Author: Greg Saunders

He seemed like a normal kid…

The oldest of three brothers raised on South L Street in Lake Worth, Florida, [Charles] Whitman attended St. Ann’s High School in Palm Beach, where he was a pitcher on the school’s baseball team. Charles and his brothers all served as altar boys at Sacred Heart Roman Catholic Church, and he chose the Confirmation name “Joseph” for himself.

At the age of 6, he had scored 138 on an IQ test. Six years later, he was among the youngest to ever achieve Eagle Scout, to his father’s delight. He took five years of piano lessons.

When Whitman was 14, and still serving as an altar boy, his Scout leader Joseph Leduc completed seminary and served as the priest of Sacred Heart for a month. Leduc was a family friend, who had accompanied Whitman and his father on several hunting trips. This was also the year that he finally overcame his habit of nervously biting his nails. At the age of 16, Whitman underwent a routine appendectomy. The same year, he was hospitalized following a motorcycle accident.

When he graduated high school, he joined the Marines…

At first Whitman did quite well in the Corps, earning a Good Conduct Medal and the Marine Corps Expeditionary Medal at Guantanomo Naval Base in Cuba. He also scored an eye opening 215 out of a possible 250 points on the shooting range, receiving a Sharpshooters Badge. Trying to prove his father wrong and be successful, Whitman applied for a Naval Enlisted Science Education Program scholarship, which would help him earn an engineering degree at a selected school. Whitman got the award, and was expected to enter Officer’s Candidate School upon the completion of his degree. In September of 1961 he enrolled at the University of Texas.

But despite all that promise, something awful happened five years later :

It’s a story that’s too familiar. Someone disturbed through emotional or physical trauma loses control and acts out a violent fantasy. It’s not because they play video games or listen to aggressive music or watch violent movies or don’t go to church. Oppressive security measures and an obsessive push to rid our culture of unpleasant imagery won’t make us safer. Despite what those desperate to finding an easy fix to a complicated (and probably unsolvable) problem would have you believe, sometimes people just snap.

This is funny. In an attempt to downplay anti-occupation protests throughout Iraq yesterday, conservative bloggers have been cherry-picking news about the protests to describe the turnout as “underwhelming” and “weak” while using this photo as proof that the demonstrations fell far short of their 3,000,000 person goal (via ThinkProgress):

To put this protest in perspective, however, let’s look at the same location four years and two days ago when the statue of Saddam Hussein was brought down :



President Bush once said of this photo-op :

“The toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue in Baghdad will be recorded, alongside the fall of the Berlin Wall, as one of the great moments in the history of liberty.”

That’s odd. From the photo it seems a little underwhelming to me.

All of the hypocrisy swirling around the Don Imus “controversy” is driving me nuts. The media as a whole (especially CNN & Fox) have no place to criticize Imus for the offensive things he said. That’s why they hire loudmouths like Imus in the first place. We’ve seen this same cycle repeat itself ad infinitum and if it’s not Imus, it’s Glenn Beck, or Nancy Grace, or Howard Stern, or those pinheads at Fox News. When all of the forced apologizes have been doled out and the boycotts lose steam, everyone knows this is a net positive for the entertainment news industry because people are going to tune in just to see what the racist asshole in the cowboy hat says next.

Forgive me for being a little premature, but I don’t see any scenario in which John McCain ends up winning in 2008. He’s done. His campaign donations were pitiful compared to his GOP and Democratic rivals. Of all the people in this race, McCain should be second only to Hillary in terms of an election machine ready to raise money and sell him to the undecideds. McCain has been chomping at the bit to be president ever since his BFF Dubya’s campaign started rumors that his daughter is the love child of a prostitute, yet with 6-7 years to get his plans together and the kind of media recognition that any other candidate would kill for, this early in the race, he should be the one kicking ass while the newcomers struggle to build up their campaigns, not the other way around.

Even worse for Maverick^TM is that his phoniness is on display more and more with each passing day. His whole persona was carefully crafted on the notion that he would use his “straight talk” to speak truth to power, that he alone is tired of the partisan games and the politics of personal destruction and any other cliches he can squeeze in there. But all the heartwarming rhetoric in the world couldn’t stop him from looking like a goon when he took his stroll through Baghdad last week. You can’t be an out-of-touch backer of an unpopular President and a modern-day Mr. Smith who can be counted on to rise above politics. Not only does it run against the script you’ve been writing, but it just makes you look pathetic.

McCain’s campaign seems convinced that it can’t win without kissing some conservative ass, yet each move is just alienating both sides further. Conservative voters have seen through McCain’s centrist act for years, which is why, despite his recent pandering to “the base”, he seems to have gotten so little support thus far in the primary season. And it’s just gonna get worse. The only question in my mind is whether he’ll be wise enough to pull the plug in the next 6 months of if he’ll have to suffer a humiliating defeat before realizing that he can’t be a partisan and a rebel at the same time.

Y’know, if I were George Bush and I had just had my ass handed to me in the elections last November, I would revert into “preserve my legacy” mode. Bush needs a signature achievement to hang his Presidency on besides a shaky economy, divided public, and Middle Eastern country transformed into Hell on Earth. He should figure out a way to declare victory and bring the troops home, work with Democrats to pass (and claim credit for) some major piece of legislation, throw the divisive members of his Administration to the wolves (Rove/Cheney), and try to reinvent himself as a moderate in an attempt to make everyone forget why they hate him. Turn back into the “guy you’d want to have a beer with” and get something done.

But that would require a level of self-awareness that George Bush has never exhibited. With the cocky demeanor that the President has adopted, he still seems to think his post-9/11 attitude will fly with a post-Iraq, post-Katrina American public. If the Bush Administration looks like a chaotic mess, it’s because George Bush has no idea that people can’t stand him. At this rate, things will only get worse for Bush and co.

Give it up, dude. You aren’t getting any more tax cuts. You aren’t going to “reform” social security. You aren’t going to overhaul the tax code. You’re losing ground on abortion, stem cells, gay marriage, and every other issue that you ran on. Your presidency is over. You can either accept that fact and try to turn lemons into lemonade or you can just sit around the Oval Office and act like a petulant little boy.