictatorship which is still trying to become important enough to earn the spot in the Axis of Evil that Iraq is vacating. I don't have much to say about Bashar al-Assad today other than that I'm pleased at the continuing news from Lebanon (that doesn't seem to be making the news much lately) as Assad's troops and secret police accelerate their departure, with their tails between their legs, under pressure from the soft speech of our President, the big stick he probably won't even have to use on Syria, and the huge prodemocracy demonstrations they're calling the 'Cedar Revolution'. (There's something the United Nations is good for, by the way: people talk a lot there in order to sound important, and sometimes they even write things down. Back in September 2004, when the insurgency in Iraq was going strong and it looked like we'd be bogged down in Iraq and never get back on the offensive in the War on Terror, the French were running off at the mouth with words they never expected to have to back up, but some smart American was actually listening (bless him for staying awake when France speaks) and got them to sign a document, Resolution 1559, calling on Syria to leave Lebanon. Who knew? I sure didn't hear about it. Surely the Syrians weren't going to take it seriously, hey, it was only the U.N. But a Lebanese patriot named Hariri heard about it, thought, here's my chance, resigned his position and started calling on Syria to get out. Still no big problem for the Syrians, their troops in Lebanon comfortably outnumbered the Lebanese Army (which, along with Lebanese politics, they controlled with their secret police), and America's hands were still tied by the insurgency in Iraq. True, they had no credible substitute for their current puppet 'Lebanese President' whose term was running out, so they just extended the term of the current puppet (unconstitutionally) and tried to assassinate one of Hariri's associates to keep the rest of them intimidated. Then came President Bush's second Inaugural Address, the media went wild accusing him of wanting to be the 'World's Policeman', saying, what, you are going to use military force to support any prodemocracy movement in the whole world? The antiAmerican Left was scandalized at this 'breach of international norms', this unilateralism, this, this... well, I'd call it the use of certain SELF-EVIDENT TRUTHS as the basis of a practical foreign policy, but the Left had lots of other things to call it, none good. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure I never heard our President back down one bit, he just let the Left scream itself hoarse, and by the time their voices recovered, they had something else to rant about.
And then came 30 January, and the Iraqis voted. I hope every good Republican already knows plenty about that, so I won't go into it, except to say that suddenly it was obvious to everyone (except most leftists) that the insurgency in Iraq had failed, and a time would soon come when President Bush could decide which took fewer troops, pacifying Iraq alone, or pacifying Iraq AND the insurgents' armory, treasury, and sanctuary, Syria, simultaneously. Now, the Syrians aren't leftists (they just get plenty of sympathy from every antiAmerican group around the world because they're vocally antiAmerican, too), in fact, their Baathist party traces its heritage directly back to Nazi efforts to build an antiWestern fifth column in Egypt during World War II, so they understood that their position had suddenly weakened considerably. They had Hariri to the west stirring up Lebanese nationalism and actually getting some press coverage even in France by pointing out that Syria had made a naked anticonstitutional power grab by extending the term of the 'President', and to their east Iraqis were stepping up, defying and turning in insurgents, streaming into the Army, National Guard, and police forces, freeing up American troops, while President Bush was smirking (oh, how the leftists love to point out that smirk! Me, I like to see it, it is as if MY President was saying directly to me, "I've got the answer") and softly telling Syria it should stop supporting terrorism.
So this was the critical point for revolution vs. 'stability' in the Middle East, and it shows the appropriateness of the President's long-term strategy for winning the War on Terror. Remember how the Left loves to shriek that the invasion of Iraq had nothing to do with the War on Terror, there were no WMDs in Iraq, this was an optional and not a necessary war, we could have waited, given the inspectors more time, etc.? I don't think any of that was important to the President. Sure, he thought there were WMDs there, and getting them out of Saddam's hands would be a good bonus, but his thinking was more direct: America is at war, we must stay on the offensive (because a 'Fortress America' can't make itself safe from individual fanatics without curtailing civil liberties to a degree Americans would never accept), the CIA, FBI, and State Department (to the extent that the State Department ever supports a Republican president) were gearing up for a long-term war on Al Qaeda cells and finances, and most of our military was going to sit idle? (Leaving lots of troops in Afghanistan would have been a waste; you can't use huge armored formations to chase small units through mountainous terrain (that's why DOD Secretary Rumsfeld has been pushing 'transformation' all this time, to make the military more agile), and we couldn't send any troops at all into Pakistan without embarrassing President Musharraf, who has enough problems with his own Muslim radicals.)
