1. The United States didn’t not escalate a war on foreign soil.
And we were so close, too. I suppose this is what we get when our president watches Frontline. At any rate, Obama may be the first to receive a Nobel Peace Prize and then in the same year deploy 30,000 troops to foreign soil. Take comfort in the fact that nobody really knows what will work or what will fail, and that Afghanistan has a long history of defeating foreign threats on its home turf.
2. Steve Jobs didn’t die and neither did our economy, but both inevitably will.
When Steve Jobs’ liver collapsed, so did the housing bubble. When his successful transplant was announced by the Methodist University Hospital in Memphis last June, our financial struggles began to ease. And hey, some of us still have jobs. The truth is in the facts: PCs couldn’t care less about our economy.
3. Kanye West did not just get up on stage and literally steal that award from Taylor Swift.
Did he? Seems like a reach, even for Kanye.
4. Sarah Palin did not stop to reflect and ask herself, “Why?”
The lady from Alaska is as resilient as a shit-stain, which is either a testament to her courage or to her stupidity, depending on how this thing pans out. Going Rogue, now the bona fide foundation for her presidential campaign in 2012, is selling remarkably well considering she probably didn’t write a single word of it and probably doesn’t look as good naked as we all might hope. I mean, how could she? Despite this, and the fact that many believe her brand of politics to be cancerous, we’re damn lucky to have her, just as we’re damn lucky to still have Big Gulps. Her book tour has yielded some outstanding viral material, most notably the interviews of her supporters waiting in line at a book signing—prepare to lower your opinion of Ohio, if that’s even possible.
5. A 338-word children’s story did not successfully adapt into a two-hour feature film.
You might be saying to yourself, “Well, of course it wouldn’t,” meaning you’re not Spike Jonze or Dave Eggers, respective director and screenwriter of Where the Wild Things Are. The irony here is that Jonze fought the film’s financiers tooth-and-nail to retain final-cut, preventing the studio from Disney-fying what was to be a progressive, intellectual take on children’s cinema. Twenty minutes in and I was siding with the money, wondering how the book, one of my favorite childhood reads, had been manifested into a soap opera of subtext and adult-couples’ petulance. Had the cast from Everybody Loves Raymond dressed up in Sesame Street garb, marooned themselves and then taken peyote, you’d have a similar, albeit more tolerable version of this film.
6. Chicago was not chosen to host the 2016 Olympics.
One would think that the team of Oprah Winfrey and Barack Obama could pretty much do anything outside of befriending Rush Limbaugh. Granted, it was a late push, and another round of Olympics in the United States seemed a trifle unfair given that South America has never hosted the games. Even still, what a crushing blow to the American psyche. If Oprah can give a car to every crying woman in America, and Oprah says she likes Barack Obama, swaying the IOC should have been a cakewalk.
7. Twitter did not prove entirely useless.
Tweets escaping from Iran helped spread word of the vicious beatings and killings of students protesting an allegedly fraudulent election; and Tony Danza hates Brüno.
8. Nobody was convinced that guy who yelled “liar” during Obama’s health care speech is not a racist.
The Right will claim outbursts from the gallery during presidential speeches are a commonplace occurrence; of course, this is debunked by a cursory review of presidential speeches. Republican Rep. Joe Wilson from South Carolina essentially heckled Obama. Wilson’s actions elicited the Death Stare from Speaker Nancy Pelosi and reminded us that Barack Obama is in fact an African-American, and that some people are not OK with that.
9. We did not land on the moon.
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