2008 Woodie Awards
Pop Culture Dwarfs Our Political Reality
Andy Feher
Issue date: 5/23/07 Section: Opinion
For the first five months of the year, the media have bombarded us with Rosie O'Donnell versus Donald Trump, Anna Nicole Smith versus methadone, Paris Hilton, Nicole Richie and Lindsay Lohan versus food and (who could forget?) Alec Baldwin versus his 11-year-old daughter.
It's almost as if there hasn't been any real news this year.
Here are some of the important events this year that have happened while the media wasted the public's time with trivialities:
In the global arena, problems in Iraq, Iran and Russia have intensified.
For Iraqis, the year began on a grim note, and little has changed to alter that outlook. In January, footage of Saddam Hussein's execution surfaced on YouTube. The inept Iraqi government rushed, but still held the execution on a Sunni holiday.
The event became a debacle because loyalists mocked Hussein, a Sunni, by chanting for Moqtada al-Sadr, the fanatical leader of the Mahdi army.
What's worse is that the execution violated Iraq's constitution; executions require the signatures of the president and two vice presidents, which Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki ignored, setting a terrible precedent that could instigate more sectarian hangings.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's quest for nuclear weapons is still progressing no matter how many resolutions the United Nations passes. If Iran succeeds, they could spark an arms race in the Middle East.
In the meantime, the theocracy supplies financial backing to terrorist organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah, threatens Israel's existence and kidnaps British sailors with impunity.
Boris Yeltsin, the first democratically elected president of Russia, passed away April 23 taking with him Russia's last remnant of democracy. Vladimir Putin, the current president, restricts free press by killing journalists who voice dissent, flexes Russia's petroleum muscles by threatening to shut off gas pipelines to both Estonia and Ukraine and along with China, tacitly approves the Sudanese government's prosecution of genocide in Darfur.
It's almost as if there hasn't been any real news this year.
Here are some of the important events this year that have happened while the media wasted the public's time with trivialities:
In the global arena, problems in Iraq, Iran and Russia have intensified.
For Iraqis, the year began on a grim note, and little has changed to alter that outlook. In January, footage of Saddam Hussein's execution surfaced on YouTube. The inept Iraqi government rushed, but still held the execution on a Sunni holiday.
The event became a debacle because loyalists mocked Hussein, a Sunni, by chanting for Moqtada al-Sadr, the fanatical leader of the Mahdi army.
What's worse is that the execution violated Iraq's constitution; executions require the signatures of the president and two vice presidents, which Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki ignored, setting a terrible precedent that could instigate more sectarian hangings.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's quest for nuclear weapons is still progressing no matter how many resolutions the United Nations passes. If Iran succeeds, they could spark an arms race in the Middle East.
In the meantime, the theocracy supplies financial backing to terrorist organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah, threatens Israel's existence and kidnaps British sailors with impunity.
Boris Yeltsin, the first democratically elected president of Russia, passed away April 23 taking with him Russia's last remnant of democracy. Vladimir Putin, the current president, restricts free press by killing journalists who voice dissent, flexes Russia's petroleum muscles by threatening to shut off gas pipelines to both Estonia and Ukraine and along with China, tacitly approves the Sudanese government's prosecution of genocide in Darfur.
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