« Archives in January, 2007

New on WadeArmstrong.com: Lazy Productivity — Don’t Get Ahead of Schedule

January 29, 2007 / posted in Elsewhere / No Comments

A friend cancelled our plans to grab a drink the other day. “I have too much to do,” she explained. “Behind on all your projects, huh?” I asked her, and that’s when I got a productivity-related shock: “I’m not behind, but I’m not ahead either, and I need to be ahead.” Yes, we’re all tightly-scheduled. No, being ahead in all your projects is not the answer. In fact, the first step to becoming more productive is to stop trying to get ahead of schedule.















The Sky I Was Born Under

January 28, 2007 / posted in True Life Stories, Writing Practice / No Comments

I am from Baltimore, a place where the blackness of the night is obscured and turned pink by the city lights. Some people bemoan our loss of the night stars — astronomers with the most justification — but this soft blanket of three quarters of a million people’s porch lights and bedside lamps and flickering tvs in the den is something that is particularly, authentically, of our era. It holds in the sirens and car engines and chattering neighbors that provide the background for our reality, reflects them back at us, confines and radiates the atmosphere of the city. Perhaps I love this sky because I was born under it, perhaps I love it because it enveloped me every night. But I do love it.
It’s not that I wanted for shimmering lights in the sky as I grew up. Spring brought yellow-green fireflies, blinking in and out in front of a backdrop of gray-at-night houses and yellow-white sodium streetlamps. While fireflies leave no constellations, we’d follow these blinking dancers, laughing, our arms outstretched, as surely as any ancient Greek seafarer looked to the Milky Way. And then we’d snatch our north stars down from the sky, trapping them in glass jars and watching them slowly blink out.
High School, perhaps, was when I learned that the pink blanket of the night sky could wrap just me as easily as it could wrap the whole city. I moved my bed directly under a window on the third floor of my house. Because the hill we lived on fell away towards the back of our block of rowhouses, our basements, underground in the front, opened directly on to our backyards; my perch towered four stories above the back alley, a dormer window looking over our roof and the roof of the apartments across the alley, even further downhill.
At night I lay in my bed, my window just to my right, and lifted the venetian blinds ever so slightly to peer out over the city. Of course there was a pink sky everywhere, turning pinker as it receded south, towards Downtown, the Harbor, the Beltway, “the Block”:http://jhunix.hcf.jhu.edu/~grau_c/block.html. Only the peak of the roof of a house up the alley, and the angular exhaust and air conditioning vents of the flat-roofed apartment across it, interrupted the pink blanket. This pink turned a sudden gray at a ridge of slate roofs that themselves fell off into a sea of rounded and lush treetops, running from University Boulevard, all across Homewood and Tudor Arms, and on to Hampden. It was from here that disembodied sirens and car horns raised themselves, settling into the soft night blanket and reflecting, just a little, into my room. Every sound was a potential story, air-mailed to me by the flat pink sky that didn’t permit its escape.
I was at home under this sky. It had known me since I was born under it, it had seen me grow under its smooth arc. Los Angeles’s night sky has its own soft gray glow, silhouetting palm trees, and its own moving, flickering lights — this time airplanes headed for LAX, shinng in the sky but remaining stubbornly out of reach. But the pink, enveloping sky of Baltimore is the sky I was born under and grew up under, it’s the sky that still touches my thoughts every evening as I drift off to sleep.















