What? Me Worry?!!!!!!

Gail Collins was right on target in this AM's NY Fishwrap. Her schema for ranking disasters is elegant and to the (exclamation) point. I have nearly completed my review of Tom Wolfe's oeurvre and his New Journalism legitimized lavish use of dots, dashes, exclamation points, italics, and occasionally punctuation that never existed before. Gail Collins has given us a new use for exclamation points, lots of them!!!! Gail Collins ("The Krait" in The Dubster's world of frat-boy nicknames because Collins' Fishwrap colleague, Mo Dowd, became "The Cobra" in W-speak.) needs one more disastrous category: The Dubster's presidency (!!!!!!)! If this is (fair & balanced) whistling past the graveyard, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
A Black Hole Rating System
By Gail Collins

The woes of the world have been so multitudinous lately that it’s hard to give them all proper attention. You start fretting about the collapse of the housing market. Then you wander off into melting glaciers or large cranes collapsing at urban construction sites. And before you know it, the day is over.

And now it turns out that there’s a giant particle accelerator in Switzerland that critics say could create a black hole that would swallow up the Earth. (Or, in a more optimistic scenario, turn it into what Dennis Overbye of The Times called “a shrunken dense dead lump.”)

The European Center for Nuclear Research has done several safety studies on the accelerator, known to its friends as the Large Hadron Collider, and says there is absolutely no danger. Still, you have to admit this sets the bar for worrying at a whole new level.

Let’s prioritize. Rank all your causes for concern on a scale of:

! (unfortunate development)

to

!!!!! (Large Hadron Collider has a bad day).

For instance:

Zimbabwe fails to come up with a vote count after nearly a week. (!!!)

Texas fails to come up with a vote count after more than a month. (!)

New opportunities for worrying pop up everywhere. Just a few weeks ago, the director of national intelligence, Mike McConnell, gave a speech at Johns Hopkins University. He opened with a story about a captain of an American aircraft carrier who got into a fight with another party over who should divert course to avoid a collision, not realizing the other party was a lighthouse.

“Now this is true,” McConnell began. “I was in the signals intelligence business where you listen to the people talk and so on. This is true. It’s an actual recording.”

You know where this is going, right?

The head of national intelligence begins remarks with: “Now this is true ...” and follows up with an old, untrue, naval legend. (!!)

A spokesman for the office of the director of national intelligence claimed that McConnell was setting the crowd up for a punch line. “It’s a technique — comedians use it all the time to get the audience to buy in,” he said. (!!)

Consider Iraq. According to an article in The Times by Erica Goode, Iraqis now celebrate April 1 by pulling lighthearted pranks, like informing a class of students that their teacher had been assassinated. April Fools! Clearly, these folks deserve all the worrying time we can give them.

Recently, the Iraqi government marched into Basra to route out the forces of the Shiite extremist-troublemaker Moktada al-Sadr. This did not seem like such a terrible idea at first glance, until it didn’t work. (!!!)

Then the C.I.A. chief, Gen. Michael Hayden, showed up on “Meet the Press” and gave the impression that the Americans had been blindsided by the whole affair. At least “in terms of being prebriefed or, having, you know, the normal planning process in which you build up to this days or weeks ahead of time.”

Even if there are only a half-dozen people in our Embassy who are fluent in Arabic — (!!) — you’d think we’d get cued in when the government starts a miniwar. (!!!)

From today’s Times, however, we now know that the Americans really were in on the planning. What they got short notice on, it seems, was Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s decision to go with something more spur-of-the-moment. This is the kind of free-spirited approach that works well when the goal is, say, throwing a small dinner party for six friends. But it tends to be less successful in matters like taking over a city by force.

Then the real surprise came when instead of proceeding in a strategically intelligent way, Maliki opted for the popular but controversial alternative of inept blundering. (!!!)

None of this really bodes well for whoever’s in the White House next year. Imagine President Barack Obama or President Hillary Clinton trying to extricate 158,000 men and women without benefit of “the normal planning process in which you build up to this days or weeks ahead of time.” Or, of course, if John McCain becomes president we can keep getting surprised for the next 100 years. (!!!!)

The story that McCain said he was prepared to stay in Iraq for 100 years is on one level unfair, although this fall Democrats will be featuring it in commercials about every six seconds.

What he meant was that he’s prepared to keep troops stationed in Iraq for 100 years as long as no one is “injured or harmed or wounded or killed” in the process.

Which is another matter entirely. Estimates on how long McCain is prepared to stay if some injuring or harming or wounding or killing is involved are yet to come.

Feel free to worry in advance.

[Gail Collins joined the New York Times in 1995 as a member of the editorial board and later as an op-ed columnist. In 2001 she became the first woman ever appointed editor of the Times editorial page. At the beginning of 2007, she stepped down and began a leave in order to finish a sequel to her book, America's Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates and Heroines. She returned to The Times as a columnist in July 2007.]

Copyright © 2008 The New York Times Company

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