dr_u

A week has come and gone since the media debacle that was the Britney Spears performance at the 2007 MTV Music Video Awards and as we move past that momentous event I am compelled to reflect on where we are. Obviously I am not the first to comment on the spectacle by a long shot but as I sat back and watched as people as varied as Kanye West to my grocer had an opinion. West said that MTV exploited Spears for the ratings and I find myself in agreement. "Man, they were just trying to get ratings, and they knew she wasn't ready and they exploited her," the 29-year-old rapper said Tuesday. Even though his words came off as childish and unprofessional, whining that he should have been in the opening slot instead of being relegated to hosting one of the shows multiple performance suites, he was dead on. Why is it that in times of shared national disasters Kanye West can be counted on to say what lots of people are thinking?
What seemed weird to me was that this story is still going. Maybe it has to do with a slow news cycle, but on Friday it still showed up on most news programs as a hot breaking story. The Spears performance even managed to get mentioned NPR, someplace I never thought her name would be mentioned. If this shows nothing else it is that America loves a tragedy. Granted most of us saw this fall from grace coming back when she was parading around in the school girl uniform and perhaps that is what makes this story so interesting. This whole thing has tread along so predictably I thought the "Behind the Music" would be premiering immediately afterward. As she lethargically moved through the outdated dance routine, I wondered who green lit that spectacle and how many minutes it took for them to get fired? MTV tried to shift the blame to the Britney camp, that Spears refused to wear the outfit they wanted her to. The Spears camp said that none of that was true and that the network forced her to change much of the original act so much that Chris Angel, who was reported to have been a part of the original performance, walked away in disgust. I tend to believe the story coming out of the Spears camp since it is par for the course for MTV to cause a controversy and try to shirk responsibility. After all this is the same camp that gave the country Janet Jackson's nipple at the Super Bowl. How that act made it past dress rehearsal is a mystery that will never be fully explained.
Another thing that will never be fully explained is the state of this country. Our Commander in Chief, George W. Bush, went on television for a presidential address where he announced that troop levels in Iraq would be dropping from 160,000 back to around 100,000. He made this announcement as if he had a choice in the matter since it is a well known fact that the already established laws on the court require that 30,000 troops had to come home anyway. It has also come to light that Bush's plan is to force the next president to be the one to deal with the mess in Iraq and will bully the Democrats into giving him the money needed to keep it going. Bush hopes that by prolonging the war and needlessly risking the lives of thousands of soldiers he can shift the blame to someone else. Unfortunately, the Democrats are such sycophantic marshmallows that they are just going to let him. The lack of courage by Congress is as shameful as the cynicism Bush and his cronies have used to push this fatally flawed agenda. They say that they lack the votes to override the veto that Bush will definitely employ should they try to end the war by legislature. Yet they seem to lack the fortitude of character to make him use the veto and more importantly make the Republicans in Congress own up to being nothing more than glorified enablers. That these supposed leaders lack the ability to actually do what is best for the people and would rather watch as a generation of our finest people are sacrificed for ideology is what is most shameful of all.