Dear Drew Barrymore,

January 23, 2007 / posted in Dear So-And-So / 2 Comments

I’m very excited to see that you’ll be in “a movie this spring”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0758766/. I remember just a few years ago when I could look forward to a romantic comedy, or fun action flick, with you every summer. Those were good times, weren’t they? Those were the days when our love bloomed again.
Now, I know you didn’t know I was in love with you, but there it is: you’ve had my heart forever. I actually remember falling for you in _ET_; I never cared for that whiny Eliot, but you were a cutie. And the same age as me! It was great. My parents tell me my eyes got all big every time you came on-screen, and I know you were my favorite part of that whole film. Well, you and the flying thing.
When we both turned teenagers, you had a few more troubles than me. Of course, I understand that all of that was just because you’re a big star; I’ve never blamed you for your addictions. Frankly, when I was 14, it was kind of hot to think of a girl who got into so much trouble. Especially since I was such a goody two-shoes. Of course, I rented _Poison Ivy_ about five times, just to see you swing. And rock that red-and-black skirt.
Since you started your comeback, I’ve really loved that you’re not yet another anorexic little cookie. Sure, you were a little skinny for a while, but you look like you’re back in good shape these days. You always had the greatest curves, and you sure showed them off in the Charlie’s Angels movies. Good job.
It was a little crushing when you married Tom Green, not just because he had no talent — heck, I’m pretty talent-free too — but because he was so aggressive about showing off his total lack of talent. I couldn’t put up with him, not even for you, although I sure tried. I couldn’t abandon a woman I’d loved since I was seven, now could I?
The highlight of our relationship for me was probably when we slept together in 2000. Sure, technically you didn’t sleep with me, but I slept with you, and that’s what counts. See, I dated this girl who’d dated that bartender you were married to for about a month, and you know how you say, when you sleep with someone, you’re sleeping with everyone they’ve ever slept with? Well, that brings me on a straight path back to you, Drew, my one and only.
You’re going to be in “another movie in May”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0338216/, and I’m excited about that one too. A good chance to see you is an excellent chance to enjoy a movie. For a couple of years, while you were out of sight, I satisfied myself with Eva Mendes as my summer movie crush; I’ll have a bit of overload, what with her having “her own big blockbuster role this summer”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0259324/ too. But mostly I wanted to write this to make sure that you knew that, however much I might stare inappropriately at Eva, it’s you I love the most.
And, you know, since you’ve said you wanted to start a family, if you’d like to give me a call, I’m not single but maybe we could do dinner. Because, in my heart, I’m yours.















Days

January 23, 2007 / posted in Meta, Writing Practice / No Comments

I’ve been writing this thing for three and a half years now. I started blogging because everything I wrote sounded like a business memo, and that just wasn’t a good way to make date plans; now, I can write things that are occasionally amusing. And have long run-on sentences and snarky footnotes.[1] Yep, things are moving along.
But, as much as I’d like to complain about minor customer service errors and politics and threaten football team owners in every entry, it’s probably time I tried writing, you know, better. So here’s the plan. A friend gave me this thing, “_A Writer’s Book of Days_”:http://amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1577311000/ref=nosim/wadearmstrong-20. This book has a thing to write about for every day, and I think it would be a good idea if I tried it out. You know, to get out of my comfort zone.
I’ll keep writing about things that particularly strike me, but you can expect a good 3 posts a week that are just from out of nowhere. So, consider this entry some kind of fair warning.[2]
fn1. And let’s not even talk about how many times I can use “and” in two senteces. Grammar, pshaw!
fn2. I actually wasn’t going to write an entry about how I was going to do this, but instead was just going to write today’s assignment. Today’s assignment was “write a love letter” and I figured I’d write one to Drew Barrymore, but that pretty quickly got weird and I figured I should explain what I was doing before both of my regular readers called the men in white coats on me.















Fuck.

