Shards and fissures

I used to believe I'd automatically get myself excluded from the established press if I told the truth about inherent bias, but it is something of which most readers are suspicious of already, not without justification. Let me give a for instance. Eugene Robinson yesterday faults the administration's liberal self-righteousness in villainizing Putin's provocation in the Crimea, and indeed, Eugene's voice sates progressive outrage with the Bush Administration's 9/11 overreach. Nothing wrong with pandering to a liberal base trying to shore up a fading promise Barack Obama represented. If candidate Obama had not aspired to the presidency, one can speculate what he might have done as an inspirational leader on a more nuanced platform.

Like Robinson, I actually remember Grenada. I can neither affirm nor deny that it was an appropriate domino effect for Reagan era spheres of influence, but citing the US incursion on the petite Caribbean paradise doesn't explain Ukrainian turmoil. Neither does citing America's systemic destruction of Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq. There is a minority viewpoint which doesn't equate Putin with Mussolini, which is not to be blind to modern Russian brutality. I am not unaware of ugly brute force in Russian penal systems, but this doesn't preclude Vladimir from acting out of legitimate national interests.

In that vein, plagiarism is not quite the crime journalists make it out to be, and that was what I was driving at in my column about fraud in my Examiner piece on Glass's inability to acquire a legal license. The editorial chicks who deign to approve or reject my pieces for a certain degree of promotional status didn't like it as newsworthy commentary. Certainly their prerogative, though I stayed up all night researching it, debating a call to the bar association contact. I am on to a thesis which matters, at least in relation to veracity. I do not believe my finished product, as such, does all that badly getting me where I want to go.  

I have to watch a very young Peter Falk play a spree killer for Hitchcock again; it was an interesting rationalization. Past informing the present; Falk did not mind spoofing himself, but he never played his audience false. I miss him. He loved life, tumbling with adversity and coming out of it with a twinkle in his eye. Tassoni had the same propensity toward sardonic affection in his gaze.