[Vision2020] A Summer of Great Irony

[Tom Hansen]

>From Bob Schieffer's commentary on today's (August 20, 2006) Face the Nation
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A Summer of Great Irony
By Bob Schieffer

It was hard to miss the irony. Some guy who thinks he's Peter Pan gets
arrested in Thailand and it looks like the Jon Benet Ramsey case has finally
been solved. 

Then the Peter Pan guy confesses and people say the case is falling apart.
Now that's a first. A suspect confesses and seems to help, rather than hurt,
himself. 

Makes you wonder if the courts should stop making cops warn suspects that
anything they say may be held against them. 

In this summer of great irony, maybe we shouldn't be surprised. 

Take the war in Lebanon. The Lebanese Hezbollah group starts a war that
leaves most of its country in ruins, then declares victory and now seems to
be winning the hearts and minds of the homeless by handing out money - in
some cases, U.S. dollars - to rebuild their bombed out homes. 

I remember the time during Vietnam when U.S. forces leveled a village and an
American officer said, "we had to destroy the village to save it." 

In Lebanon, that strategy actually seemed to have worked - at least on many
of the people. 

The Middle East is a poor example because nothing there ever comes out quite
the way we expect, but this summer, right or wrong, everything seems to be
coming out backwards. 

I mean, put aside the arguments about who is the best candidate and just
consider this: how do you become an overwhelming favorite to win reelection
to the Senate from Connecticut? This summer, the answer seems to be - lose
your party's primary. 

It's some summer.

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Seeya round town, Moscow.

Tom Hansen
Moscow, Idaho

"Implicit in the term 'national defense' is the notion of defending those
values and ideas which set this Nation apart. . . . It would indeed be
ironic if, in the name of national defense, we would sanction the subversion
of . . . those liberties . . . which makes the defense of the Nation
worthwhile."

- Chief Justice Earl Warren (1967)