Thanksgiving '07: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

THE GOOD:

The turkey.

The rest of the feast was great, too, but the turkey was exquisite. It was magnificent. It was scrumtralescent.

How good was it? There are no words.

For the past three years, we’ve been given fresh turkeys by one of my clients. How fresh? Well, our turkey was alive and gobbling on Tuesday afternoon. It went into our oven about thirty-six hours after its timely demise. It was slow-cooked to perfection and served up hot. I can honestly say that I have never had a better turkey. I’d be willing to bet that you have never had a better turkey. Call it poultry hubris, but my turkey was the flat-out best ever hatched.

I’m not kidding. My turkey made your turkey look like a child pornographer.

(Did you catch the two Will Ferrell references? Doesn’t matter if you did – my turkey still rocked.)

THE BAD:

Netflix sent us the first disc of the Young Indiana Jones Chronicles on the day before Thanksgiving. I tried watching it with my kids in the afternoon, and I was stunned at how stupefyingly boring it was.

After about twenty minutes of tedious narration and mind-numbing exposition, it became clear that we were watching the equivalent of a third-grade educational filmstrip/travelogue, only with better production values. No wonder this show never caught on. It couldn’t be less Indiana Jonesy if it tried.

“Is something going to happen?” asked one of my twins.

“I don’t think so,” I answered. We turned it off and watched Ratatouille again instead. I fell asleep. (All that tryptophan, you know.)

THE UGLY:

We had Thanksgiving at our house with my wife’s parents and two of her siblings and their families. The first rule when dealing with my in-laws is never talk about politics. Ever. My mother-in-law is a Democrat, but only because most Mormons are Republicans. My father-in-law is a genuine independent, except he thinks Dick Cheney is too evil to burn in the regular hell and deserves a special, extra-crispy hell fueled by Halliburton oil and the charbroiled bones of all the Iraqis he’s slaughtered. (My wife was a Democrat when she married me. Now she’s a registered Republican. I consider that to be my greatest single victory in our thirteen years of marriage.)

Anyway, when my sister-in-law announced that she hates Hillary Clinton, all bets were off. To her credit, my mother-in-law wisely left the room at that point, whereas my normally mild-mannered father-in-law started to spit fire and insist that Bush should be impeached because he lied us into war that has killed half a million Iraqis. Both of these statements are provably untrue, but I bit my tongue until he started wailing on Cheney.

“Dick Cheney is even worse,” he said, “because he committed treason when he outed a covert CIA agent because she’d proven his war was based on a lie.”

I didn’t raise my voice, but there is absolutely nothing in this statement that even slightly resembles reality. To refute this nonsense, I proceeded to recount the timeline of the whole Joe Wilson debacle, and he walked out of the room. The rest of my family told me to drop it, which I did eventually, but it still bugs the crap out of me. Everyone kept saying “it’s just his opinion,” which made me even madder. When people say things like “9/11 was an inside job” or “the holocaust didn’t happen,” yes, they’re expressing their opinions, but their opinions are based on bad facts. When someone says “2+2=37,” you can just write it off as their opinion, but it might not be a bad idea to persuade them their “opinion” is WRONG! WRONG, I TELL YOU!

Now I’m getting all hot and bothered again.

Just for my own edification, here are the basic, fundamental facts. I won’t review how conventional wisdom got lost along the way. Just consider these three:

1. Valerie Plame, the CIA agent in question, was not a covert agent when her identity was revealed. Revealing her name was not “treason” or any other crime. Patrick Fitzgerald, the Democrat-approved prosecutor who was looking for any evidence that could have nailed Cheney, Bush, Karl Rove, or any significant administration official to the wall, was forced to concede that revealing Plame’s status did not constitute a violation of the law.
   
   
2. The person who identified Valerie Plame as a CIA agent to Robert Novak in the column that started the whole brouhaha was a man named Richard Armitage, a Clinton holdover in the state department who was opposed to the Iraq war from the outset.
   
   
3. Scooter Libby, Cheney’s former Chief of Staff and the only person prosecuted for anything in all this mess, was convicted of perjury – NOT for revealing Plame’s identity, as is widely believed. He lied to a grand jury about whether he had learned Plame’s status from his boss or from Tim Russert of NBC News.

That’s all. I’m done. It was a good day otherwise. And the turkey was really good.