'Learning to Fly' . . . Still

GM,

Watching a wretched Monday Night Football game (which turned out to be incredible after we started this post), the only thing worth mentioning is that Mike Tirico's winter hat has done the impossible--made him look even nerdier. (Here's a shot I just found of Tirico explaining to Jon Gruden how to sexually harass a coworker without losing your job.) It's a good thing the game is boring, though, because two events from this weekend clearly stood out as the most relevant. (My Christmas-Day unwrapping of towels and bedsheets wasn't one of them.)

I wonder what went through Urban Meyer's mind in the 25 hours and 9 minutes between his decision to step down as Florida coach and his decision to stick around after a leave of absence. What is it about having two national championships and living in Gainesville that breeds such indecisiveness?! Meyer's similarities to Florida basketball coach Billy Donovan are great. Both won two titles, of course, but both were also leaving teams that were loaded but would soon be bereft of all their talent. And if you don't think that was at all a factor, well, you're less cynical and jaded than I. But both men thought about it a little while, decided that coaching an average team was still better than almost every other job in the country, and ultimately made the right decision.

Meanwhile, the federal government is having a change of heart before our eyes--through no choice of its own. You may recall its post-9/11 commitment to making air travel safer.

More frustrating? Sure. More invasive? You bet. More bureaucratic? We can only assume. But on the first- or second-most significant Christian and American holiday, were we capable of stopping a bomb-carrying Islamic extremist named Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab from boarding a Detroit-bound plane in Amsterdam? Not even close. And news like this makes that fact even piss poorer:

In November, Abdulmutallab had been placed in a database of more than 500,000 names of people suspected of terrorist ties. But officials say there was not enough information about his terror activity that would have placed him on a watch list that could have kept him from flying.

What could that possibly mean? We knew enough to figure he might be a terrorist, but we didn't know enough to watch out for him at airports?! While that doesn't make sense, here's a suggestion that does: We give a firmer frisk to anyone with any of these in his name.

Remember what people told us after 9/11? "Sometimes you have to trade freedom for safety." We seemed pretty divided on whether or not that was a worth-while trade. What's for damn sure, though, is that we should all be willing to trade political correctness for both.

-JW

JW,

I suppose it's not an accident that the hyperlinked hat with which you illustrated Tirico's was a woman's. For the record, his actual hat wasn't nearly that feminine. And you left off the propeller on top.

With that settled, let's move on to Urban Meyer, a story that resolved too quickly for me to predict its resolution, dammit. Nevertheless, I'm happy to report that I saw Meyer's "return" (Did he even physically leave his office during that retirement?) coming a mile away. As I wrote in a Sunday email, "There is absolutely no need for coaching to be life-threateningly stressful if you've already won two national championships and will never under any circumstances be fired. Just care slightly less."

And speaking of caring less, how about a prediction for the Abdulmutallab story? It disappears. Vanishes. Quicker, even, than the Fort Hood story. The media knows that a continued examination of Abdulmutallab's motives, strategies, and actions can only hurt an administration that prefers to eliminate the word "terrorism" from our vocabulary. Literally. Just like Afghanistan is now Obama's war, Abdulmutallab is Obama's bored, privileged Islamofascist. We need to stop talking about him before the President gets hurt.

-GM