Burnettiquette

Ten things that surprise me...or maybe not

• Levi Johnston, former almost son-in-law to Sarah & Todd Palin and father of their only grandchild, exposed his junk for Playgirl magazine.
• Playgirl magazine still exists.
• In her new book, Going Rouge Rogue, Sarah Palin bit the hands that fed her. And relax, Palin fans. I'm neither bashing the GOP or hockey moms. You should know this already. But just in case, "Bit the hand" is just a figure of speech, not a comparison to a dog or any other mammal large enough to hold a hockey stick or wear lipstick. Anywho, setting aside your political leanings, you have to believe that any reining in done by McCain staffers during last fall's presidential election was done to help McCain - and therefore Palin - win the White House. To bash those staffers now over things like diet advice, wardrobe, Saturday Night Live, and media interviews is silly.
• The first missing kid whose picture was posted on the side of a milk carton is still missing 30 years later. Not making fun. It's a tragedy. But have you ever taken even 10 seconds to look closely at one of those milk carton pics and then kept an eye out for the kid? Me either. And I used to drink a lot of milk.
• In the "It was bound to happen" category: A young athlete with big potential did not drop out of college to turn professional. Nope, Jeremy Tyler broke a record. He dropped out of high school. That's right, Tyler, a 6'11" basketball phenom, quit San Diego High School after his junior year. You can't enter the National Basketball Association draft till you're 19. So the impatient Tyler stupidly signed a 1-year $140,000 (that's thousand, not million) contract with a pro team in Haifa, Israel, so he could polish his skills and raise his profile till he becomes eligible to play in the U.S. Here's the shocker: Tyler's Haifa experiment is going very badly A good crossover dribble is great. Tyler's suck-ups (parents, friends, etc.) should have told him reading is fundamental, 'cause at the rate he's going, he may never make it to the NBA.
• The U.S. Army gave a bogus story...at first about the circumstances surrounding the murders committed at Fort Hood recently by Army Maj. Nidal Hasan - everything from who took him down, to whether he'd made any declarations involving his religion, to whether he was alive or not, following the shooting. Why?
• Andre Agassi's early-to-mid 1990s power mullet was actually a pelt. I would have written about this sooner, like right after Agassi admitted it in his new book. But the shock was too great for me.
• This one falls into the Hell-must-exist-for-people-like-this category: A woman in Texas faked breast cancer, so she could collect donations and use 'em to pay for breast implants. She got the implants.
• Carrie Prejean has more sex tapes, eight total. So if the first that she admitted to was "the biggest mistake of (her) life," as she told Sean Hannity on his Fox News Channel show, then where on the sliding scale of mistakes do the other seven tapes fall? Lesson: It's OK to take a moral stance on something, even if your stance is unpopular. If you're really principled, then popularity shouldn't phase you. On the other hand, before you take "principled" stands that involve finger-wagging, news conferences, and making the talk show rounds, you'd better make sure you don't have any closet skeletons that will negate your self-righteousness in the eyes of the general public. That's not caving in to popularity. That's just good sense. BTW, those of you, my friends, who always scold me for allegedly picking on sexually "free" people, leave me alone on this one. I'm not picking on Prejean for loving herself. But you gotta admit it was kind of very stupid to do it on tape, know the tapes were out there, and still go on a media blitz portraying herself as the picture of the new, modern, young "Christian soldier."
• This one from the Daily Mail in Britain: Universal Pictures, one of the film companies that frequently distributes to theaters worldwide movies so bad they might cause cancer, has been busted in the UK for deleting the images of African American actors Faison Love and Kali Hawk from promo posters for Couples Retreat. Asked to explain, Universal said it was innocently trying to "simplify" the poster for international audiences. Loosely translated, "simplify" in this context means "remove the scary black people so that our British audiences don't see the posters and get turned off to this film."

Iraqi Shoe-thrower

You know the story. An Iraqi journalist hurled his brogans at Pres. Bush a few days ago.

I've seen all the late night jokes. Some of 'em even made me laugh.

But even though I haven't been a fan of the outgoing president's work, this whole incident bugged me.

I mean no disrespect to the office of the presidency, when I make this analogy: But I view elected officials like my siblings in the sense that I can snap at my sibling and say things and do things to get under my sibling's skin that you can't do. And if you tried to do or say those things to my sibling, I'd strongly rebuke you. May even knock you the hell out, and my displeasure with you wouldn't necessarily be about the reasons you were angry with my sibling. We may agree on the reasons. But my sibling. Leave the scolding to me.

