Jimmy Carter, Ukraine, and THBB

President's Day tragic news bonfire

I am advising the vultures who circle near my back yard to not waste their time circling the former President Carter at this time. This “hospice watch” thing that has been in the media is absolutely laughable and reveals a youth-bias among cable news journalists I previously did not see.

From the outside looking in, taking into account everything I know about President Carter, I see a family decision to decline futile treatment. That is, he stopped doing something that wasn’t helping.

That’s all, folks. He isn’t mixing up his Kavorkian Cocktail.

We don’t have a good name for this, because to the unitiated, which apparently includes most reporters, it looks like a dangerously irrational decision unless the grim reaper is already standing at the foot of your bed. What do you mean you’re not going to keep fighting? What about Jimmy V? Never give up! This is war, win or die trying!

It breaks my heart when I think of the suffering such attitudes have inflicted on the end of so many lives. This is why the Jimmy V foundation pisses me off so much that I have to keep the remote nearby for quick muting over the next couple of months while they pollute the end of the college basketball season on ESPN with their merchantile cries of forever vigilance. How appropos that their most prominent spokeman is Dick Vitale, but I digress.

President Carter may be near the end of his life, most people his age are. What he has chosen to do is shift the goals of his medical interventions away from eradication of disease and towards a comfortable, self-directed, life. He isn’t lining up morphine pills. He’s asking his doctors to address his adverse symptoms and support his decision to live and die at home because they can’t do anything about his cancer that is worth the burden of enduring the treatment.

The closure of his life could take the rest of today, it could take the rest of the summer. I don’t know. Both situations would look exactly the same from the outside. Chill out, people.

Ukraine

Well, well, I flip on the news this morning to find President Biden standing in Kiev. I was wondering my why he would go to Poland but not Kiev. He is a sly fox, my only regret is he didn’t wear the aviators and civie fatigues.

I thought about what might be going on right now if Hillary Clinton had won in 2016. She would have been going after Georgia back then, and Ukraine would have gotten all the weapons that Trump held hostage as political chips in 2016-2018. Paul Manafort would have probably been over there running the opposition disinformation campaigns.

Instead, we have this awful mess. A year later, and nothing is more clear than Putin was wrong about everything Ukraine. The US was wrong too, but about different things.

I know we are getting santitized reports. War is never as “clean” as this one is being portrayed, there’s little difference between the international media coverage and the Ukrainian government’s information. No one has a monopoly on virtue. We aren’t seeing the whole story. War is terrible. It is terrible for the winners and the losers.

Tar Heel Basketball, another tragedy

Hoo boy they haven’t been this bad in a dozen years. The decline is spectacular, perhaps best demonstarted by the technical foul Caleb Love had in Sunday’s game against bitter rival North Carolina State University, down the road from Chapel Hill in Raleigh. He was mouthing the refs.

Caleb, you ain’t Lebron. You can’t hit the broad side of a barn with a basketball and you get beat on defense so often that opposing teams have made a sport of it, literally. You’re a human being, we get that, we all go through bad stretches of performance, but don’t mouth off about calls while your performance sucks. That’s beneath the name on the front of your jersey.

Honestly, considering the schedule, their only chance to go to the NCAA Tournament will be as a automatic bid as the winner of the ACC Tournament. The chance they can do that is more than zero. How much more remains to be seen.