All About the Mommies

By B.E. Earl

02/02/2006 5:31 PM EST

Hey Kids! A couple of news items have been buzzing my brainpan lately and rather than just let them stew in my noggin, I thought that I would share my oh-so-unimportant thoughts with the Slydesblog community. Here’s (really) nothin’:

Big Momma’s House 2 – Now I know that I’ve previously poked fun at this totally unnecessary sequel, but it just opened this past weekend and it really struck a nerve. This film, for lack of a better word, actually grossed over $28 million in ticket sales on its’ opening weekend. That is about what my beloved Serenity made in its’ entire theatrical run here the US! Who the hell is actually buying tickets for this crap? Didn’t anyone see the trailers? There has to be some conspiracy! And why did Martin Lawrence need to make this film? Were there so many unanswered questions from the first one? Wake up people!

I am so sick of trying to make sense of the weekly box office tallies. I mean, I know that there is nothing but crap out there, but you know what I do when there isn’t anything worthwhile to see a the theatre? I stay home and practice my embroidery. I’m getting very good. I’m currently making a quilt with scenes from all the quality movies that Martin Lawrence has made in the past decade. It shouldn’t take me very long.

Cindy Sheehan – OK. I’ve got all the respect in the world for those who choose to protest the war. Especially a mother who feels that the President lied to us, and who also feels that her son’s death in Iraq was a direct result of those lies. I’ve supported her behavior in the past, and I even got a bit of a giggle about her protest outside the President’s Texas ranch a while back. Guy can’t even take a working vacation nowadays without getting protested on. But she has crossed that tenuous line of my compassion in the past week with last night’s arrest in the Capitol and her photo shoot earlier this week with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. Let me tell you why (in my humble opinion, of course).

She was invited to the State of the Union address by a Representative from the great state of California (I still giggle when Ah-nuld says that word). She was given a pretty good seat not far from the President and she was told that there would be no protests allowed in the Capitol. She was then led to her seat and proceeded to take off her jacket where she exposed an anti-war T-shirt that she picked out especially for this occasion. Security then led her out of the building where she was arrested for demonstrating in the Capitol. That charge was soon changed to unlawful conduct. Now, I’m a fairly intelligent guy. I know what she was trying to do. She wanted to get arrested. She wanted her name to be in the papers today. I’m fine with that. But don’t you think it would have been far more effective for her to have played nice and just sat there the entire time with a stern look on her face for the entire nation to see? Her Representative from CA must surely have alerted the press to her attendance. A few dozen shots of her sitting with her arms folded, shaking her head at the President’s rhetoric would have made an even better story for the talking heads at CNN. Without her presence, the camera had only a few disapproving shots of Sen. Hilary Clinton to keep us going. I’m all for protesting the war, but sometimes I don’t believe that these people are thinking straight when they are trying to get their message across.

Don’t even get me started on her photo shoot with Chavez. Aw, you had to go and do it, didn’t you? You got me started. OK…I warned you. This is the one that really got my blood boiling. Does she realize whom she slipped into bed with this time? This is a man who has openly praised his good friends Fidel Castro and Mohammar Khaddafi. This is a man who does not believe in a representative democracy like we have here in the good ole’ US of A, but a participatory democracy…not that anyone has a clue as to what a “participatory” democracy entails. He is a dictator. If not in name then in actions. He led a coup d’etat in 1992 against the democratically elected Venezuelan government and spent some time in jail for it before he, in turn, was elected President in 1998. That doesn’t diminish his thoroughly un-democratic actions since he has taken office, at least in the eyes of his critics. Maybe dictator is too strong a word to use at this point, but he has taken steps to dramatically increase the power of the executive in his country while controlling the police, military, judicial and tax authorities. Do the math.

You may want to do a Google search next time before you run off for a photo op, honey! Who’s next? Osama bin Laden? Go for it! Just make sure you let us all know where and when that’s gonna be. I’m sure US Special Forces would love to join you.