Cheers & Jeers -- July, 2008

Pictured: Washington Campus, President & CEO, Diane Auer Jones (Cheers) and Indicted Alaska Senator, Ted Stevens (Jeers)

Cheers

Katy Couric – for her marvelous “no spin allowed” questioning of Barrack Obama on his contradictions regarding the success of “The Surge” in Iraq. While Obama performed his usual tap-dancing routine with supreme arrogance and condescension directed at his interviewer, Ms. Couric continued to rephrase and drive home her questions without bending to Obama’s clear intent to blow her off. Katy Couric’s tenure as CBS Evening News anchor has been a miserable failure reflecting more on the network and their attempts to “package” her. Yet given this high exposure opportunity, Couric performed brilliantly with the kind of clear headed approach rejecting the typical media hype and hysteria fawning all over their anointed candidate and typically quick to overlook the contradictions and lies that are a well-documented part of Obama’s daily activities. Couric demonstrated both the innocent clear-minded honesty of the little girl in “The Emperor’s New Clothes” with the professional persistence of the late, Tim Russert in the only performance of journalistic value on Obama’s Grand World Tour.

Jimmy Johnson – on the pole and winner of the Brickyard fiasco, on the pole for Pocono, love him or hate him (RMF can’t stand Johnson’s arrogance), Jimmy Johnson is a big money racer who knows it’s not where you start the season but how you finish. Johnson has the reputation for being a strong second half driver, but so does Tony Stewart, and where is he?

Diane Auer Jones – assumed the position of President and CEO of “The Washington Campus,” a consortium of the nation’s top business programs who’ve created special programs to help graduate students and corporate executives further their knowledge of government/business affairs. Jones resigned in May from her position as Assistant Secretary for Post Secondary Education, Department of Education. Jones quit over disagreements with the department particularly Deputy Secretary, Sara Martinez-Tucker, over the department’s attempts to use its clout to impose rigid accreditation standards on Liberal Arts programs seeking to develop exams that would have the effect of “vocationalizing” the pursuit of humanities studies where the emphasis in not on mastering a pick “a, b, c, or d” factoid as part of a mandated knowledge base but more on developing critical thinking skills and applying knowledge in creative contexts that no standardized exam could capture. Jones was a rising star, a true bright spot, in the Bush administration’s second term, joining the Administration as a senior advisor for the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) where she served on the National Math Panel and was a key proponent of the American Competitiveness Initiative, a visionary strategy on how the United States must maintain its leadership in science, technology, engineering and math as rising countries such as Red China and India are advancing rapidly and the European Union is working more independently of what goes on a cross the “big pond.”


Jeers

The Green Bay Packers management – for their confrontational and unnecessarily heavy-handed approach in creating the Brett Favre saga. While Favre is not Mr. Innocent in his attempts to renew his football career, if for no other reason than simple marketing and PR, the Green Bay brass looks bad creating the second biggest media circus of the summer.

Ted Stevens – for finally getting the kind of treatment elected officials who put their own advancement over the peoples’ business using our tax revenues as their personal booty stash to secure favor, influence, and wealth. The Senator who created the symbol of earmarks and pork barrel excess for aggressively pursuing the bridge to nowhere in Alaska threatening his colleagues with mayhem if they backed out their support, Stevens is the poster child for out of control self-serving spending on Capitol Hill putting him right beside the Godfather of Pork, Robert “the Dragon” Byrd of West Virginia.


Manny Ramirez – for being himself or as the Red Sox brass put it, Manny being Manny. His tussles with his teammates, failure to pursue fly balls while in the outfield or barely shuffling to first base when running out groundballs. Ramirez, a player with Hall of Fame stats, has become the official poster child of the self-centered, over paid athlete. Soon after suggesting in a poster the Sox should trade him to Green Bay for Brett Favre, he was dealt to the LA Dodgers where he will make Joe Torre regret leaving the Bronx.


Barrack Obama – for all the things RMF has documented since its launch in mid-July. He will remain a permanent fixture through his deserved defeat at the hands of the true blooded Americans who have no tolerance for an opportunistic, self-infatuated, radical socialist who has taken the “me” generation concept to all new lows.

John Edwards – Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!!!! Tee-hee, tee-hee, tee-hee!!!! And who didn’t see this coming? Perhaps the only person in politics to rival Barrack Obama’s big ego while sharing quite a few of Bill Clinton’s negative qualities, this sleaze bag of a high-living ambulance chaser darn near got caught with his pants down hiding in a bathroom in a Beverly Hills hotel where he was supposedly visiting his mistress and his bastard son. Isn’t this the kind of thing we always suspected of Edwards from the first time this fellow who Dennis Miller cited as a poor vehicle for an expensive haircut emerged in the public eye? It’s people like Edwards and Elliot Spitzer who make telling nasty lawyer jokes so much fun.

Our sympathy goes out to his wife Elizabeth who continues her fight against cancer having to deal with the humiliation of her sinful husband’s despicable behavior. Though RMF thoroughly disagrees with Mrs. Edwards’ political beliefs, we all sympathize with her struggles and wish her God’s blessings as she lives through human tragedy no wife or mother should ever endure.