Sweetwater Reporter (Sweetwater, Tex.), Vol. 114, No. 308, Ed. 1 Friday, January 11, 2013 Page: 4 of 12
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Viewpoints
Page 4 ■ Friday, January 11, 2013
Sweetwater Reporter
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EDITORIAL POLICY
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expression of a variety of viewpoints. All articles except
thoselabeled “Editorials” reflect theopinionsof thewrit-
ers and not those of the Sweetwater Reporter.
GUEST COLUMN
Baseball hall of fame
gets new inductees
HOLLYWOOD--God bless America, and how's
everybody?
The Baseball Hall of Fame got no new inductees
Wednesday after Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire, and
Roger Clemens didn't get enough votes to get n.
It wasn't a total loss. They didn't
make it into the Hall of Fame but
they did finish n a four-way tie for
Mr. Olympus.
Brent Musberger drooled all over
Miss Alabama Karen Webb when
cameras showed her in the stands
during the title game Monday. He's
seventy years old and she's twenty.
In Alabama she'd be his grand-
daughter and n Los Angeles she
would be his murder victim.
Lance Armstrong agreed to go on
Oprah and confess to steroid use
Friday. His world has collapsed.
Last fall, Nike terminated Lance
Armstrong's contract, saying it doesn't condone
performance enhancing drugs unless it helps Asian
children increase production.
The Hollywood Reporter said Hillary Rodham
Clinton's life as a young congressional staffer in
the Seventies will be made into a feature movie.
It covers the time she and Bill first met and fell in
love. The working title of this movie is An Affair to
Refrigerate.
Charlie Sheen thanked L.A. Mayor Antonio
Villaraigosa on Twitter Friday for the great time
they had partying in Mexico's border country last
weekend. The mayor is just lucky he's still alive.
Last year Charlie Sheen did enough cocaine to kill
Two and a Half Men.
Barack Obama named Jack Lew as Treasury
Secretary. He picked John Kerry, Chuck Hagel,
John Brennan, and Jack Lew to head State, Defense,
CIA and Treasury. He's got so many white guys
working for him it's starting to look like a photo-
negative of an NBA team.
WalMart turned down Joe Biden's request to
meet with him to discuss gun violence and gun
sales. The store wouldn't even talk to him. They
felt they did their part for gun safety last year when
they stopped people from making crystal meth in
the bathrooms.
Savannah gun stores were bought out of stock
Tuesday as residents of Southern states continued
buying up guns and ammo. They're ready for any-
thing. Georgia is a right-to-work state, so armed
school guards get to shoot without having to join
the teachers' union.
The National Hockey League owners and play-
ers reached a labor deal Saturday after a lockout
nearly cancelled the season. What a relief. For the
last six months, to enjoy hard-partying and hard-
fighting white guys wth bad teeth we've had to fol-
low Prince Harry.
Monopoly gamemakers announced a vote
Monday allowing people to decide the fate of the
eight tokens. There's only five left. The White
House just decommissioned the battleship, out-
sourced the wheelbarrow to Mexico and sent the
Top Hat fleeing to the Grand Caymans.
Senator Lindsey Graham vowed to block John
Brennan's nomination for CIA Director f the State
Department doesn't come clean on the Benghazi
fiasco. Thequestions in the hearings will be brutal.
Hillary Clinton has two weeks to find somethingto
hit her head on.
North Korea's leader Kim Jung Un celebrated
his birthday by delivering two pounds of chocolate
to every kid in North Korea. What a nice gesture.
Syria's Bashar al-Assad is kicking himself for cel-
ebrating his birthday two years ago by sending
everyone anthrax.
Audi introduced its new self-driving car at the
L as Vegas Co n su m er EI ect r o n i cs Sh ow W ed n esd ay.
The new car is accelerated, steered, stopped and
parked by sensors equipped with autonomous
technology that guides you smoothly to your des-
tination. It's an absolute embarrassment to the
Confederate flag you have painted on the roof of
your car.
Argus Hamilton is the host comedian at The
Comedy Storein Hollywood and entertainsgroups
and organizations around the country. E-mail
him at Argus@ArgusHamilton.com.
Argus
Hamilton
GUEST COLUMN
Can Hillary pace herself?
