January, 20th, 2021

I don't date things the American way usually, I put the day, then month, then year, but I made an exception for the title of this post, because of the circumstances. One of the advantages of having a working day that ends early, is that you can watch historical live on TV. So I watched the inauguration of Joe Biden as the 46th President of the United States of America. This is the second live inaguration I've made, the first one was the one of Barack Obama and you can read my impression here. Rereading it now, I'm surprised that I feel that I have been harsh on George W. Bush. He was not exactly my kind of president, but by hindsight, he was a decent man. I did not watch the inauguration four years ago, but I shared a filthy joke I made about it, which got me the attention of a troll. Biden may not have the eloquence or the charisma of his former boss, but given that he won against the Swine and pretty much saved American democracy (or at least contributed to its salvation), I am even happier than I was back in 2008.

Men of power, men of glass

I guess I don't have to tell you what I did this afternoon. One thing really struck me during the whole ceremonial: it was seeing Dick Cheney in a wheelchair. I never liked the man and I must confess I felt a bit of schadenfreude watching him like this, but that's not what prompted me to blog again today. It was the way he, who used to be so powerful, now seemed frail and broken, almost dying. I know he never had a good health, but he never looked so powerless. It was illustrating perfectly the end of the Bush administration: a wounded, out of touch, dying dynasty moving away for good, having been broken by the power they used, the scandals they caused, the lies they lived by. However trivial was the reason for Cheney to be in a wheelchair, there was some kind of poetic justice about it.
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J'écris le prochain billet en français, promis.

What did Chamberlain do? (a frustrating yet fascinatin video)

I guess it's all around the internet now, but I'll show it here anyway. I found this on Richard Hétu's blog. It's baffling, surrealistic. An indigest cocktail of ignorance and loud mouth. The worst thing is, we find this sort of ignorance displayed here by Kevin James (never heard of the guy before, don't think I missed anything) everywhere in the world. But you' ve got to give that to United States: they have some educated people who can actually put those big mouths at their place, right in the middle of their verbal diarrhea. Québec journalists are often more on the whussy side. Anyway, I think the whole rhetoric (if you can call it that way) of Kevin James (and Bush and co) against Obama in that whole controversy could fall into Godwin's Law.