Tornadoes and other modes of obliteration.

It’s a day before the start of summer, which will hopefully mark the end of a spate of weird, Midwestern weather here in Denver. Over the last couple of weeks, there have been hailstorms and tornados every day; home video footage of which we’ve been shown on the local news each night as one dumbass or another has thought it would be cool to drive right on up to the edge of the swirling funride to Oz.

Sure, it’s a bummer that people’s homes are getting ripped out of the ground, but what irritates me most is that these storms only move in as I drive home from work. It’s nice and sunny all day as I sit in my office, only clouding up and cooling down in time to scuttle our nightly plans to eat dinner in the back yard. Worse, all this rain has meant that we now have mosquitoes, something that we are usually blissfully devoid of here in Colorado. Except for the summer a few years ago when I got the West Nile virus, of course, but that was a rather extreme exception.

Meanwhile, in news from outside the borders of my increasingly dull existence, WTF is going on with North Korea? How is their belligerent boot-stamping going to end well for them? I’m really not sure what their endgame is here – just to show they are a world player because they are so powerful they can create nuclear weapons? Because waving your missiles around every time you want something from the world probably isn’t the best way to get the rest of the world to want to do things your way. Particularly when we can call their bluff pretty much anytime we want to by obliterating them from the face of the planet. Granted, they might take South Korea down with them, which I suppose is what they hope we will not be willing to risk, but I think they overestimate America’s tolerance for their shenanigans. For now, we can continue to swat away their threats like a pesky fly, but that probably won’t be true forever. I wish the Dear Leader would down a bottle of his beloved Courvoisier and drive one of his Bentleys off a cliff and leave the rest of the world, including his starving, tortured countrymen, in peace.

And then there’s Iran. Not surprisingly, I am right on board with President Obama’s approach to the current turmoil in that country: to remain more or less silent on the subject and let Iranians work it out for themselves. I can’t stand hearing the new, cornpone-accented voices of the Republican Party droning on about how Obama looks weak because he’s not making some forceful statement about the situation in Iran. Really? Because all that forceful shit George Bush put us through went down so well on the world stage. And why do we need to say anything when our ongoing political/diplomatic positions with respect to Iran should make it quite clear how we’d like things to turn out? We don’t need to give anyone more fuel for an anti-American fire. I’m not saying anything new here, but it does drive me crazy to hear a few vocal Republicans shouting for more of the same. We have a new president, f-f-f-folks, elected by a large majority of the American people. Can we try his way for a little while?