The football helmet that State
Department stafferspresented H illary
Clinton upon her return to the office
was cute, but only sort of. Same went
for the "Clinton"
football jersey bear -
ingthenumber 112.
That's how many
countries she's vis-
ited si nee becoming
secretary of state.
Clinton had
been away sick for
a month. She had
suffered a stomach
virus, which dehy-
drated her, which
made her woozy,
which led to a fall,
which caused a con-
cussion, which landed her in a hospi-
tal with a blood clot in her head.
No secretary of state had gone to
that many countries. In her nearly
1,500 days as America's top diplo-
mat, Clinton traveled on 401 of them.
During one famous 48-hour period,
she met with Palestinian officials in
Abu Dhabi, Israeli Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem
and, after doing an all-nighter in
Morocco, a group of Arab leaders.
Of course, she got sick. Who
wouldn't? Lots of otherwise healthy
Americans come down with a nasty
bug after just one transatlantic fight
to London. Add to that constant
time-zone changes, rich banquets,
minimal exercise, lack of sleep and
stress-filled meetings. Clinton wasn't
GUEST COLUMN
thereto stroll around museums.
What's not cute about all this
is the underlying - shall we say?
-- irresponsibility of so overstuff-
ing the agenda. This blows against
Clinton's reputation as the ultimate
Responsible One. It's thus disturbing
that many of her admirers portrayed
the resulting sickness as a tribute to
her work ethic.
Melanne Verveer, a longtime
Clinton aide now at the State
Department, meant only praise when
she said of the secretary of state: "So
many people who know her have
urged me to tell her not to work so
hard. Well, that's not easy to do when
you're Hillary Clinton. She doesn't
spare herself."
Yes, she works hard, but doesn't
working smart mean pacing oneself
so that you don't fall apart in the last
mile of the marathon? People do get
ill through no fault of their own, but
Clinton was asking for it.
All that racing around Mideast cap-
itals sometimes took on the air of a
personal endurance test rather than
effective management of foreign pol-
icy. (You'll note that the Arab-Israeli
conflict remains unresolved.)
Make no mistake: Clinton has been
a fine secretary of state. Few would
argue otherwise. Still, we're kind of
lucky there wasn't a major new inter-
national crisis in December.
It pains me to bring up the woman
angle here, but you wonder whether a
man would haveoverscheduledtothe
point of collapse. (Only one secretary
of state exceeded Clinton in the num-
ber of miles traveled: Condoieezza
Rice.) President Obama tries to make
time for exercise and rest, as did
President George W. Bush before
him. They understand the impor-
tance of maintaining their health.
It's no small irony that Clinton's
recent illnesshasledsomeDemocrats
eager for a strong female presidential
candidate in 2016 to start looking
beyond Hillary. It may be true that
Clinton says she's not interested in
running again, but her medical scare
is making some supporters think she
means it.
The let's-find-a-woman people are
misguided. I don't believe in backing
candidates on the basis of gender (or
race, religion, height or eye color).
Hillary Clinton became one of our
era's great political figures for other
reasons.
While she will never embody the
cool and outward serenity of Barack
Obama, Clinton didn't have to
becomethe spinning top that put her
in a sick bed. Even there, she noted
- not without pride - her difficulty
in becoming a "compliant patient."
If Clinton does run for president, she
must show more dedication to self-
preservation. Martyrs don't necessar-
ily make great managers.
To find out more about Froma
Harrop, and read features by other
Creators Syndicate writers and car-
toonists, visit the Creators Syndicate
web page at www.creators.com.
Roma
Harrop
The truth about Bin Laden
At the very beginning of
Kathryn Bigelow's "Zero
Dark Thirty," the audience
is told that the movie they
are about to see is
"based on firsthand
accounts of actual
events." Then we
hear tapes, ter-
rifying if familiar,
of those final calls
being madeby those
trapped on 9/11.
Then comes the
torture.
Bigelow has
defended the
scenes, which leave
audience members
rooting for our
heroes (who are doing the
torturing) as a "part of our
history." If you believe the
movie (and you shouldn't),
torture was key to find-
ing and killing Osama bin
Laden.
Except it wasn't. This is
a movie masquerading as
a true telling when in fact
what it tells is a lie.
