The News

I know this is a tired cliche, but there is no other way, in my limited imagination, to express the feeling I get when I listen to the news. I refer to Bill Murray's role in "Groundhog Day". In this film, he awakens to a repeat of the day before. The news is the same everyday.

My day starts with NPR telling me how many people have died in Iraq. The approach is the same regardless of the news source. So many Iraq citizens died today. So many American soldiers died today. The total for the month is so much. The total since the beginning of the war is so much. Suicide bombers. Improvised Explosion Device (IED). Car bombs. Ethnic cleansing. Insurgent attack. Private armies.

These words appear in our news daily and yet we have seem to have a strange disconnect from all but the death of our own soldiers and even there the connection is tenuous. Do we disconnect from this war because it is going badly for us and we don't like to lose? Some say we were never engaged because the government deliberately shielded us from the consequence of our blunders. Or do we just want to avoid thinking about it because there seems to be no solution and the whole thing is making our collective head hut? Or is it that the situation does not permit us to live in our fantasy. To view the situation as we prefer, not as reality but as a world the way we wish it was.

Not only are we involved in a no win war, but we are being subjected to the biggest he said -she said contest of this century. I refer to our never ending run for the White House. I say this because I am convince that our commander in chief is perfectly willing to pass this dilemma on to his successor and that person will bear the burden of solving the seemingly unsolvable.

We have no other way of dealing with this situation. The President has shown that he is living in a fantasy world of his own. There are enough of his supporters that are willing to support his mental state of unreality for their own sakes if not his. We don't have a form of government that can be reformed with a simple vote of no confidence. So, we are stuck. Stuck with a game of saving face.

I long for a new headline. I settle for one that said Middle East peace talks begin in South Africa today.