Things That Don't Quite Work

1. The dog. Egad. She is still limping around and it's breaking my heart. So, I'm going to keep her off her leg as best I can today. It seems to be a lot better than yesterday, but obviously still tender. So, we'll take it easy. But you know what this means?! No walking the dog at the park on Saturday morning! America, what is this world coming to when a girl can't go to the park with her dog? I guess I could drive her around the park, but somehow I just don't think it'd be the same. 2. Tucker Carlson's new show. It's set up like Pardon the Interruption, which I love, and so I don't think the format is the problem. It's just that one of the reasons PTI works so well is that you know that those guys know shit-tons about sports and could and would fill a whole hour talking about whether Michael Jordon or Michael Andretti would make a better hockey team manager. The format then kind of serves to help them whittle down their sizeable knowledge and opinions into negotiable chunks. But Tucker Carlson, bless his heart, just don't have the depth of knowledge or the breadth of interests to pull this off in some kind of "smashing success" fashion. It's like he reads the headlines and the first paragraphs of the top news stories and then tries to speak from an informed position. And his lackeys never call him on it (which, please, if someone on PTI was not being sharp enough, he'd get nailed on it). So, like yesterday, the reports that psychiatrists at Guantanemo were helping interrogators figure out how best to get the prisoners to open up came out. And, as they were talking about on Dan Abrams (ah, Dan Abrams), if this is true, it's a big deal because doctors are not supposed to harm the people in their care--not physically and not psychologically--even if those people are evil. This is why doctors don't administer the death penalty (I don't know if that's true; that's just what they were saying on Dan Abrams). It violates their professional ethics. So, the topic came up on Tucker Carlson, and he said, "Well, I just don't see what the problem is. So what if doctors help us figure out how to break these guys?" To which I responded, "Jesus Christ, Carlson, don't you watch your own fucking network? In the face of Dan Abrams, who is on two hours before you, discussing the ethical quagmire, you can't think of any reason, any reason at all, why psychiatrists helping interrogators figure out how to fuck with the people they're supposed to be taking care of is not a problem? Are you a moron?" And the people who are supposed to be his antagonists just sat there like "What vague, meaningless, consensus can we reach?" Seriously, can't MSNBC insist that anyone who's going to talk about the news have some knowledge of the news? Especially when that knowledge could be gleaned from watching their own station? I think the format of the show is a really good idea and could work well, if the right people were doing it, but Carlson's got to do something more than just sit there looking like the kind of guy your grandma wishes you'd date. 3. President Bush. How I love you! Okay, how I love to watch you squirm. How I love to watch Republican congress-folks demanding something from you we all know you'd be stupid to give. How I love that finally you speak the truth to the American people and we fickle nitwits who voted you in based on our love for your stupidity turn on you when you finally say something smart. Of course we can't give a timeline for pulling out of Iraq. We can't say that we'll have the forces in Iraq reduced by half by, say, August 15th or the insurgents certainly will just hang back and wait until August 16th to launch some kind of major offensive. Bush, you've gotten us in this mess, knowing that, if we didn't see it through, it'd be worse for our safety than if we hadn't done it at all. And you lied to us about why we needed to be in there. And now, now that people know you lied about the weapons of mass destruction, now that they know you have no interest, really, in catching Bin Laden, now that they know the war is going to cost and cost and cost, the one time you're telling us the truth--that we can't set a 'leave-by' date--even your fellow Republicans unofficially start their reelection campaigns by demanding that you must. Ah, sucks to be you this week. 4. But not as much as it sucks to be Bill 'The Kitten Killer' Frist, who is trying to run for president on the "I'm a Strong and Sure Leader, with Close Ties to the Christian Right" platform, and who keeps having the 'strong and sure leader' part of the platform collapse beneath him. 5. Faith Hill's new song 'Mississippi Girl.' This song starts off bad, but is almost redeemed by the chorus. But the chorus really needs to go some place--it needs an extra 'oomph', maybe a great bridge that it seems to be missing--but instead, you feel like the song is building up to something and just when the music builds to a point where you think it's just going to break wide open into a song you can like, she just starts repeating the chorus and fading into "la, la, la"s. Women, I think you know what I mean. If this song were sex, you'd be going "Oh, oh, oh" and then you'd be kind of squeezing your legs around someone's back, and then you'd be holding your breath just a little and thinking of Aragon or Aretha Franklin (or maybe Jerry Orbach. I don't know why, but thinking of Lenny Briscoe is a sure fire lift for me. Laugh if you want. I don't care), and just when the fireworks ought to be going off, it kind of fizzles. And you can't put your finger on what went wrong, but it was like you just couldn't get over that hump. Whatever needed to happen just didn't. Well, that's this song. Almost everything you need for an enjoyable song is there, but the wild abandon. Hey, maybe that's what this song needs. It needs one of those old fashioned Tanya Tucker moments where the audience is all clapping along and the musicians stop playing and everyone is singing "If I die, I may not go to Heaven. I don't know if they let cowboys in. So, if I die, then let me go to Texas, because Texas is as close as I'll get." and then the band kicks back in. Yep, that's it. This song needs some moment where it's just Faith and her fans and some hand-clapping and some singing along. It needs that moment where Faith and her fans know this whole thing is all about the special relationship between her and them. And it doesn't have that, so it doesn't quite work.