Please pray for me. I’m a Mizzou football fan and I think our team may be bad. Worse yet, I think Kansas football may be decent and I’m stuck here on this island without any hope. It’s a sad place and plight.
I write Mizzou checks all year long so that I can get a parking spot at their games and enjoy their game day experience and we are only three weeks in and I’m afraid it’s another lost year. I’ve been part of several lost years. In fact, so many of them that they lump together into decades at this point.
Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I don’t know a single thing about football, but in the next few weeks the truth will be told and if I was a betting man, I’d bet for unwelcome news.
Maybe it’s me. Maybe I’m a bad fan.
To be honest I am a betting man, but that gets us into all sorts of legal ambiguities that I’m not willing to address in a 700-word column. Contact my lawyer for full disclosure.
I don’t really have my own lawyer. I consider lawyers to be hired on an “as needed basis.” Seems like a prudent life lesson. I try not to need one often.
President Biden declared that the pandemic was over on 60 Minutes last week. He did not clearly state if it was the pandemic of 2019 or the one in 1918, tough to tell with Uncle Joe, but I’m assuming he meant the most recent one, so congratulations, you have flattened the curve. Have a beer and tell your grandkids how you whipped the pandemic of 2019.
I’m a long time 60 Minutes watcher and was disappointed in the interview with the president. Any fool can see that the interview was edited in the favor of the president, something that has not always been the case (see Bill Clinton and Donald Trump). The lack of any significant prying into the dealings of Hunter Biden was an embarrassment for 60 Minutes. Morley Safer rolled over in his grave and smoked a heater if he saw this thing.
Hopefully, you didn’t quit reading and start celebrating the defeat of the pandemic, because it is also notable that President Biden told 60 Minutes viewers that the United States would defend Taiwan against Chinese aggression. Actually, he said US “forces” would defend Taiwan, agreeing with the question of whether US men and women would be deployed. That ain’t sending a few billion dollars to them. That’s sending your sons and daughters and friends and neighbors.
Well, within minutes of the interview, his staff “walked that back” by saying this “The US maintains ‘strategic ambiguity’ on whether American soldiers would defend Taiwan but has pledged to help equip the island to defend itself under the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979.”
Uh, this is going to get sticky folks. This has happened more than twice. So, if he’s wrong about this, maybe he’s wrong about the pandemic victory, I don’t know.
Did all that make you wonder how the 1918 pandemic ended? It did me. These are the things that keep me up at night. Anyway, here is what Time Magazine had to say about the ending of the 1918 pandemic: “There was no dramatic or memorable declaration that the end had come.”
Well, that’s sad. Looks like history says we get no celebration. That’s it. All done. Skip that celebratory beer I offered you earlier in this column and get back to work, we’ve got a recession to get started.
(Guy Speckman can be reached at gspeckman@me.com or watching reruns of Morley Safer interviews)