ShareThisChristmas is right around the corner.
Yup, we've already plodded through Black Friday, Cyber Monday and the first Sunday of Advent that came sandwiched in between.
Come Tuesday morning, there was Barry Manilow crooning all about it on one of the morning "news" shows.
Christmas -- you feel it in the air.
I'm not quite ready for that.
Change the channel and there's Dr. Oz hosting a show for an audience filled with pregnant women, featuring a segment on the intricacies of the placenta -- and he's using real placentas in his demonstrations. It's one of those face-scrunching, "ew" moments that you can't help but watch even though you really, really want to look away.
Kind of like all the buzz surrounding that crazy, publicity-seeking couple who were giving an exclusive on the morning news show and proclaiming innocence and personal devastation after they crashed last week's state dinner at the White House.
Did they, or didn't they crash the party? A few days into the news cycle and the only clarifying fact is that the Secret Service screwed up and our president wasn't as secure in his own house as he should have been.
Firings? Charges pending? Reality show forthcoming?
Stay tuned.
And watch as talking heads gripe about Tiger Woods, who was trying hard to elude his own crazy-couple spotlight and all the controversy surrounding his recent car crash right outside his home.
His public life is all about being the best golfer ever, making money doing that and endorsing things like American Express, AT&T, Nike and Gatorade. He's not perfect -- no one is. So let him and his wife deal with his regretful transgressions in private, mind your own business and direct your attention to something more newsworthy.
Like the fact that some 30,000 of our troops will be heading to Afghanistan starting next month, at the orders of our commander in chief who appeared to be turning that "presidential gray" right before our eyes during his speech Tuesday evening. West Point was a dramatic backdrop for the good speaker who, to his credit, wasn't donning a flight suit as he laid out his arguments to escalate the fight in the longest war in American history in a country where the biggest step toward democracy has been a fraudulent election.
Bottom line is that it's a matter of our national security.
But we've heard that before from folks like Karl Rove and Sen. John McCain -- who, wonders upon wonders, were back on the morning news shows offering tacit support for the president's military plans, but not, McCain asserted, the announcement of a deadline to withdraw in 2011.
Heard that before, too.
Which no doubt leaves more than a few Americans feeling perplexed about our country's direction -- at least those who thought they were opting for a more peaceful agenda when they voted the Democratic ticket in 2008, and those struggling financially who are wondering just how we're going to scrape up the $30 billion needed to fund the war for just one year.
Add to that the tab for health-care reform.
And to top it off, Christmas is just around the corner.
(Michele Miller can be reached at miller(at)sptimes.com.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service www.scrippsnews.com)
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