What A Wonderful, Wacky World We Live In

Reading along this morning I came across two articles in the New York Post that just hit as being a riot.

The first, 'ALIVE' OSAMA PLOTS DOOMSDAY BIO-STRIKE, describes everyone's favorite terrorist clown as living in "good health" in a "secure, remote mountain lair".

All that I can picture is Osama sitting in a big Dr. Evil type lair trying to figure out how to work his fancy Captain Kirk chair. Up and down, go around a few circles in each direction and then get dumped off. A "secure, remote mountain lair" just seems to add a level of comedy to the whole Osama story that makes it hard to take the whole thing seriously anymore. The threat of terrorism is still real and serious, but Osama himself seems to have been turned into the Chevy Chase of terrorist leaders.

The second article, CARDS TARGET TOP ISRAELIS shows just how far "me, too"-ism has gone in the world today.

The deck of cards handed out in Iraq was a novel idea. At the time, I thought it was a cute, but effective, way of targeting certain people.

Then the Israeli paper Ma'ariv create a deck of 34 Palestinian terrorists.

Now Hamas has taken it a step further and has created a deck of their 34 most wanted Israelis, but they took it to a new level of classlessness by "X"ing over Rechavam Zeevi, the Israeli Tourism Minister who was assassinated.

In the course of what, four months, the "most wanted" deck has gone from a cutesy gimmick to a tired and trite cliche.

I just find it funny to see how much effort and thought went into Hamas creating their deck, only to have it come out being such a crass embarrassment to decency. In their quest to go "Me, too! Me, too!" as quickly as possible they have once again damaged their cause in the community of decent people. In their one-upmanship with the "X", they crossed the line and went to totally tasteless.

But I still can't get the picture of Osama trying to work his chair out of my head.