January 21, 2007 / posted in Sports, True Life Stories / 7 Comments

The Colts won the AFC Championship. They’re going to the Super Bowl.
The Colts are going to the Super Bowl.
This is fucking awful. Goddamn it.
I remember, when I was 7, watching TV one snowy night. Like most snowy nights, even in the city it was exceedingly dark. I don’t, however, remember it being quiet as were most snowstorms. I don’t remember what was on TV when the news broke in with the footage of the Colts leaving town. I didn’t get it; how could a football team leave town? They were the _Baltimore Colts_. This was the team I saw on TV and billboards and whose memorabilia was in my friends’ parents’ dens. Sports teams were supposed to be permanent.
But the Colts left. That was strange. That was confusing. Sure, it could have been worse — The O’s[1] were hot, with dominating pitchers like Jim Palmer and second-year player Cal Ripken, who was — get this — a _big shortstop who could hit for power_. Crazy.[2] And we loved our Orioles[3] more than we loved our Colts. This was not least because the Irsays, who owned the Colts then and now, instituted planned programs to destroy fan support for the team, such as charging players for autographs they gave fans; players, of course, signed fewer autographs. And, of course, the only remotely good QB the Irsays had managed to get on the team was Art Schlicter, who was himself a disaster.[4] The Colts were by no measure a well-run team.
Of course, Baltimore was by no measure a well-run city. By ’82, most of the White people had left town and moved 5-7 miles in order to live in the suburbs and not have to pay school taxes for Negroes. Crime was rampant. Bethlehem Steel downtown was shutting down. We were an abandoned, rusting industrial center, and everyone made sure we knew it. “You live in _the City_?” my friends would ask, credulous even though we went to a private school in the City together. It was like I lived in some ghetto.[5]
I was seven, and it didn’t make sense to me that people would disrespect my hometown. We had two “great”:http://www.thewalters.org/ “museums”:http://artbma.org/home.html/. We had one of the “first free public libraries in the country”:http://www.epfl.net/info/history/. We had a “top orchestra”:http://www.baltimoresymphony.org/, led by “one of the best conductors in the world”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergiu_Comissiona. We had “one of the country’s leading universities”:http://jhu.edu. What was possibly wrong with Baltimore?[6]
All of the parents I knew who stayed in the City loved the place, thought it was a good home. I know my parents did. But I could feel what the adults thought about the Colts’ departure — that it was some sort of statement that the doubters were right, that Baltimore was a dead city. Not good enough for a pro football team, that’s what we were.
We loved and missed our Colts. The Baltimore Colts marching band — a private association not run by the team — stayed together through my whole youth, performing at all sorts of events around the city. That kept the flame alive, and everyone I knew hated the dastardly Colts.[7] Later, when the Orioles became crappy and lost the first 21 games of the 1988 season, we were reminded how big a hole the Colts’ departure left and how much it appeared our city sucked.
During my senior year of High School, the NFL decided to add two more teams; the leading competitors to get a team were St. Louis, who had lost their Cardinals to Arizona, Baltimore, and Carolina, a football-mad part of the country with no team for hundreds of miles. It was generally agreed that Carolina would get one team, and that the other would go to St. Louis or Baltimore; all of us Baltimorons agreed that, while we hoped we won, St. Louis was also deserving and we could live with them getting a team. When the Rams moved to St. Louis, it looked like Charm City[8] could welcome its new franchise.
Imagine our shock then when Jacksonville — whose ownership group appeared to actually be broke — got a team. Again, the powers had spoken: Baltimore wasn’t a real city. We weren’t good enough.
Well, screw you, we said, we’ll just get a Canadian Football League team. And we did! They were called the Baltimore CFL Team[9], because there was only one appropriate name for them and they weren’t legally allowed to be called that. However, before each game, the announcer would welcome “your hometown Baltimore… Football Team,” with a big pause between “Baltimore” and “Football,” during which the whole stadium would yell “Colts.” The CFL Team’s owners even tried to buy the Colts name off the Irsays, but they wouldn’t sell even though Colts merchandise was, at the time, dead last in sales of all NFL teams. That was a serious fuck you.
The CFL team left when the NFL Browns moved to our city. Sort of an instance of two wrongs maybe sometimes make a right, I don’t think Baltimorons would’ve accepted the Ravens-né-Browns if Cleveland hadn’t been guaranteed a new franchise, also named the Browns, which kept all of the Browns’ old records, which was fine with us because we only wanted the Colts’ old records, which they wouldn’t let us do but which was also fine with us because all of the old Colts’ stars supported the Ravens and disowned the Indianapolis fucking Colts those heartless bastards.
Of course, the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away, and in the 1996 ALCS MLB umpires decided Baltimore wasn’t good enough to make it to the World Series and so let that punk-ass kid Jeffrey Maier reach into the field of play and grab Derek Jeter’s easy out seconds before Tony Tarasco, who was standing there waiting for the ball, could get it. It should’ve been an out by interference but instead was a home run. Sure it was only the deciding play in Game 1 but the Orioles knew it was a statement that they, like all Baltimorons, just weren’t good enough in the eyes of the rest of the country so they folded like a tent in a windstorm. It was just another reminder.
At least the Ravens won a Super Bowl before the Colts did. And Bob Irsay died painfully and slowly, if I remember correctly. That was also an upside.[10] But last week I had to watch my Ravens lose to the Colts at home in the playoffs in one of the most-hyped games ever in the city. Our great white hope was Tom Brady and his New England Patriots; although an out-of-towner rooting for the Pats is only slightly better than an out-of-towner rooting for the Yankees, there was really only one way I could root in today’s late game.
And the Pats lost in the last two minutes. And the Colts are in the Super Bowl. If Evil Rex shows up for da Bears, that’s a sure Lombardi Trophy for the hated Colts. And, let’s face it, if the super-clutch Pats can’t beat the Colts, it’ll take a lot more than Good Rex to beat them in Miami.
Now I know why my mother, who’s from Brooklyn, never reads the sports pages. Sorry, Mom, for that one time I wore that Dodgers hat.[11] Someday, when I’m President, I’ll outlaw Indianapolis, raze it to the ground, and scatter salt over its lands. And Peyton Manning? I hope you step in front of a bus.
Fuck.
fn1. That’s not a typo, that’s how they write it. I’m not entirely against apostrophes in single-letter plurals, although I can’t say I think they’re right, either.
fn2. Seriously, back then pretty much every shortstop was like David Eckstein.
fn3. Pronounced “Aryuls”
fn4. Years before Eli Manning was drafted by, and thenrefused to play for, the Chargers, John Elway was drafted by, and then refused to play for, the Colts.
fn5. And I did, if ghettos are filled with retirees and the occasional college professor or young doctor, and have cherry trees whose pink blossoms coat the sidewalk after spring thunderstorms. Actually, the latter does occur in Baltimore ghettoes. And, in fairness, I did live close enough to the ghetto that you could run there carrying a TV. You’d run east if you were Black, and west if you were White.
fn6. And what kind of a little nerd must I have been to know all these things?
fn7. Except for Ben, whose family moved to Baltimore sometime while I was in high school. He once wore a Colts hat to school, and was told by several people that his fashion choice was “dangerous.”
fn8. My hometown’s nickname, somewhat contradicted by the common saying that Baltimore “has all the charm of the North and all the efficiency of the South.”
fn9. Really!
fn10. I’m comfortable with going to hell for that thought. I’ll see ol’ Bob there.
fn11. It was cap night, and it was free, and I didn’t have any other baseball caps. I’d throw it away now except I have an unnatural attachment to objects and a consequent unwillingness to throw away something which did nothing to deserve such a fate.















