News Briefs – Volume XXV
News briefs are a collection of interesting news stories…
Brief 1: Never content to accept a win, special interest groups (perhaps the bane of our society) have already begun to dissect America’s victory when a team of soldiers killed Osama. The Onondaga Indian tribe released a statement criticizing the use of the code name “Geronimo” for bin Laden,
“Think of the outcry if they had used any other ethnic group’s hero. Geronimo bravely and heroically defended his homeland and his people, eventually surrendering and living out the rest of his days peacefully, if in captivity…Geronimo is arguably the most recognized Native American name in the world and this comparison only serves to perpetuate negative stereotypes about our people…Why would that be honorable to us? All they know is just cowboys and Indians, the stuff they saw on TV.”
Whether you want to call it a “war on terror” as George W. Bush would or an “overseas contingency operation” as our current president prefers, we are at war. At least those who are waging battle against us are at war. I am not sure that politicians in Washington are at war or that the general public quite feels the war. This war almost came home to us again on Christmas Day with a Nigerian terrorist.
I had thought about the framework for this posting for a little while, but only recently found the hook that I wanted to use. I was checking in on Facebook and noticed a posting from a friend of a friend ”liking” a photograph [that actually makes sense if you use facebook] of President Obama and his family returning from their Hawaiian vacation. Many of the friends posted comments and since I surmise from the photograph that most of these folks are young I was not too surprised at the comments.
A month ago Costco featured former VP, Al Gore, on their magazine cover. Many members of the warehouse club expressed our displeasure with both the free publicity for Gore (he was hawking a book) and the shot the editor David Fuller seemed to take at Glenn Beck who was charged by Costco for the same privilege to hawk his book. The second of these issues is what 