I was going to write about the abject stupidity and duality of George W. Moron's statement of "flee for the hills to avoid the terrorists, yet live your lives normally," but Michele beat me to it. Instead, let's turn our attention to the Business section of the paper, shall we?

United Airlines (who I refuse to fly anymore because every time I fly United, they either delay my flight a long while or route me through Chicago even when I'm not going anywhere near it) canned their chairman, James Goodwin, because he said last week that the company would "perish sometime next year" unless they took actions to cut costs. The company's other directors forced him out and replaced him with board member John Creighton.

Okay, can we take a look at how dumb that was? The man gave a warning -- he said, "Unless we cut costs, we're not going to make it." And they canned him for it. Personally, I think that was a really wise thing to say because it showed that he recognizes the problems facing the company. That's the kind of leadership that I'm looking for in the White House. Recognition is the first step towards solving the problem. Shooting the messenger is the first step towards burying your head in the sand.

The thing that I don't get is that George W. Moron hasn't really done anything since the 9/11 attacks. He's made all sorts of vague statements about how we need to "stand firm and united" and "not give in," but if you break it down to the nitty-gritty, he's really made no definitive points at all. He's the idiot full of sound & fury, yet signifying nothing. All he's really done is send the military over to Afghanistan, and they're not even being that effective considering that we've been bombing for a couple weeks now and all we've succeeded in doing is blowing up sand. We still haven't caught Bin Laden. The Taliban are still firmly entrenched over there. And despite this, Moron's approval rating is through the roof. So how come a guy who has the chutzpah to stand up and say, "Hey, our company has a problem and here's a path we can take to try to keep ourselves afloat" -- how come he's the one who gets canned?

The irony of the situation is that this new guy, Creighton, said basically the same thing as Goodwin did when he announced that he would attempt to "sort out" United's financial problems. Apparently, though, he said it with a little more sugar-coating, so that's okay. But I'd rather have a guy stand up and rain fire & brimstone, because sometimes that's the only way to galvanize people and to make them realize that everything's not all right. If you sugar-coat things too much, people will get a false sense of security, which makes things worse for them when the bottom falls out a few months or years down the road.