Dems: Say Goodbye to the White House

January 20, 2007 / posted in Politics / 6 Comments

Well, now Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are running for President in ’08. That means that us lefties can say goodbye to the White House for probably the next 12-16 years. The decision of these two people to run in two years says awful things about the Democratic Party machinery and its long-term planning capability.[1] Obama and Hillary[2] can’t win in 2008, and, by overexposing them now, we’ll ensure that they can’t win later. It’s lose-lose and it will keep a Republican in the White House for eight years or more.
A quick look at each of the candidates individually shows why they can’t win in 2008. At least a third of the country would never vote for Hillary, short of Jesus Christ himself coming down from heaven to be her running mate. Obama is an inspiring speaker but has almost no record; his election was so recent that he hasn’t even been able to establish a strong local constituency, to say nothing of a national following. While there are advantages to being unknown and to being able to define exactly who you are, and while this is definitely year for people who are “outside the Beltway,” a lack of both local and national profile is hardly a strength.
Now, both Hillary and Obama are solid candidates. Hillary, in particular, has a powerful machine and good fund-raising capabilities. She’s likely to make it deep into the primaries and could even win the nomination. But, with 30-40% of the country unwilling to vote for her under any circumstances, can she win?
But in 8-12 years, after another Democratic President, Hillary might not be the bugaboo to conservatives that she is now. In 8-12 years, she’ll have had more time to establish her centrist credentials — and she has been very centrist — and build alliances that make her someone other than that wife of Bill Clinton who tried to nationalize healthcare.[3] Obama will have time to become well-known throughout the midwest, to introduce major legislation that can define him, and to take meaningful positions. He could even serve as a Governor, expanding his expertise and base of power. Both are young enough to wait that time — why not enter the fray with a greater chance of winning?
If we in the Democratic Party want to take and hold Congress, the states, and the White House, we need to stop sniping at targets of opportunity, as we are with hot new fads like Barack Obama. We need to have a solid strategy that finds and funds strong candidates at all levels, advancing those who are able to win at a higher level. That’s right, the Democratic Party needs a farm team.
h3. Let’s be the Yankees in the late 1990s
In the late 1990s, the Yankees went to, and won, four World Series. Now, we all hate the Yankees,[4] but we can learn something from them. The Yankees’ big streak came from two things:
* A strong farm system
* Strategic free-agent pickups
The strong farm system brought in players like Derek Jeter and Mariano Rivera, while strategic superstar pick-ups like Roger Clemens filled key spots. In contrast, my Orioles are losing these days because we overspend on mid-level free agents and fail to develop our own talent. Miguel Tejada may be a great shortstop, but he can’t win if he’s not surrounded by talent, and two years ago we gave big bucks to Sidney Ponson[5] because of one flash-in-the-pan pitching season; he turned out to be nothing but trouble and imploded.
The Dems now are being like the Orioles now. Obama had a hot ERA so he’s looking like the #1 starter, but what’s his record? Can he bring the heat next year, or in two years? If not, why are we giving him the big contract?
Instead, like the Orioles, we’re raiding our farm teams for short-term solutions, compromising our future. Two years ago, John Edwards walked away from a Senate seat that he could have held for years in order to run for President, after just one term. Of course, being in North Carolina, that seat went Republican. What kind of a strategy is that?
To win, we need to focus on our A team. In California, and in my home state of Maryland — both strongly blue — a strong slate of Democratic city and county officeholders (A ball) continually trickle up to statewide offices (AA ball) and provide a number of options for the Governor and Senate and House seats (AAA ball). In California, although we lost to Schwarzenegger, the Democratic Party was able to put forward two totally plausible candidates — a guy from AA who had risen through the A and developmental leagues (Angelides) and a hot AA free agent acquisition (Westly). Best of all, with two people leaving their statewide positions to take a run at the Governorship, we had strong enough A-ball players to keep their seats Democratic.
