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Fifty years ago today, the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Junior gave a seminal speech. This anniversary has been marked today by many, by presidents and by bloggers alike. Many have taken as their springboard for commentary the immortal phrase "I have a dream," completing it with their own new dreams of justice and righteousness for America.
"Boehner's trouble isn't even that he's trying to herd cats -- it's that he's trying to herd stupid insane cats."
This speech will forever be known as his "I Have A Dream" speech, and portions of it are as familiar to every American as F.D.R.'s "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself," J.F.K.'s "Ask not what your country can do for you," and even Abraham Lincoln's immortal "Government of the people, by the people, for the people" address on the hallowed battlefields of Gettysburg.
No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.
The problem, obviously, is that nobody's ever adequately legally defined what exactly "a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States" means. There have been no court challenges. It has become a political issue at times, but has never been adjudicated at all -- which means it is completely open to interpretation, for now. By anyone, really.
[T]he military coup that overthrew Mosadeq and his National Front cabinet was carried out under CIA direction as an act of U.S. foreign policy, conceived and approved at the highest levels of government. It was not an aggressively simplistic solution, clandestinely arrived at, but was instead an official admission [...redacted...] that normal, rational methods of international communication and commerce had failed.
The Huffington Post just highlighted the worst example of this from last Sunday's political chat shows on television, and while they did an exemplary job I feel further deconstruction is necessary. David Brooks, in discussing the online changes in the journalism business, falls back on the sneering contempt print journalists have long voiced towards the blogosphere:
While it may seem like that headline refers to yet another poll released which proves that Congress is held in lower esteem than dead bodies (dead bodies are actually now enjoying a resurgence of support, due to the proliferation of zombies in pop culture), it is in fact nothing short of literal. The U.S. Botanic Garden is currently experiencing record-breaking crowds eager to see -- or, more accurately, to smell -- the blooming "corpse flower" (or amorphophallus titanum, which -- no lie! -- translates to "giant, misshapen penis"). We merely note the event for those in the D.C. area who are inclined to visit the blossom before it shrivels up, and not to inspire any jokes in the comments or anything. I mean, how could you possibly joke about a corpse-like stench... the Nation's Capital... or "giant, misshapen penises"?
So the question is now: what will the big 2013 Silly Season issue be? Predicting such things is almost impossible, admittedly, due to the silliness factor itself -- if these things followed some sort of logical process, then we wouldn't call it Silly Season, would we? But that doesn't mean we can't have our own kind of silly fun guessing what it'll be, right? After setting the stage a bit, I'll offer up my own silly prediction at the end, and then we can all see who can manage to out-silly it in the comments.
Marijuana seems to be all over the news today, so I thought I'd just give a quick rundown of the recent developments, with a little call to action at the end.