The way forward was pretty clear even to me: invade a Muslim nation, preferrably an influential Arab one with a large, educated population that wasn't too mountainous. And then do our best to stay out of the way while they reshaped their nation, with all the Muslim world watching. They'd have to build a new government to maintain order, and they'd have to build a legitimate, popular government (or we would just suppress it easily, being right there), and best of all, they'd have to develop an ARAB governing philosophy which could combat Islamic terrorism, because they'd have to build their new government while under siege by the same radical Islamic elements we were at war with; the radicals would have to come out and fight our army, and they'd have to stay and fight the new government, too, or be exposed as a dead end in Muslim philosophy, unable to win a war of ideas or hold territory. Even I knew the Arabs would get it right eventually (I actually expected we'd have to set up forts in the desert and let them experience anarchy for a while, and sweep away five or six failed governments first), but our President was right in his Second Inaugural: people will choose freedom when they get a chance, and they realized they had that chance on their first try!
Iraq was a perfect target: we were already sort of there, patrolling the no-fly zones to protect the friendly Kurds in the north, Saddam was regularly shooting at our planes anyway, Iraq is historically second to none in influence in Muslim culture, why, they even had some experience with democracy, a weak fragile democracy lasting only from about 1920 to 1950, true, but in the Middle East, that is a comparatively GOOD record. Best of all, all the diplomacy had already been done, you'd think... 16 Security Council Resolutions, and Saddam was still cheating and obfuscating and defiant. Most of his people hated him, all his fellow Arab states feared and loathed him, no one would regret his dispatch to the ashbin of history. So we finished the diplomacy with that 17th Resolution, a clear ultimatum, in diplomatic terms. Then came the whole sad story of Chiraq and de Villepin stabbing Colin Powell in the back and organizing the Security council against an 18th Resolution, and maintaining that 'serious consequences' in the 17th Resolution didn't mean military force. I won't go into that here; suffice it to say that everyone with half a brain knew that Saddam Hussein was an outlaw and we (or anyone else) had a right to take him down, unilaterally or not. (And by the way, I expect I or any other veteran would've approved all the sleep deprivation or bright lights necessary to get from him the truth about the fate of M. Scott Speicher, the still-missing pilot we think Saddam was holding after the first Gulf War.)
So the critical point came after the January 30th vote in Iraq: would a prodemocracy movement spread in the Middle East? President Bush's assertion that the Iraqi people would stand up had been borne out, but could neighboring nations turn on their illegitimate dictators? The answer is, yes, eventually. Any little sign of weakness or misstep by those dictators will be magnified by the world's scrutiny, and once they slip, they have no legitimacy to fall back on when the landslide begins against them. Hosni Mubarak in Egypt slipped at least to some degree, arresting a street demonstration leader and having to back down and promise real elections when the Secretary Rice put the heat on him by cancelling a trip to Egypt, but I don't know much about the details on this and I want to get back to Bashar al-Assad and HIS slipup, because it has to do with opthamology.
Bashar's father, you see, was the famous Hafez al-Assad, who with Saddam set the standard for maintaining power and repressing a whole nation with only a small power base of one's own. We've all heard how Saddam kept the power in Iraq in Sunni Arab hands even though Iraq is about 20% Sunni Arab, 20% Sunni Kurd, and 60% Shiite Arab. But the Assads were managing it with an even smaller demographic base: they're Alawites, members of a minority culture which comprises only about 10% of Syria's population. So they have to be very good at repression of democracy. Hafez was very good at it. He's the man who gave the name to "Hama Rules", which the blogosphere uses to describe the power of the state in the Arab world, the delimiting factor is, "are you capable of playing by Hama Rules, or not?" The implication is that the Bush Administration was going to have to be able to use naked violence to get credibility in the Middle East. Hama was a small city in Syria which revolted against Hafez al-Assad, and he surrounded it and pounded it to rubble with artillery, killing 20,000 people and in effect saying, "we play for keeps around here." Thing is, Hafez had two sons, one he was grooming to succeed him, and one that he allowed to go off to Europe and study opthamology. When the elder son died (I think it was given out as being a traffic accident, but cause of death of political figures in the Middle East is a very political matter; people who one might think could have been assassinated or murdered by secret police get "killed in traffic accidents" suspiciously often), Hafez had to call the younger son back to be his heir apparent, and he didn't have enough time, by all accounts, before his own death to retrain Bashar in statecraft and "Hama Rules".
