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Sometimes lack of focus is a good thing. It allows restless eyes to wander across an insane landscape of newspaper headlines that proclaim every absurdity, outrage, and shameless prevarication possible. All of which can leave a stupefied mind to scream at the universe in the way that Vizzini did in The Princess Bride, every time he failed to kill the Dread Pirate Roberts: Inconceivable!

Thus I present actual headlines culled from the actual archives of actual world-famous newspapers based on actual news reporting over the last few weeks, after going through the slight filtering process of my own deranged imagination. Are you ready? Here we go!

Iran Claims Nuclear Power for Peaceful Purposes.
Yeah, sure, right. Just like Hitler claimed that he was building all those panzer divisions so workers could car-pool in tanks to Hallmark factories. Certainly Amanide-misanthropic-jad must be offended by the fact that, oh, America is prosperous and they’re not; we’re successful and they’re not. All the time while Iran feels free to flood Iraq with suicide bombers, while Americans and Iraqis play the terror game on this side of the fifty-yard line. That famous metaphor was once used by President Reagan’s CIA director after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Why wait for their side to invade our side? Director Casey quite sensibly asked; why not instead send insurgents into Soviet territory to make their lives miserable? Why not indeed. We did and it worked. Then why aren’t we doing the same thing with the Iranians?

Inconceivable!

Oscars Smoskers.
Here’s a real first. Oscars oddballs proclaim that the best movies are those bursting with themes they imagine must be dear to the hearts of average Americans: homosexuality and horses, rampant redneck racism, anti-Americanism so thick that you couldn’t dent it with a light saber, and one blasted turnip (The Johnny Cash movie—the only one worth its weight in microchips or celluloid, or whatever they make movies with these days). Now, I admit, I didn’t actually see any of these films. Didn’t want to; more important, didn’t have to. I didn’t read Mein Kampf all the way through, either. Why not? Didn’t need to; I got the gist after a few dozen pages.

My question is: why don’t those counter-cultural airheads just vent their fetid spleens on One Really Big Movie that combines everything they must spend their every waking moment thinking about? They could call it, Camelback Fountain, where a group of homosexual Muslim fanatics strap bombs around themselves while mounted on camels to patrol a water hole against predatory oil-sucking, racist Americans. Why don’t they just do this instead of dumping more trash on American consumers? Better yet, why didn’t films like Cinderella Man and Narnia receive awards?

Inconceivable!

Administration Critics Outraged Over National Security Leaks!
Here is a contradiction in terms that boggles the mind—an oxymoron on steroids. Bush-bashers bloviated their lungs out over a trifling affair involving an administration official who apparently whispered the name of a former CIA operative—Valerie Plame—who had long since departed spookdom in favor of safer pastures at Langely. No damage to our national security was inflicted; none, nada, zero. Yet in a case where real damage took place, according to CIA Director Porter Goss, testifying before Congress, the New York Times published a story divulging how those sneaky geeks behind computer terminals at the NSA were intercepting messages (of known terrorists, no less!) in order to prevent another 9/11.

Consider this: if American journalists had applied such treasonous standards during the Second World War, they most likely would have told the Germans that the Allies had cracked their Enigma Code; or informed the Japanese that we had been listening to their messages before and since the Battle of Midway. Probably the American press would have published it in German and Japanese, in order to show that nothing as silly as a global war for the survival of civilization should compromise their efforts to display multi-cultural sensitivities or violate the civil rights of those committed to destroy us. So, in a global war against terror, why can’t journalists show the minimal level of patriotism simply by exercising their right to remain silent for the good of the country?

Inconceivable!

France Announces Aid to Hamas to Prevent Suffering.
Crying crepes! Who thunk up that one? Larry the Cable Guy could come up with a better foreign policy than that! News flash to that gang of gullible Gaullists who are now galloping to Gaza with Euro-dollars in hand: the Palestinians voted—you heard me right, voted—those guys in, the terrorists, the ones committed to the destruction of Israel, the ones for whom freedom of expression consists of perforating the air and innocent civilians with blasts from AK47s. This is not the netherworld of liberal academia, North Korea, or the mind of Harry Belafonte, where you never have to face the consequences of what you say or do; this is the real world of democratic politics. Hamas doesn’t have the reputation for doing ordinary government sort of stuff, like garbage collection and constituency service, other than ignoring the former and occasionally eliminating the latter. The democratic lesson is simple: you voted them in; you take the consequences and vote them out—simple as that. What’s hard for others to understand is why you voted them into office in the first place. Again…

Inconceivable!

These are just a sampling, of course. I didn’t mention San Francisco wanting to apply for admission to the UN to prevent a magnificent heritage of American honor from mooring in its bay. Or, Yale University starting an affirmative action admission program for terrorists; or a coven of Stalinists at Harvard expelling their President for committing thought-crime; or a dozen or so other things. Question: is there any chance the headlines will reflect any more sanity in the future?

Inconceivable!

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