{"id":150,"date":"2002-08-06T14:35:00","date_gmt":"2002-08-06T19:35:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.illinoir.com\/wp\/?p=150"},"modified":"2010-10-20T12:29:18","modified_gmt":"2010-10-20T17:29:18","slug":"150","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.illinoir.com\/wp\/?p=150","title":{"rendered":"NPR-Related Traffic Fatalities"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I nearly lost control of my car on the way into work today. On NPR, a story about the miners trapped in that mine (of all places for miners to be trapped, eh?)<\/p>\n<p>First of all, as I predicted, they&#8217;ve gotten a movie deal. Disney&#8217;s bought the rights to make a movie about them (hopefully animated, with talking chipmunks and cave trolls) a deal which is going to make each of the 9 men $150k. The story has all the earmarkings of a great drama, and hell, these guys ain&#8217;t ever gonna go down underground again (I wouldn&#8217;t&#8230;) so you gotta be happy for them in that regard.<\/p>\n<p>But then George Bush comes on. He praises them, their courage, the courage of the folks who lead the rescue effort&#8230;. And then this is when I nearly crashed (I&#8217;m paraphrasing here&#8230;):<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;It is that sort of teamwork that is going to help our nation get past the obstacles that we face&#8230;.is going to give us the tools we need to hunt down every terrorist out there&#8230;.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>This is me, laughing my damn fool head off. Holy shit! He can turn ANYTHING into a terrorist hunt pledge drive.  I understand where he&#8217;s coming from but it seems real desperate. Figure that the terrorist hunt has largely fallen out of the public eye. The main actions in Afghanistan are long over &#8212; the US people are focused on mass violence in Israel and who&#8217;s left on Making an American Idol&#8230;or whatever&#8230;. It&#8217;s a pathetic cry of &#8220;Remember what I&#8217;m doing here? I&#8217;m protecting the American people!&#8221; I know it might not be true, but I like to think that some of our recent presidents (even this one&#8217;s father) wouldn&#8217;t have made the ridiculous leap from rescuing 9 trapped miners to hunting Bin Laden&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>I can just imagine the number of quizzical looks, confused faces around the room when he said that &#8212; &#8220;Did he say hunt down terrorists?&#8221; &#8220;Are we going to have to go dig <i>them<\/i> out of flooded mines?&#8221; <\/p>\n<p>Of course, he didn&#8217;t stop there. He went on to praise God. (Again, a paraphrase:)<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Everyone was praying for these men to an Almighty God and thank God, our prayers were answered.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>I&#8230;eh&#8230;.feh.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I nearly lost control of my car on the way into work today. On NPR, a story about the miners trapped in that mine (of all places for miners to be trapped, eh?) First of all, as I predicted, they&#8217;ve gotten a movie deal. Disney&#8217;s bought the rights to make a movie about them (hopefully [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[164,165,156,166,40],"class_list":["post-150","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-bush","tag-miners","tag-npr","tag-terrorists","tag-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.illinoir.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.illinoir.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.illinoir.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.illinoir.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.illinoir.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=150"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.illinoir.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.illinoir.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=150"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.illinoir.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=150"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.illinoir.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=150"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}