Having a strong farm team nationally, like we do in very blue states, will thus have two advantages:
* Provides a number of strong candidates, with built-in messages and constituencies, to run for higher office
* Ensures that we can keep the seats of the people who run for higher office
That’s a big win-win. Of course, we have to start at the City Council level to play the game this way, but that’s ok — City Council races are cheap. Throw $10k a few places and it’ll make a big difference. Which races? Ones in the cities in which we need to keep mayors. Then we need to be selective, supporting Mayors and County Administrators and the like who can move to wider office, such as State Senator or Governor. Again, it’s cheap to win a State Assembly race, but a strong Assemblyperson is a strong House member. It’ll take 25 years, but, with vision and strategy, we can find ourselves with strong candidates at every level in strategic states, able to take and hold seats that are safe not because of fancy redistricting but because of the range of viable candidates that the Party can offer.
But, for the moment, we need to realize that our current, short-term focused plan will fail. Howard Dean needs to sit down with Hillary and Obama and get them to sit down themselves, waiting for a few years to make the big run. Then he needs to sit down with solid candidates, such as Bill Richardson,[6] and get them to stand up this year.[7] Until we start having a solid, long term-focused strategy, we’ll be staying up late every election, wondering who won State Attorney General and Governor and House seats, rather than going to bed early, confident that we’re bringing the all-around game that will win. And we need to start this soon, because the Republicans won’t always have such an albatross around their party’s neck in the White House.
fn1. It should surprise nobody that Howard Dean would run an organization that was weak in planning.
fn2. I hate to come off all Republican, but “Clinton” isn’t sufficiently specific when speaking about politicians.
fn3. She didn’t. But that’s a discussion for another time.
fn4. If you don’t, then I hate you. Personally. Watch your back.
fn5. That’s Sir Sidney to you!
fn6. Bill has probably decided that he doesn’t want to face down the deep-pocketed Hillary and the charismatic Obama and therefore is sitting out this one, waiting for these two to ruin their future chances to win the Oval Office and open up the playing field for him in 2012.
fn7. Assuming that there’s another Democrat who can win the New Mexico Governorship — let’s not hobble our AAA team.















Play Time

January 18, 2007 / posted in Junior / 2 Comments

Finally, in action, this blog’s namesake:















Bugs Bunny Was Right!

January 16, 2007 / posted in Otherwise Uncategorized / 3 Comments

You probably think that what you see in cartoons is all fake. Until two nights ago, I would have agreed with you completely. Those scenes where Wile E. Coyote steps off the edge of a cliff and his body plummets to the bottom of the canyon while his face, maudlin, stares at you? Fake. The bits where the Animaniacs bounce off everything? Fake. The part where lab mice try to take over the world every night? OK, maybe not so fake. That should’ve been my hint; the cartoons… they’re all true. I know this because, two nights ago, I slipped on a banana peel.
Slipping on a banana peel is exactly what you’d think it would be like from watching Bugs Bunny. You walk unsuspectingly along the road; one foot goes out in front of the other; said foot rotates upwards in an arc; your upper body rotates backwards; your body begins to describe a circle about the axis of your belt. It’s very exciting, to say the least. Fortunately, my banana didn’t slide far enough for me to do a full gainer onto the street,[1] but it did slide enough for a passer-by to exclaim “did you just slip on a banana?” She and my companion discussed it and concluded that I was the only person they’d ever seen slip on a banana peel. It’s nice to know that I’m unique.
In my own defense, it was night and the banana had in fact gotten old and turned brown, so I fell on a dark thing on the dark ground. But what if more of the things we’ve seen on cartoons were true in real life? Can I really stick my finger in the barrel of a gun and make it blow up? If I hold a bomb up to my face, will I just end up with a blackened nose? If I’m the guy who bought said bomb from Acme, will I be pissed off because my good money didn’t create the size boom that I expected?
And what of the possiblities that come from strapping a rocket to my back and roller skates to my feet? Man, I shoud buy roller skates.
fn1. She asserted that she wouldn’t’ve found it funny if I’d actualy fallen; in contrast, I woud’ve found it much funnier. Guess which gender prefers the Three Stooges.















