Since there’s only a few hours left for this year to torture us all, let’s assess the damage before we pat this one on the fanny and send it off to the place that all bad years go to live.
This one was worse than most…..for nearly everybody. That’s what constitutes a truly bad year. Certain years may gang up on this person or that, but when one comes in and spells disaster for all, then you’ve got a whopping one for the ages. That’s what 2008 was.
2008 was so bad, it was damn near ridiculous. Let’s go through some of them, starting with things that in 2007 you would have called someone crazy if they had told you we were destined to witness or experience in the coming year.
1. Hillary Clinton did not get the Democratic nomination for president, nor did she become president. As far back as a few years ago, Miss Hillary reportedly had such a substantial war chest and lead on all other comers that she was supposed to be a shoo-in. It was hers to lose. And….she lost it.
She and some pundits might try to lay the blame at her staff’s unraveling at inopportune times, but it all comes back to her. She picked them. They followed her lead.
It was all as I expected. Hillary Clinton does not hold up to close inspection. Her arrogance, given a chance to show, which it always will in a protracted presidential campaign, turned off just enough people that a relative newcomer to the national stage slipped right around her. Then she hung on for so long in the primary when she had no chance of winning, that she allowed the severely weakened and inept Republicans to pull even and make it a race. She made a sense of entitlement look as if it were invented by white women.
2. Bill Clinton’s posturing during the primary on his wife’s behalf made one wonder if he really ever had any political savvy. He often looked so eager and out-of-control that he looked like last decade’s show dog who wanted more than anything else to jump into the ring to show the others how it’s done. When he wasn’t doing that, he was insulting a whole race of people, which formerly claimed him as their own.
3. But for the All-Round Political Tin Ear, the prize goes to the Republican candidates for president. All of them. Let’s see. We had a Mormon who looked so good and switched his beliefs so often that even his own party didn’t like him. There was the Arkansas ex-governor who alternated between telling inappropriate jokes and speaking like a man who was lining up Christian mullahs to take over the country.
A special case was was Rudy Guliani, who separated himself from the pack in a number of ways, first by cleaning up New York City and then behaving like a leader during 9/11, something George W. Bush couldn’t quite manage for a couple of days. But then, there was the matter of Guliani in those videos in which he appeared in dresses, make-up, and ladies wigs. Did he really think those wouldn’t surface? For a while there, it looked as if the race would be between Guliani and Hillary Clinton and the one least likely to show up in a dress was Hillary.
John McCain shot himself in the foot so many times that he nearly sank his campaign midway through the primary process. But for sheer audacity, my favorite Republican candidate was Fred Thompson. Thompson showed up, well, he never quite showed up, which was the problem. Thompson, not only ran while being in full bore cancer treatment, but his most recent gig was as an actor. “I used to be a lawyer and a politician and now I play one on TV.” He was as wooden a candidate as he is an actor, and the “Law and Order” people ought to be taken to the woodshed for yanking the wonderful Dianne Wiest and inserting the teleprompter-addicted Thompson in her place. Thompson’s campaign philosophy was “Show me my mark. Give me my line. Call me when you’re ready for my close up in the Oval Office.”
It’s little wonder that old, and I do mean old, warrior John McCain bested this bunch for the nomination, not that he honored himself in any way other than picking a sorry running mate, stumbling around during the debates, and single-handedly summoning the ghosts of both “Grumpy Old Men,” and ruining a perfectly good word like “maverick” from overuse. But more about Senator McCain later.
4. The Democrats had their share of screw-ups and yawns too. Joe Biden nearly bored everyone to death. Chris Dodd, a good and longtime legislator with a nice record never excited. Dennis Kucinich looked like an elf in a suit and kept getting himself entangled in questions about what that UFO he saw looked like.
Then there was John Edwards, who emerged as the biggest hypocrite since Henry Hyde or Eliot Spitzer. His public face spouted concern for the poor and love of family, especially his wife who was fighting her second and terminal battle with cancer. All the while, Edwards was living in one of the biggest most outlandish houses in the country and messing around with a younger videographer on his campaign.
When he was caught, Edwards confessed, though denied that the resulting baby was his. He did, though, go to see the woman and her baby, in whose bank account was suddenly infused with a great deal of cash. The man who was named as the father on the birth certificate was an Edwards campaign operative and friend who once professed that he’d “take a bullet for John Edwards.”
5. The Sex Scandal Hall of Shame Award goes to former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer. Spitzer, a former prosecuting attorney who specialized in prosecuting prostitution cases, especially when they featured well-known, well-placed or well-heeled customers, found himself named as Client #9. He may have been Client #9, but he was John #1.
Spitzer was a busy boy. He was arrested for being on the receiving end of a prostitution ring and had to resign his office. The saddest part of this whole tawdry episode was the look on his wife Silda’s face as she stood up beside him during his resignation news conference. It was a look of pure disillusionment and humiliation.
