News of the ironic: Max Cleland spent the 1960s in Vietnam, where he lost both legs and an arm fighting to preserve the doomed-from-day-one nation of South Vietnam. Jane Fonda also spent part of the ’60s in Vietnam. She played footsie with North Vietnamese officials and sat at the controls of an anti-aircraft gun.
Flash forward to 2002. Max Cleland is an incumbent Senator from Georgia running for re-election. His largest campaign contributor is “Hanoi Jane” herself. Cleland was summarily defeated by Republican Saxby Chambliss.
Walter Mondale lost to Ronald Reagan in the 1984 presidential election by a tally of 49 states to one. The one state he carried was Minnesota. Eighteen years later, he returned to politics to run for Senate in place of Paul Wellstone. The only state he won in 1984 sent his opponent to Washington in 2002.
Florida’s Palm Beach County decided to upgrade its voting system to prevent the confusion many of the county’s elderly voters experienced in 2000. Instead of putting a hole in a piece of paper, voters can now utilize a high-tech computer with a high-speed processor that uses advanced touch-screen technology, has a 3 percent margin of error, and cost thousands of dollars. Let’s hear it for simplification!
News of the ironic and hideously unfair:
Dusty Baker has been manager of the San Francisco Giants since 1993. This season, he guided his team to the World Series for the first time since 1989. Unlike in that series, the Giants actually came close to winning this one, getting edged by the Anaheim Angels four games to three. His reward? The Giants did not offer him a new contract and he was let go.
Now that you have the irony, here’s the hideously unfair part. Baker is probably going to take over the manager’s job of the Chicago Cubs. The Cubs finished 67-95 last year. In the past five years, Baker’s Giants won the National League Pennant and two division titles. You’d have to go back 70 years to get similar numbers from the Cubs.
The Cubs haven’t been in the Fall Classic since 1932, when Babe Ruth was playing. The last time the Cubs won the World Series? 1908, six years before the start of World War I. Cubs players didn’t even have numbers on their jerseys the last time they won it all.
And Dusty Baker, manager of the reigning National League champions, is probably going to take over one of baseball’s most accursed franchises.
News of the ironic and downright bizarre:
H.K. Edgerton is an Asheville, NC, resident who is making his way to Texas on foot. He expects to spend about four months walking. He carries a Confederate flag and a sign that reads “Heritage not Hate.”
Edgerton said he believes that people need to get “the truth” about the Civil War. Of course, the truth according to Edgerton is that:
* The South’s cause in 1861 was just.
*The war wasn’t about slavery.
* Slavery wasn’t so bad.
* The South deserves reparations.
He has been a regular at flag protests and has even been seen shaking hands with Klansmen at a flag rally in Stone Mountain, Ga.
Oh yeah, Edgerton is black and a former head of the Asheville NAACP.
Tony Odom is a graduate student in the history department.