So there was an opthamologist running Syria, and all his subordinates were seriously worried about Syria's position after the Iraqi vote. Bashar might have stepped into his father's shoes and shown himself to be a born dictator like his father and, with skill or luck, secured his position, but having spent most of his life preparing to fix eyes, the odds weren't on his side. And he did screw up. He either allowed paniced subordinates to kill Hariri, or he had him killed himself (no one in Lebanon, outside of maybe Hezbollah, takes seriously allegations from the 'blame Israel' crowd that the Mossad killed Hariri in an incredibly subtle play to promote Lebanese democracy by killing its leading proponent). Hariri's death is what brought 1.3 million Lebanese (out of a population of 3.4 million) into the streets to demand Syria withdraw from Lebanon and take its secret police with 'em, and it is working!
Here's some more impact of opthamology on the situation in Lebanon: it is a great time (for males at least) to have good vision in Lebanon. I'm trying to get into this blog community, and one common thread running through every right-wing blog on the net these days seems to be headlines reading, "Hot Chicks March for Freedom in Lebanon" or the like, with pictures of same. I'm not going to try and put pictures here, but I'll link to some
Now we come to my third opthamology point for today. I recently became aware that NC House Speaker Jim Black is an opthamologist. A newspaper I read, can't remember if it was the News and Observer or our own Roanoke Rapids Daily Herald, had nice pictures of him actually working with patients. As I said way back at the beginning of this post (you've forgotten, haven't you? I need an editor to combat my long-windedness), I think doctors are generally good people. Certainly I don't mean to imply that the study of opthamology can turn one into a bloodthirsty dictator like Bashar al-Assad, or cause him to brutally oppress people when he only has, for instance, 49% of the NC House vote on his side yet runs things anyway, I just thought it was interesting. (My psychologist told me I'd best keep my parallel-drawing in check lest people think I was a wild-eyed-black-helicopter-paranoid. I know sometimes my satire and irony is too subtle.) Today my beef with our Speaker/opthamologist is just with his organizing a committee of lottery proponents to draft a bill authorizing a state lottery and get it voted on next week. Some people are saying that creating a committee only of PRO-lottery politicians and having them meet behind closed doors to write the bill is antidemocratic, since no one will know how they come to decisions no matter how good their eyesight might be, because of the closed doors, you know. Personally, I don't see the sense in demanding that people who are going to vote against a lottery anyway have input into the bill's drafting, but that's just me, maybe I'll learn better. I plan on writing more about why I oppose a lottery some time soon, but for now I just want to make a suggestion for the bill-drafting committee: absolutely keep it behind closed doors. For that matter, get all the pro-lottery lobbyists in there too, to make sure they can help with their input. Close the doors securely, and let them have, maybe once a week or once a month, a drawing where the winner gets to come OUT of their meeting room. And pipe in, every 10 or 15 minutes, a 30-second ad telling them that lottery players drive around with better-looking women in their convertibles than non-lottery-players, and lottery players are much more likely to burst into happy song-and-dance routines at their local convenience stores than dour non-lottery players, you know, things like you see all day every day on TV in lottery states (can you tell I lived in Maryland before I retired to NC?).
So I'll end this post, and hope to see what, if anything, people found interesting or provocative in it. And for those who may say I'm implying that Jim Black is a wicked behind-the-scenes power broker for a minority regime like Bashar al-Assad is, I may have to point out that this post can also be interpreted as a call for Bashar al-Assad to be brought up in criminal court for murder rather than just sued in civil court, or as a rallying cry for more pretty young ladies to turn out for lottery protest marches. Me, I'd like to talk to anyone who agrees with any of those three propositions. The Halifax County Republican Party needs YOU!
