'Tis the season, of course -- which this year likely will not end until the January 20 inauguration of a presumed secular savior and the corresponding departure of the dread George Bush. The D.C. city council, giving new meaning to the term "emergency legislation," has joined in the fun with an ordinance allowing bars and clubs (a) to remain open for 24 hours between January 17 and 21, and (b) to serve booze until 5 a.m. each of those days.
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The season began on what now is known as "Black Friday" (the day after Thanksgiving), so called to connote the opening of pre-Christmas shopping in earnest. At 5 a.m., Jdimytai Damour opened the doors of a Long Island Wal-Mart to a throng of shoppers lusting to be first for bargains. Rushing in, the fools trampled about a dozen people including Damour, who will know no more holidays ever -- happy or otherwise. The shopper surge took his life.
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From the political front, three items:
(1) All told, campaigns to elect a new president and Congress cost about $5.3 billion -- this from the Center for Responsive Politics. That's a lot of green, yet according to the National Retail Federation not so much as the $6 billion Americans spent on ... Halloween.
(2) The defeat of Connecticut's Congressman Christopher Shays marks the departure of the last Republican New Englander from the House. And the Senate may not be far behind, with but a single Republican from New Hampshire and two from Maine. For congressional Republicans, New England is becoming a grim and barren land.
And, oh yes, (3), Pakistan's widower president, Asif Ali Zardari, has the hots for Sarah Palin. At the United Nations in September, he greeted her in what news reports described as an "overfriendly" way and termed her "even more gorgeous" than her pictures. President Zardari's words and actions earned him a chastising fatwa from Islamabad's Red Mosque. The mosque's Abdul Ghafar ripped Zardari for "indecent gestures, filthy remarks and repeated praise of a non-Muslim woman in a short skirt."
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Does the culture move -- does it ever improve? From the brazen and blaspheming Blago to the dubious David Letterman, the dialogue descends. Letterman? Indeed: During the campaign he confessed that John McCain's selection of Sarah Palin was the first time he ever has been aroused by a vice-presidential nominee.