Baseball, Nuclear Brinksmanship, and Congressional Pedophilia (Or What I Missed On My European Vacation)

So, as usual, I go away for a little while and something extremely newsworthy happens. I went to a wedding in February and Dick Cheney shot a man in the face. I moved back to Boston over a weekend and Scott McClellan sweatily resigned. And now, I go to Europe for two weeks and the Mets sweep a playoff series, Mark Foley (R-eally? What are you doing after band practice? TTYL) resigns from Congress after being outed as a pedophile, and Kim "You're busting my balls, Hans" Jong Il fires off a nuclear test missile. That's it! I'm never leaving my computer screen again. For the record, I had a good trip but not a good flight back, where I was sitting next to a woman who looked exactly like Auric Goldfiner and snored like a chainsaw.

Let's break these stories down, one by one.

1. You better, you better, you bet

Oh lord. The Mets make the playoffs for the first time in 6 years and I have to struggle to find the games on in Scotland. I did manage to find one bar in Glasgow that was showing the game so I went (by myself) to watch Billy Wagner nearly blow the game and then finally get the winning strike out. So I celebrated, alone, and skipped my way out of the bar and back to my hotel room. They won the next two games, without my watchful eye, and are rolling on to St. Louis.

I'm less ecstatic than I was when they made the NLCS and World Series in 1999 and 2000. Maybe it's because they were almost expected to be playing this well throughout the season, maybe it's because I'm getting older and sports are not as important to me as they were then. Sadly, I think it's the latter, and I think it's less a sign of me growing up as a sign of me growing lame.

Regardless, Let's go Mets!

2. Before I use it, and lose my cool

Years of broken diplomacy by every single party involved has resulted in -- Hey!!! A nuclear test missile fired by Kim Jong-Il! Excellent. How's that war in Iraq coming?

So North Korea gives the US the ability to send John Bolton and his moustache to the UN to fuss and fret and bitch and moan and threaten sanctions and divert attention from congressional republican pedophilia and blah blah blah... To be honest, it got uninteresting after about six hours, but it did result in a lot of iterations of this image, from the best movie of 2004, Team America: World Police! Fuck yeah!



3. Tough boys, come over here
And finally, the story of the year if it hadn't been for Cory Lidle and perhaps one of the most bizarre political news items ever. Republican Congressman Mark Foley of Florida, after carrying on years of sexually inappropriate email and instant message conversations and God knows what else with underage congressional pages, resigns from Congress when the story breaks, then pretends it was all caused by an alcohol problem and being molested as a child. Wow. So illegal and horrible activity can be explained away by upbringing an addiction? Wait, what party are you a member of?

And to top it all off (pun intended), Denny "Denny's" Hastert and his staff knew about these emails etc... for years and did nothing about it, with the exception of having an overly large meal, but Hastert does that anyway so it wasn't anything special. Like Nixon and Clinton, Hastert should have learned his lesson: "They get you on the come back" -- Coverups = bad. Foley should have resigned years ago to spend more time with his "family" or underage kids who didn't work for the Federal Government and the leadership could have washed their hands of it. But, no. Typical political arrogance. And it's all so sweet.

Enjoy the weekend folks. By Monday, I will have rediscovered my voice and will be funny again!