When I lived in Sicily as a kid, just outside Palermo, young Sicilians with whom I became friends, would make anti-American jokes. They'd poke fun of the sailors and airmen stationed on nearby U.S. Naval and Air Force bases. They'd dog the servicemen's uniforms and pick on their funny haircuts. The thing is I'd poked fun at the servicemen too. I'd made cracks about the haircuts, and so on. But my young Sicilian friends? They were knocking these guys and making more generalized anti-American jokes even as they bragged about the summer homes their parents were able to buy in Taormina, thanks to lucrative contracts they'd signed for work on those military bases.

My own sister and I did it. She's five years older than me. And when I was a kid and she was a slightly older kid she and my older cousin who lived with us at the time would torture me mercilessly. You think of the cruel nickname; they used it on me. I don't think it's a stretch to say that my sister and cousin bullied me. They won't mind me saying so. It's true. But it probably helped toughen me up.

But I digress. My point is when some other kid, some kid who wasn't family, tried to jump in the fray and bully me, my sister and cousin would put that kid in check and tell him things to the effect of "We know James is a snot nose and has cooties, but he's not your brother. We'll deal with him."

Goofy? Yes. But I'm sure you get my point. If that journalist dude wanted to yell at President Bush or stage a protest outside the hall where the president spoke, fine. But even if we weren't all informed that in Arab cultures tossing shoes is a put-down, I'd still have seen that journalist's shoe-toss as out of line.

Unpopular or not, I give Pres. Bush a few points on this one. I think I might've tried to force that guy to eat those shoes.

In Memory Of...

Today being Sept. 11th, makes it an obligation to write something about the evil terrorist attacks - conducted under the guise of religious fervor and cleansing the earth - on New York City, Washington D.C., and inadvertently Pennsylvania, seven years ago.

But I can't bring myself to write five or 10 paragraphs about how we, the American people, will overcome.

No doubt we will overcome. I mean, we've already proven we're resilient. Our economy bounced back...for a time. Our national spirit, that American attitude, that swagger that foreigners speak of - some nicely, some not so much - when trying to characterize us, came back with a vengeance.

New, defiant construction is well under way for the Freedom Tower, the replacement for the World Trade Center towers that were felled by cowards steering hijacked planes. BTW, if you follow the link and watch the video, which counts down backwards, the info on the Freedom Tower starts at the 1 minute 4 second mark.

All in all, I'd say we've done a relatively good job behaving in a way that honors the memories of those folks killed by terrorists on 9/11/01.

If I had just one wish though it would be that the brave troops who've done their duty in Iraq and maintained their mission, even at those times when the mission seemed a little unclear, be allowed to take a long break, catch their breath, and then be sent to join their fellow troops in Osama bin Laden's neighborhood so that we can finally do what the honchos in Washington promised on 9/11 - catch him!

We have sent men to the moon and had them walk on the surface, and photographed the event. We have placed in outer space a telescope so powerful in the Hubble that it has been able to see the outer reaches of our galaxy and the outskirts of the next, at least when we remember to leave the lens cap off. We have captured serial killers who left no DNA evidence and therefore, in the most literal sense of the word "hidden," were perfectly hidden...before we tracked them down. We boast of having the greatest intelligence agencies on earth. We have satellites in the sky armed with cameras that can zoom in on a pinhead, human or metal, from dozens of miles above the earth. And yet we can't find one man in a mountain range.

History has shown us that during the Vietnam War, one of the biggest criticisms of the politicians giving the orders - publicly or behind the scenes - to our military commanders was that those politicians instigated what some call our loss of that war by hamstringing the troops and not letting them fight fire with fire, so to speak.

Osama bin Laden already spit his fire.

I hope that whoever becomes the next President of the United States realizes that in order to flame him up in return, we have to take the fight to him.

That's the funny thing about a duel. The two opponents can't be in two different locations. They have to be facing one another.

So with that said, catch and crush bin Laden, and we'll never need another 9/11 tribute speech...or column, or blog post. Sure, we'll make those speeches and write those columns and posts out of respect to the dead. But The act of following through on the promise to get bin Laden, the man who started this whole mess, will speak louder than any words.