Just once, I wish that one of these women would stop the proceedings and either turn and whack her hubby across the face with a fish or tell him and all the assembled, “Nope. Not going to do this. You’re on your own, Buster.” I wish it had been Silda.
6. John McCain was a spectacle in his own right. His campaign should be studied by political science students as a case study in how not to do it. First, his campaign for president nearly folded out of incompetence and financial problems, not a good sign in a potential commander-in-chief. Then he let slip that he didn’t quite know how many houses he and his Stepford Wife had.
He tried to keep selling himself as a war hero, and he did survive five years in a prison camp in Vietnam. But he never quite explained successfully how that made him presidential material nor did he ever mention that of his five airplane crack-ups, in four of them, including the one that resulted in his capture, the planes were shot out from under him. In most cases, Navy fliers lose one plane and that’s it for their flying days, but McCain’s father and grandfather were both admirals, so I guess that entitled him to keep flying and then to run for president.
There’s that word again….”entitled.” I’m not sure if it should be the word of the year, but it sure is in the running with “hubris” and “greed.”
7. Sarah Palin got foisted on the American consciousness by John McCain when he named her as his running mate. This was after an hour or so of his interviewing her on the banks of a river. Her qualifications: she was the governor of our least populated state in the Union, she was cute, she had a big family that included a baby that was a special needs child, she had good legs. And er…..that was it.
8. This Palin woman duped the McCain people by not telling them that she had a pregnant 17-year-old daughter until the annoucement was made of her being on the ticket. The McCain campaign claimed later that they knew ahead of time about young Bristol Palin’s preganancy. Sure they did. If so, then they had lost their collective minds.
Then Gov. Palin duped them into springing for $150,000 in clothes for her and the family to run in. But apparently this is nothing to people used to seeing the prime candidate’s wife show up at the big moment in the Republican convention wearing a $300,000 outfit. Yeah, that represents the “real” America. Right.
9. Lest we forget that this was George W. Bush’s final turn around the world stage, let’s try to remember some of his finer moments. He continued to come forth throughout the year as bad economic news came to the fore and tell us that the economy was sound. The Bear Stearns debacle was just a little blip. “We’ve got it all under control now.” Congress and the financial markets weren’t so sure, but W. was confident enough to take his month long summer hiatus in Crawford while Wall Street was about to burn.
Then when the climate heaved and spewed once more as when Hurricanes Gustav and Ike hit Texas - Texas! - he did just what he did during Katrina. He said it was well in hand and he took a powder. Coastal Texas is still awash in debris and they are still finding bodies. That’s our boy!
10. There was more bad news from the Iraq War. Despite everyone’s hopefulness over the surge (not as many of our people are being killed and maimed as they had been previously), they were still being killed and maimed and the government of Iraq didn’t appear to be any more eager to take over the mess we had made and to try to step in and straighten it out themselves.
11. Then in mid-September the bottom fell out and the Bush Administration nationalized the banks. Yes, they did, just like a Communist country. Think about that for a moment. The federal government nationalized the banks. They can call it what they want, but that is what it was.
In between massive bail-outs of banks and insurance companies, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke decided to let Lehman Brothers fall through the cracks. Then they bailed-out insurance giant AIG. Craziness followed. By the end of the week the economy was in free-fall and it hasn’t stopped. Hasn’t been this bad since the Great Depression.
Of course, the banks took the money that Paulson and Company threw at it with no plan for oversight and they ran. The people who held those bad mortgages have yet been offered a bail-out or help to stay in their homes, so we suddenly have a subclass of homeless middle-class people, increasing joblessness, etc.
It was so bad that when Congress hauled all of the suspects in for a “What the Hell happened and what did you say you were going to do about it?” moment, they summoned the former Teflon Fed chairman Alan Greenspan. Greenspan was brilliant. He looked at them all and said something like this, “You mean everything we’ve been doing since Reagan was destined to bring us to the point of economic collapse? Who knew?” Great job, guys!
So what we’ve got is an administration out of touch and out of ideas. A president who thinks everything is hunky dory. A VP who does a great Darth Vader impression and thinks that a snappy comeback to legitimate questions about whether his part in the Iraq War, Guantanamo, prisoner torture, spying on Americans, rendition, and oh so many other delights was a snarling, “So What!” Now is this an America we can be proud of?
12. It was so bad that the majority of people in the United States finally shrugged along about November 4 and collectively sighed, “Well, this Obama guy sure can’t make it any worse. Let’s try him!” And for the first time a Black man with a Muslim name was elected President of the United States.
It doesn’t matter who you voted for, your participation in taking back your country was a high water mark in American history. The scene in Grant Park in Chicago with Obama, his family, and the multitudes was inspiring enough to bring tears to many across the country.
And John McCain never looked or sounded so much like a statesman as when delivering his wonderful concession speech. It truly looked like a new day, and we could all use one.
Make no mistake about this incoming president. He may have been the best candidate. He may have run a brilliant campaign. But the reason Barack Obama is cruising toward his inauguration is that the other guys screwed it all up so much that the electorate was desperate for somebody, anybody, who looked and sounded different from the Bush gang.
