Personal Asides: The Year 2006...Not Again! Frank Nofsinger Wins One on Political Trivia

The Year 2006.

Things I can’t believe: that ace sportscaster Mike North is being criticized for using the word “Chinaman”! Com’on, get real!...That George Allen really and truly lost the U. S. Senate from Virginia for using on camera a word—called an epithet—that most of this country had never heard of before (including me). The word was “macaca” which Allen purportedly learned from his Indonesian mother which he directed against a student of Indian descent who was tailing his campaign and recording it on video for Allen’s opponent, Jim Webb. It supposedly means “long-tailed Asian monkey.” Are we so terribly precious? The fact that Allen is out as Senator and the old relic of a bygone racist era and former KKK member Robert Byrd was reelected at age 87 to continue representing West Virginia is astounding, Byrd using the “n” word on national television just a year ago. Also the fact that New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin, having extolled his city as “Chocolate City,” an obvious slur at whites, won a great majority of the city’s black vote and no condemnation from the sacrosanct “mainstream media”--is evidence of the serious double-standard that the falsely described “mainstream” media pursue…

That Mark Foley’s indiscreet near-proposition of a male page has been labeled a central cause for the House going Democratic when Massachusetts Democrat Barney Frank had allowed his male lover to turn his apartment into a bordello and refused to apologize…that Democratic Congressman William Jefferson whose Washington area home was raided by FBI agents who found $90,000 in his freezer went on to win reelection in his New Orleans congressional district…that Denny Hastert joined Nancy Pelosi in assailing the Justice Department for supposedly violating separation of powers by probing Jefferson…that bird flu did not, despite widespread predictions to the contrary, spread far from its Asian home and scored only 111 bird-related deaths worldwide…that Kobe Bryant reminded us all how great he is, dropping 81 points on Toronto January 22 shy only of Wilt Chamberlain’s 100-point game in the record book…

That despite our hedonistic culture, “The Nativity Story,” New Line Cinema’s film of the birth of Christ, grossed nearly $8 million on its first weekend, taking fourth place and that a church-produced “Facing the Giants” which has a Christian theme grossed over $9 million on a shoestring budget…that Don Rumsfeld was evidently from all reports a mush as secretary of defense while the “mainstream media” in Washington portrayed him as a hard-liner…that this neuter Republican twerp Linc Chafee, defeated and a lame-duck, still wouldn’t vote to confirm John Bolton as ambassador to the UN, proving that eventually like other breeds, New England Brahmins tend to breed their brains out…

I will miss…June Allyson, everybody’s favorite freckle-faced young wife (88)…R. W. (Johnny) Apple, 71, who treated me to culinary delights on occasion when with the “New York Times” he came here…Joe Barbera, 95. half of the Hanna-Barera animation team, who (I think I’m right about this) also helped create Quaker’s favorite cartoon character “Capn Crunch”…Glenn Ford, 90, my favorite from the film “The Blackboard Jungle”…John Kenneth Galbraith, 97, a terrible economist but superb rhetorician whose language was molded for angels…Steve Irwin, 44, although to my mind what with wrestling crocodiles and the like, it was about time (although death from a sting-ray?)…Coretta Scott King, 78, who bore her sadness with grace and serenity…Jeane Kirkpatrick, 80 a terrible loss and a woman who should have become secretary of state…Don Knotts, 81, the funniest man I ever saw on TV…Byron Nelson, 94, the great golf champ who my fellow kids at St. Juliana’s caddied for at the old Tam o’Shanter opens…Buck Owens, 76, the buck-toothed singer I enjoyed on “Hee Haw”…Jack Palance, 87, who moved from scary menace in “Shane” to a comic in his 70s…Dana Reeve, 44, who died oh so young after a decade of dedicated care-giver service to her immobilized husband Christopher…

…Ann Richards, 73, a liberal former Governor of Texas who still captivated me with her keynote at the Dem convention in 1988…Joe Rosenthal, 94, the Iwo Jima photographer who angered of all people Paul Wigoda who was there at the picture-taking because Rosenthal, a Jew, became a Catholic…Louis Rukeyser, 73, brilliant supply-sider TV journalist who didn’t have to be told he was great before he’d tell you…Jack Warden, 85, boxer turned tough-guy actor who played George Halas in “Brian’s Song”…Caspar Weinberger, 88, great American secretary of defense…Paul Wigoda former alderman of the 49th whose death somehow, unaccountably, eluded me (how I don’t know)…Jane Wyatt, 96, actress who played the perfect wife on “Father Knows Best”…

Disappointments…After South Dakota legislators voted in February to outlaw all abortions except when they are necessary to save a woman’s life, becoming the first state to do so, pro-aborts swung into high gear and beat the issue in a statewide referendum…the loss of the GOP House and Senate which will set back the timetable for conservative economic and social gains…the defeat of David McSweeney in the 8th whom I regard as the best of the best by a beauteous (let’s face it) woman, Rep. Melissa Bean, who had to rely on a staff aide and a Clif’s Notes to get her thorough my WLS show…the Palestinian elections on Jan. 25 which gave an unexpected landslide victory to Hamas…Voters electing Rene Preval in Haiti on Feb. 7after reporters found hundreds of ballot boxes and burned ballots in a garbage dump outside the capital…the incapacitating stroke of Ariel Sharon, a truly great man…the election of former Marxist dictator Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua Nov. 5…the tirade of Mel Gibson in July who made hideously anti-Semitic remarks after being stopped by cops in July…the easy treatment George Ryan got: only 6 years…and his remaining free on appeal…that that old windbag Robert Byrd of West Virginia served 17,327 days by last June 12 when he became the longest-serving Senator in U. S. history.

Optimistic Moments... Peter Roskam’s election that continued distinguished pro-life representation for the 6th in Congress…How British and U.S. intelligence agents uncovered the plot to blow up airliners using liquid explosives at Heathrow and the arrest of 21 involved in the plot on Aug. 10…the fact that President Bush did execute a veto—of a bill to federally fund embryonic stem-cell research…the fact that Wal-Mart now offers a flat $4 price for nearly 300 generic prescriptions…that there are at least 700 miles of new fencing along the U.S.-Mexican border giving some hope for more…that there are by conservative count 100 million Christians in China…that an excellent choice was made to replace Alan Greenspan in Ben Bernanke…that Kofi Annan finally left, embarrassed but not sufficiently so, by a UN Oil for Food scandal in Iraq that implicated his own son…

Frank Nofsinger.

The intrepid Connecticut-based expert won the trivia question which asked what president was the first to be sworn in under the amendment which changed inauguration day to January 20 from March 4? Franklin D. Roosevelt. What about the other questions I asked, folks?