Barroom brawlers believe that whoever throws the first punch
is legally responsible for whatever ensues.
American journalists, who are oh so anxious to please media owners,
don't mention that for most guys the sucker punch is universally regarded as a
despicable tactic that even gangsters, grifters, and lowlifes (who wear
wife-beater T-shirts?) consider dishonorable.
George W. Bush, who either didn't have the experience to know about or chose to cavalierly disregard that example of barroom etiquette, got the USA to go along with some convoluted logic that gave a sucker punch the eloquent sounding label of pre-emptive strike and took the country to war.
Now, Obama is using the fact that Bush set a precedent and the result is that the topic can be dispensed with via a late night vote that authorizes funds to bomb Syria.
Statistics regarding the number of people who have been shot by a police officer have risen dramatically this year. It is always reported that the policeman feared for his life because a suspect was reaching for the officer's gun. Isn't it time for a trend-spotting story or two in the national media about this statistical phenomenon? Some cynics regard the shootings as an example of using a bullet to deliver a sucker punch.
We would really rather be writing about other more innocuous topics and not be the point man for criticizing American Foreign Policy for looking like an example of the sucker punch tactic on a national scale.
We read recently a column by Maureen Dowd about a nasty encounter with marijuana and then learned that California may get a new chance to vote to legalize recreational pot via the initiative process. We did a quick bit of online searching for pot news and found out that Rolling Stone magazine was reporting that Willie Nelson had offered Ms. Dowd with "ground control" for a much better retry of her marijuana experience. He offered to provide a better environment for such a repeat pot experiment via the congenial setting aboard his tour bus.
For any other columnist such an offer would be the opportunity of a lifetime to write a historic report that would launch the writer into the level of columnist super-star and probably produce a book deal, but because she has published several books and has a steady gig on the New York Time roster of Op-Ed Page pundits, it seems that she has not opted for a carpe diem response the offer.
She might even get an entire column's worth of information by asking him what honky-tonk habitues think of sucker punches and any link to America's foreign policy.
Meanwhile, the World's Laziest Journalist has to struggle with the attempt to come up with either a unique topic or new, logical, perceptive, and and/or insightful, comments on something that has escaped the notice of all the other columnists in the United States.
As September of 2014 was drawing to a close, we were considering writing a column about the death of James Dean or Banned Book week, but as they said in the Sixties, nostalgia isn't what it used to be.
We know that these are disturbing times because recently we went to Half Price Books in Berkeley and learned that the Cliff Notes guides for both "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" and "On the Road," are MIA from their list of available titles.
We had intended to write a sports oriented column urging the NFL to can Goodell and replace him with Donald Sterling, who is available for a management consultant gig in the sports world.
An oil company refining facility was bombed this week as part of the ISIS eradication program and that made us wonder if the price of gas would be increased in California this weekend with the destroyed targets in Syria being cited as the explanation.
One of the top reasons for living in Berkeley is the fact that it provides the best used book shopping experience this side of Book Row of America and we fully intend to write a column on that topic . . . some day.
After getting a bargain basement copy of "The Road Movie Book," we intended to do a review full of lavish praise because it was knowledgeable about a topic we appreciate and because it hipped us to the film "Wild Boys of the Road," which preceded "Easy Rider," by almost four decades. We had just acquired a copy of "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls," by Peter Biskind, and thought that could be the keystone for a great column.
Someday we'll do a column on possibility that Obama is a Judas goat leading the Democrats to acceptance of the restoration of the Bush Dynasty via JEB as the Republican nominee to succeed him.
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