Newsweek
Dec 22 2007
2007: Ready, Fire, Aim
Lego blocks were banned by progressives, Che’s hair was for sale and
Sheryl Crow urged (almost) giving up toilet paper.
Dec. 31, 2007 – Jan. 7, 2008 issueUpdated: 1:02 p.m. ET Dec 22, 2007
In 2007, came the revolution. Determined to end the war in Iraq and
begin the reign of justice in America, Democrats took over Congress
and acted on the principle "ready, fire, aim." They threatened to
tell the Ottoman Empire (deceased 1922) that it should be ashamed of
itself (about Armenian genocide) and raised the minimum wage to
$5.85, which is worth less than the $5.15 minimum was worth when it
was set in 1997. Onward and upward with compassionate liberalism: The
Democrat controlled Senate flinched from making hedge fund
multi-millionaires pay more than a 15 percent tax rate. At the
year-end, there were more troops in Iraq than there were at the
year’s beginning. Although it was not yet possible to say the war was
won, it was no longer possible to say the surge was not succeeding.
The McClatchy Newspapers, with the media’s flair for discerning lead
linings on silver clouds, offered this headline: AS VIOLENCE FALLS IN
IRAQ, CEMETERY WORKERS FEEL THE PINCH.
The King of Spain told the president of Venezuela to "shut up" and 51
percent of Venezuelans seconded the motion. Rudy Giuliani said, "I
took a city that was known for pornography and licked it." Hillary
Clinton accused Barack Obama of having been ambitious in
kindergarten. Disraeli once said of Lord Russell: "If a traveler were
informed that such a man was leader of the House of Commons, he may
well begin to comprehend how the Egyptians worshipped an insect."
Mike Huckabee became a leader among Republican presidential
candidates.
In March, when a planned trek by two explorers to the North Pole,
intended to dramatize global warming, was aborted because of
temperatures 100 degrees below zero, an organizer of the
consciousness-raising venture explained that the cancellation
confirmed predictions of global warming because "one of the things we
see with global warming is unpredictability." Al Gore won the Nobel
Peace Prize that should have gone to nine-time Grammy winner Sheryl
Crow, who proposed saving the planet by limiting – to one – "how many
squares of toilet paper can be used in any one sitting." At the U.N.
global-warming conference in Bali there was Carbon Footprint Envy – the
airport did not have space to park all the private jets.
As Americans debated expanding government involvement in health care,
Britain’s National Health Service told Olive Beal she would have to
wait 18 months to get her hearing aid. She is 108.
Thanks to federal supervision of K through 12 education, when a
Johnson City, N.Y., parent complained that cheerleaders lead cheers
for the boys’ basketball team but not the girls’, the U.S. Department
of Education, citing Title IX’s requirement of sexual equality in
scholastic sports, demanded equal "promotional services." Two Los
Angeles teachers were fired after a controversy that began when one
had her class, during Black History Month, make a presentation about
Emmett Till, the Chicago 14-year-old who was tortured and murdered in
Mississippi in 1955 after his wolf whistle at a white woman. Some
students and teachers charged that school officials said Till’s
whistle could be construed as sexual harassment. In an inexplicable
(and probably temporary) spasm of good taste, public opinion sent Don
Imus packing because he said on his radio program something no more
tasteless than things he had been saying for years, to the delight of
a large (and evidently fickle) public.
A Seattle day-care center banned Lego building blocks because the
beastly children "were building their assumptions about ownership and
the social power it conveys, assumptions that mirrored those of a
class-based, capitalist society." The center reinstated Legos but
allowed the children to build only "public structures" dedicated to
"collectivity and consensus." In other lingering reverberations of
communism, scientists unearthed what they think are remains of two
more of Czar Nicholas II’s children murdered by Bolsheviks, who never
played with Legos. A Cuban exile, former CIA operative and Bay of
Pigs veteran announced plans to auction what he says is a lock of Che
Guevara’s hair taken from the corpse before burial in Bolivia.
When the Confederate monument in Montgomery, Ala., was desecrated,
was that a "hate crime"? Saying he wanted to bring Alabama "into the
20th century" – the 21st would be a bridge too far? – a legislator,
worried that "a shower head" might be illegal, moved to repeal the
state’s ban on the sale of sex toys. A mayor looked on the bright
side of his city’s high homicide rate: "It’s not good for us but it
also keeps the New Orleans brand out there." Lucky Belgium has been
without a government since June.
In 2007, for the first time, two Hispanic surnames, Garcia and
Rodriguez, were among America’s 10 most common. Paul and Teri Fields
of Michigan City, Ind., named their baby boy Wrigley.
Death, as it must to all, came to Paul Tibbets, 92. Eighty years ago,
12-year-old Paul flew with a barnstorming pilot who dropped Baby Ruth
candy bars over a Florida racetrack. In 1945, Tibbets was pilot of
the Enola Gay, the B-29 that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
"What about the shortstop Rizzuto," asked Casey Stengel long ago,
"who got nothing but daughters but throws out the left-handed hitters
in the double play." Phil Rizzuto, the oldest living Hall of Famer,
was 89. Emma Faust Tillman, 114, of Hartford, Conn., had been the
world’s oldest person. She was born during the presidency of Benjamin
Harrison. Robert Adler, 93, gave the modern world its most beloved
invention. The TV remote, of course.
From: Baghdasarian