Ugly Poker, but Great TV

I mentioned a while back that almost ten years ago I started a poker game in my neighborhood. A couple of things I failed to mention at that time is the overly conservative nature of the neighborhood I live in. In 2000 and 2004 this caused some problems during the poker gettogethers as I was one of the few liberal voices in the neighborhood and, being mindless Republicans, my neighbors talked a lot about how liberals had no ideas and how they had taken over the country and would own it forever.

As you might guess, over the years, as the true horror of President Shit-For-Brains has become evident, there is not a lot of political talk at the games anymore, mainly because I don't want to rub their faces in what jackasses they have been in the past. Well, the calm was broken at last week's game, and god did it get messy.

It started when I was talking to a neighbor about the weather. All of a sudden another neighbor at the table started talking about how "the next thing you know the liberals will be blaming all the weather on global warming." Then a guy from another table comes running into the room yelling, "I'm Al Gore and I know everything!" and then they both started laughing. I said, "Jerry, global warming is nothing to laugh about."

"There is no such thing as global warming. Al Gore invented it for his movie!"

How do you respond to such nonsense? How would you? I did rather poorly, I said, "Jerry, you are joking, right? I mean you'd have to be an idiot to believe what you just said." OK, calling my neighbor an idiot was most likely not the best approach I could have taken, but I really believed at that moment that he was pulling my leg. No one can be that stupid, right? Wrong! Since I had already called him an idiot, there was no positive place this was going to go. But I had some assistance, someone trying to pull this back into a discussion.

Sitting next to Jerry was Gilbert Ivey, another neighbor. Gilbert is the Chief Administrative Officer of the Metropolitan Water District of Los Angeles and a heck of a nice guy. He brought a calming voice of reason to the table, "Jerry, I'm in charge of seeing to it, that when 17 million people turn on their faucets, water comes out. That's my job and to keep the water flowing we look at all the scientific information we can on any subject that could possibly affect the supply of water, including the weather and the climate. Jerry, let me tell you, global warming is very real, I stake my job on it."

"No it's not," replies Jerry and off we went again. For the next 10 to 15 minutes Jerry argued the wrong side of just about every issue you could imagine, including he still believes that there were WMDs in Iraq, we just didn't find them because they were sent to Syria (something for which there are no facts to support, but that won't stop Jerry).

And on this issue I wish Jerry could have seen the Bill Moyers' Journal that was TiVoing at my house even as our nastiness was occurring at the poker table.

"Buying the War" detailed how the Iraq War was "sold" to the American people and how most of the press went along with it. I say "most" because a great deal of the show looked at the Knight-Ridder news service and how a number of reporters there never believed any of it and wrote story after story of how the administration was plain lying to the American people. But without an outlet in Washington or New York, the Knight-Ridder stories were pretty much ignored by the more "mainstream" press.

If you didn't TiVo it, you can watch all one and a half hours of this amazing show online at the PBS website. I think you will find it well worth your time.