Some Random Thoughts

• I fail to understand this Harriet Meiers pick that Bush made today. No judicial experience, no paper trail, and she gave money to Al Gore's failed presidential bid (in '88, not in '00). Worse than that, Harry Reid, the overly whiny and effeminate Senate Minority Leader from Nevada, is pleased with the pick. That last little factoid has me really amazed. I, like many conservative pundits out there, might be proven wrong about this pick, but for now, my opinion about Meiers is similar to Bill Kristol's of the Weekly Standard. Kristol thinks that Bush chickened out. He might be right. Bush has been getting the crap kicked out of him from the press and the left from virtually the minute he won the '00 election. The last few months have been particularly harsh for him, what with Hurricane Katrina (which could be the most embarrassingly exaggerated natural disaster in my lifetime), Cindy Sheehan, the ever-present situation in Iraq, the Valerie Plame non-scandal, etc. Couple all this with the looming showdown regarding the next SCOTUS appointment, and it looks like Bush took the easy way out. I might be wrong, but if this is what he really did, he just lost major conservative support in lieu of attempting to gain liberal support, which of course, he'll never get. (His father made this mistake as well.) Here's to hoping this entire paragraph is entirely mistaken.

• Last Friday, I went to see a new band called The Killers at Jones Beach Theatre. Interesting gig, but not terribly compelling. There's something to their sound, but they kind of seem rather undeveloped at the moment. Additionally, they're not particularly active on-stage. Mind, I'm not turned off by this per se, but if you're going to be a stationary band, you should compensate in one and/or two ways: offer some wild animation and graphics on the screen to offset the lack of action on stage, and you should absolutely WAIL on your instruments. The Killers are neither. They do have some potential, and their sound is appealing, but they've got a long way to go. They kind of remind me of a young pitching phenom who came up too early to the majors. There was one interesting aspect to the whole night, that being the plethora of high school kids at the gig. The average age of these kids was probably about 17. I probably haven't attended a concert with an average age of 17 since I was, uh, 17.

• HBO's Rome is getting better and better with every new episode. Terribly intense, complex characters, and an amazingly interwoven plot-line. Best of all, it's all historically accurate. As I've said in an earlier post, it gives a glimpse into what the world was like two thousand years ago. Rome may have been the apex of civilization at one time, but it was anything but civil. Along with high learning, it was also quite brutal. Machiavelli was to say 1500 years after that man was more prone to do evil than good. He also said that it was better to be feared than loved. Rome reveals to a very large extent why Machiavelli came away with these conclusions. Western Civilization has come a long way since those savage days. But the stirrings of these concepts are always below the surface.