After eight years it became obvious to all but the most deluded that George W. and his administration had made the administrations of U. S. Grant and Millard Fillmore look downright whiz-bang competent.
13. Also adding to our end-of-year entertainment, and who can forget it, was the sight of one of George W.’s infrequent but always showboating turns in Iraq when an angry, frustrated, Middle Eastern journalist hurled his shoes at W’s head. The whole episode wound up played on an endless tape loop and became one of the funniest sight gags of the year with Bush bobbing and weaving, all with that perpetually goofy look on his face. Then he showed how wrong he can be by stating that he wasn’t nonplussed, and the shoe-throwing incident was all one man’s grab for attention. Huh?
14. While we’re on the funny bits, some of them funny because you had to laugh or else you’d cry, we lead with Tina Fey’s star-making, dead-on impression of the surprise candidate for vice president on the Republican ticket, Sarah Palin. Her Palin was so spot-on that when they once appeared on screen together on Saturday Night Live, viewers had to stare at the set for a second or two to see which one really was which.
Fey’s genius was to use Palin’s own words to skewer her. Every thinking person in American had to be wondering through their laughter, “Can the country really afford to have another person as dumb and deluded as this one attempt to lead the country?” The final answer was a resounding “No!” and in large part we have to thank Tina Fey and her equally talented partner-in-crime, Amy Poeller.
15. China took it’s chance to shine in the Summer Olympics and turned it into a bid to crack-down on Tibet and on dissenters at home. Then they gave us a spell-binding opening that seemed to say, “Pay attention, World! We have all of these people. They all have a drum and they know how to use it. We think nothing of taking little girls under the age of 10 and presenting them as our teenage gymnastics team, and even less of ripping the heart from a 7-year-old singer who’s not cute enough and putting in her place a cuter lip-syncher. Do not provoke us!”
And what could be more stirring than Michael Phelps with his little boy face and his big boy physique? The sight of him standing after a race with the top of his skin tight swimsuit dropped and threatening to reveal even more of Phelp’s personality was particularly stirring. And worrisome. Phelps once and for all proved that freakishly long arms and huge feet are not a deterrant to success. If you weren’t screaming as loudly as his mother for him to win in those last two races, then you have no soul.
And while we’re on the subject of the crossroads of athletics and polictics, here’s one for the books. After their final win, the U.S. women’s beach volleyball duo met with President Bush. One of the gals offered W. her butt for a congratulatory pat….and he did it! Now that’s class, isn’t it?
As for pastimes, such as movies, music, and TV, I hope I haven’t seen the best movie of the year yet. None that I’ve watched so far measure up enough to even be in the Best Movie category. I do have a favorite for best movie performance of the year and that is Heath Ledger as The Joker in “The Dark Knight.”
Television just gets worse and worse with more and more channels to choose from. I still think that cable’s “The First 48″ is the best thing on the tube. Tina Fey’s “30 Rock” is terrific. “The Closer” with Kyra Sedgwick is still a fine way to spend an hour. “Law and Order,” in all its incarnations remains highly watchable.
In the realm of music, I’ve sort of fallen off the bandwagon. I listen to an extraordinary amount of music, but most of it is from bygone eras. I’ve tried the younger acts, but find them wanting. My favorite new musical finds of the year are hardly newcomers, just new to me. Betty Lavette is stunning and versatile. I love Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings. The Dap-Kings backed up Amy Winehouse in her huge debut album and with Jones fronting them, it’s as good as the old soul music out of the Stax-Volt Studio in Memphis.
I spent some time in New York City this year seeing some great musicals, “South Pacific,” “Gypsy,” and “Spamalot.” Sadly, both “Gypsy” and “Spamalot” are closing in January due to the downturn in the economy. Don’t miss seeing these shows and the terrific “South Pacific” while you still can.
On the personal front, I weathered the world’s longest, most stubborn urinary tract infection at the first of the year while husband Bill waited for the hole in his leg from last year’s surgery to heal up. There were broken toes and a strained back which ruined our plans to turn ourselves into the next Fred and Ginger. We had to drop ballroom dancing lessons.
For bad news, to me nothing compares to the news that one of my beloved sisters has leukemia. She is in treatment and doing fine, but has nagging peripheral problems, some of them very serious. We hope that the coming year brings nothing but good health, for everybody.
The bad economy and resulting massive changes in employment prospects hit my immediate family hard. We are all waiting for the other shoe to drop. My speculation on agricultural futures is focused solely on the price of sweet potato slips and turnip seed.
We had bad trips and good trips. We started some things that have worked out, like our blogs. We’ve met some nice people as a result and look forward to corresponding with even more.
To everyone who to took the time to read this blog this year and especially to those who commented, thank you so much. I don’t need much encouragement, but it is nice occasionally.
I wish you all a Happy New Year in 2009. Good Lord, how I wish that.