New on WadeArmstrong.com: iPhonalysis

January 14, 2007 / posted in Elsewhere / No Comments

I’m a geek; therefore, I’m fascinated by the iPhone. It’s an interesting product, and it says a lot about Apple’s cell phone strategy and technology. Of course, I’ve got a lot to say about that myself.















Dear George W. Bush

January 11, 2007 / posted in Politics / No Comments

Thanks for introducing the plan that’ll allow us to win the war in Iraq. I really appreciate that you’ve gotten to the heart of it and discovered that an increase of 16% in our forces is what we need to win. This simple solution really gives us victory without having to change what it is we’re doing at all, and that’s an approach that every American can appreciate.
I do have to admit, though, I wonder why inreasing our troops by 16% wasn’t something we could have done all along. As you said “[t]his time, we will have the force levels we need to hold the areas that have been cleared.” I would have though that an inability to hold the places we just cleared woud’ve been noticeable much sooner after we invaded and put our soldiers in harm’s way every day. But I realize that force levels have gone up and down during the last three years, and there’s no way you could’ve been responsible for that fluctuation. I mean, that’s an Army thing, right?
Anyway that’s just splitting hairs, because it’s really exciting to have this fresh approach. Who other than you, our fearless leader, could’ve come up with the innovative idea of moving away from building the Iraqi army, which we’ve been wasting our time on for a couple of years now, and going back to doing it ourselves like we did in the beginning? That’s pretty out-of-the box right there, boy howdy! Good thing we’re getting away from strategies that didn’t work out for us and are returning to the strategies that didn’t work out for us before that other set of strategies didn’t work out for us. Ya know?
Overall, I’m just super-impressed with the quality of the decisionmaking that led you to this super new policy. I know I’m using the word super here a lot, but, really, it’s all just so… super. So that’s the right thing to call it. I really want to say that I know you could’ve gone with one of those super-complicated concepts, like what the Iraq Study Group put forth. But we all know that you have basically one thing you can fool with in this whole little conflict here, and that’s the number of troops we have over there, and boy are you fooling with that! You’re taking it as far as it can be taken, without having to reconsider our force structure or think about a draft or anything like that, of course. ‘Cause that would just be crazy talk. Seriously, it’s just super what you’re doing, it’s like Iraq is a video game and you have a controller with one big red button on the top that says “adjust force levels” on it and you’re just pushing the stuffing out of that button.[1] Super. High score!
Let’s not forget that super thing that Condi said before Congress, that you all weren’t wedded to this strategy. That’s really the overlooked innovation here; you were so all into that last strategy that you had that you never would change it, but, revolutionarily, you’re actually prepared to move away from this new approach. Now that is a super new change! It’s like, you know, if you really believed in what you’re proposing, you’d be all into it again, but you’re breaking out of that box by not being “wedded to it.” Super! I bet we’ll see another approach just as revolutionary in a few months, like, maybe, _cutting_ our troops by 20,000. That would be really mindblowing. I bet we’ll super-confuse those insurgent guys by having a bunch of approaches that we’re not wedded to, changing them any time things look a little down. That, boss, is a high score right there! Plus, you can totally stay ahead of that annoying legislative branch by being ready to change our approach before they even get a chance to hold hearings and ask what the heck is going on and if things are working. That is definitely a high score in the ol’ book of running the US Government!
Anyway, thanks, Mr. President. This is just a super new approach, and I expect super new results. Thanks for coming up with all this super stuff for us.
fn1. Because we had over 20,000 more troops in Iraq than we do now in 2003, and during two periods in 2005. You know, when you pushed that button to adjust it up and down before. It’s probably like Dance Dance Revolution, you gotta push that button frickin fast to win, so go for it.















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