Fifteen Minutes

Broder on the subject of prosecutions for torture done during the Bush Administration:

Suppose the investigators decide that the country does not want to see the former president and vice president in the dock. Then underlings pay the price while big shots go free. But at some point, if he is at all a man of honor, George W. Bush would feel bound to say: That was my policy. I was the president. If you want to indict anyone for it, indict me.

Is that where we want to go?

Yes.

This has been another edition of Simple Answers to Simple Questions (with apologies to Atrios).

For quite some time I was of the modest opinion that services like Twitter, Facebook and MySpace are ridiculous, and thought that the people who use them are idiots. No way would I ever be so foolish. But I kept getting invitations to Facebook, and kept hearing about Twitter, so finally, reluctantly, I broke down and joined up, just to see what it's all about, only to have a minimal presence, I told myself, still inwardly sneering at all of those people wasting their time.

Right away I was secretly enjoying it, ashamed of my new guilty pleasure (as if I needed any new ones), very reluctant to admit that I liked it, even to myself. But before long I was overindulging, Twittering my life away, re-loading Facebook every ten seconds, adding friends and becoming a fan of everything I could find, neglecting my real-life responsibilities, going at it day and night. Now I'm overloaded, exhausted, hung over, all out of Tweets because I can't think of anything else to say, and wondering if I'm the biggest fool of them all.

And this all happened in the course of, um, about a week?

I feel like someone who has refused alcohol for religious reasons all his life, then took one drink and immediately got drunk, felt liberated and went on a week-long, overwrought, self-destructive binge straight out of "Fear and Loathing", and is now allergic to the stuff.

Anyway. Follow me on Twitter! Join me on Facebook! Enable me!

The Heinrich-Hertz-Turm, popularly known as the Fernsehturm -- the TV/radio tower that dominates the sklyine in Hamburg:



Apartment buildings on The Jetsons:

Before World War II, they called World War I "The Great War", because they didn't know there'd be a II.

So will we have to rename "The Great Depression" as "World Depression I", in order to make room for "World Depression II"?

Incidentally, while World War I was ghastly, World War II was even worse. Think about that.