Others, including Jane
Mayer in The New Yorker
and Glenn Carle on the
Huffington Post, have
detailed what's wrong in
"Zero Dark Thi rty" - what's
wrong about the efficacy
of torture (which tends to
produce false information
or none at all) and what's
wrong about the role of tor-
ture in the killing of bin
Laden. (The key name did
not come from a detainee in
CIA custody, according to
former CIA Director Leon
Panetta, who knows more
about the "actual events"
than Bigelow or screenwrit-
er Mark Boal.)
And contrary to the
defense being offered by the
filmmakersin theaftermath
of such criticism, the film
does not, in Boal's words,
"show the complexity of the
debate" about torture. There
is no "debate" in the movie.
Everyone in it - hero and
heroine and their bosses -
is for it. The only contrary
voice is a clip of President
Obama in the background,
whose condemnation of
torture seems, while you're
watching it, to be
the voice of a legal-
istic priss.
But the problem
with this movie isn't
just that it's wrong.
Plenty of movies
are wrong. Oliver
Stone's movie about
President Kennedy's
assassination is
wrong.
The problem is
that it's dangerous-
ly wrong, and not
simply because it is
distorting the debate here at
home about torture ("Look,
Mom, it works," you'll hear
some conservatives boast.),
but potentially and much
more seriously because it
could endanger the lives of
Americans who are already
risking their lives for our
country.
This movie won't be seen
only by those who know that
what they're seeing is fic-
tion. It won't be seen only by
Americans. Entertainment
is America's biggest export.
The myth that Americans
support torture, that we
depended on it for our
greatest military operation,
will be seized upon not only
by those in the world who
already hate us but also by
those who might grow up to
hate us and those who are
still not certain about how
much they hate us. Just
as we are lulled into sup-
porting torture, they will be
lulled into hating usfor it.
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The "myth" - and that
is what this movie is sell-
ing, pure and simple - that
torture is what allowed us
to kill bin Laden insults the
hard work of the Americans
who risked their lives and
also endangers those who
follow in their footsteps. It
arms the extremists with
far more powerful propa-
ganda than anything their
own machines are capable
of producing. It cements the
viewthat thereisno limit to
the evil we will engage in to
suit our goals, and that in
this respect we are no dif-
ferent from our enemies.
At one point, one of the
heroes/torturers tells the
detainee that if he doesn't
cooperate, we can send
him to Israel. Even in the
midst of the film's drama,
I cringed. The point was:
We'll send you to Israel, and
they'll kill you. The danger
of gratuitous lies is not lim-
ited to Americans.
Another scene in the
movie, one of the doctor
knocking on the door of the
"safe house" in the hopes
of collecting information
under the guise of giving
polio vaccines, provoked
a collective chuckle in the
theater. Except that there
really isn't anything funny
about it. There was, report-
edly, such a doctor, who is
being held in a Pakistani
prison. But the myth that
polio programswerecr eat ed
by the Cl A to gather intelli-
gence has led to the sus-
pension of such programs
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in Pakistan and elsewhere
and has blocked efforts to
wipe out that scourge. And
we're laughing? We are bet-
ter than that.
The First Amendment
protects the right to make
movies, including this one,
not because words are
harmless but because they
aren't. They have power.
With power should come
personal responsibility for
how it is used.
I wanted to see a movie
about the hunt for bin
Laden. I wanted to feel
proud of the Americans
who risked their lives to
hunt him down. If it'sjust a
movie, as its defenders have
urged, it should not pre-
tend to be based on "actual
events." It isn't. But God
help us if it leads to them.
To find out more about
Susan Estrich and read
features by other Creators
Syndicate writers and car-
toonists, visit the Creators
Syndicate website at www.
creators.com.
Correction Policy
Editorial:
As a matter of policy, the
Sweetwater Reporter will
publish corrections of errors
in fact that have been print-
ed in the newspaper.
The corrections will be
made as soon as possible
after the error has been
brought to the attention of
the newspaper’s editor at
236-6677.
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advertising at any time with-
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amount paid for advertising.
DEDICATED TO PROUDLY DELIVERING LOCAL NEWS SINCE 1881
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Susan
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Sweetwater Reporter (Sweetwater, Tex.), Vol. 114, No. 308, Ed. 1 Friday, January 11, 2013, newspaper, January 11, 2013; Sweetwater, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth851323/m1/4/: accessed April 24, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Sweetwater/Nolan County City-County Library.