Barbra Walters is an adorable, partially-clueless old lady. Sherri Shepherd occasionally says intelligent things. Elizabeth Hasselbeck is mostly an airhead, but at least she is a good mom. And Whoopi. Need I say more about Whoopi Goldberg?
And then there is Joy Behar. Most of the time, I agree with her. I mock her thick New Yorker accent. She's entertaining.
But the other day, she opened her mouth about something that made me realize she should stick to comedy and leave intellectual debate to us grown-ups.
They were discussing the would-be Times Square bomber. I call him "would-be" because he didn't actually bomb anything. To be honest, that had to be the most pathetic attempt at terrorism that I have ever seen. I mean, for fuck's sake, I cause more terror when driving on the connector on a fresh layer of snow. The dimwit should have stuck with something simple. Like dynamite. Or McDonald's. Hey, it takes awhile, but heart disease will kill more people this year than any silly bomb.
All Osama has to do to cause another media circus and mild panic is release a video tape. But this fool, Faisal, couldn't even blow up a car. He should have hired some Manchester United fans. They would have taught him some things about properly destroying cars. And then supposedly he's connected to the Pakistan installment of the Taliban. One would imagine that their leaders would be backing away from this so fast they'd leave skid marks. Who wants to claim responsibility for the world's most epic fail?
I don't mean to make light of someone attempting to blow up a clunker SUV in tourist central. I'm just pointing out that this was pretty much the worst recorded case of terrorism ever. The man sucked at making bombs, the people on the ground in New York reported the SUV, and the FBI caught our wannabe anarchist in record time. I mean, talk about the best anti-terror response time I've ever seen. Nothing was harmed, the dumb-ass was caught, so one would think that we could just all chill the fuck out.
But oh, no, Americans suck at chilling out. We have perfected the act of over-thinking things. We invented the "What If" game. You would think we'd all be shitting diamonds, with all this intensity.
John McCain (and others) claims the FBI screwed up by reading this idiot his Miranda Rights. Somehow, our Crazies-In-Residence seem to think we could have better pumped him of information has we not informed him of his Constitutionally-given rights. Funny enough, all the reports coming out have stated he's been entirely cooperative.
Now, a Miranda warning is pretty much a no-brainer- you don't give someone their Miranda rights before interrogation, and anything he says is guaranteed to be inadmissible in court. There have been plenty of court cases dismissed on the technicality of the accused not being given their rights. In the case of a moron who tried to bomb a public area, not giving him his Miranda warning could, in essence, allow him to walk away unscathed. Is that really what you want, John McCain? Funny, the actual court case that gave us the Miranda warning was Miranda v. Arizona. How easily they forget.
Anyway, back to The View. Joy claimed that while he may be a naturalized citizen, our government still should have been monitoring him. Basically, her attitude was that because he had ties to a volatile region in Pakistan, and he wasn't "born here," his citizenship should be conditional.
I'm sorry, Ms. Behar, but citizenship isn't conditional. You either are, or you are not. He's a citizen, and should be treated like a citizen. You didn't see them arguing over Timothy McVeigh's citizenship, and he actually killed people.
All this side, my biggest beef with Behar was this: Whoopi said that Miranda warnings are a part of your constitutional rights, to which Joy claimed that Whoopi was wrong, it has nothing to do with the Constitution, and that it is just a law. This, of course, is absolute bull. Miranda warnings are an extension of the Constitution; specifically, Miranda warnings are in place to guarantee the observance of the accused's fifth and sixth-amendment rights. One would think the staff at The View has access to the internet. Maybe even Wikipedia. It angers me when a program with thousands, if not millions, of viewers misrepresents the facts.
And so, Joy Behar is a moron, just like Faisal Shahzad. Her biggest problem is that she is a comedian, not a reporter, and certainly not a scholar. She doesn't know what the fuck she's talking about. If she doesn't want to research something, she has no right to talk about it. For so many people, shows like The View are a major source of news. There are people out there who, unlike myself, take this show seriously. Blatant ignorance should not be tolerated. Xenophobia amplifies ignorance.
I might just be a college student with a blog, but I never form an opinion, much less express an opinion, unless I've researched the topic. God gave us Google for a reason. I realize how alarmed New Yorkers must have been by the actions of this idiot and his SUV, but that is no reason to spew bullshit. Especially when Glenn Beck is the one defending the observance of Miranda laws. I mean, you know you're in for a world of hurt when the voice of media reason is Glenn Beck.
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