My dad is in his second week of radiation for prostate cancer (the surgery didn’t work). I wasn’t able to spend the weekend with him, and I desperately need to see him while he still allows me around – I’m afraid he’s a bit too proud to let us close to him once the side effects hit hard and he starts being sick all the time and losing his hair, he has the most beautiful, thick snow-white hair. There’s an 80 percent chance the radiation will work, and I plan to go see him this week, but I can’t help feeling I should have been with him on Father’s Day.

Instead, I traveled 6 hours south and spent the weekend with my husband and his father who is dying. He’s an old soldier, so he has it set up for his kids who are there at the flag ceremony to lay a few hundred on the bar to cover the tab and buy everyone who shows up a drink. He did two tours in Vietnam, where he was exposed to agent orange, which we know causes one of the different kinds of cancer from which he has suffered over the past few years. His emphysema is self-inflicted from years of chain-smoking, and he climbed in the bottle to medicate the pain from the wounds that don’t show – he talks about the rescue missions in the Belgian Congo, and sometimes he’ll talk about Japan, but he never talks about the rescue missions or any of the other stuff that happened in Vietnam while his five children grew up without him.

And while we were sitting at his house, checking his meds to make sure he’s taking what he should WHEN he should, to give him the days or weeks he has left with as little pain as possible..and while we were listening to his last wishes and directives about how he wants everything handled, from distribution of what little he owns to who to notify at the end and who has his will to signing legal papers to make sure his children have equal access to his money and power of attorney for when the time comes..the tv was on in the background (he always keeps the tv on, he says it’s company, but he only turns the sound down when we’re all there). And all day long, on every channel he normally watches, was nonstop talk about Tim Russert.

It was surreal somehow.

I’m truly sorry for his family – my own husband had a bout of congestive heart failure a couple months ago, at age 48, and I know EXACTLY how close we came to losing him – but DAMN, LET IT GO! We all know he had family and friends who loved him – what more could a person want?

But even with the business of death, life goes on.

I’m sorry, as I said, I’m not in my happy place right now. My apologies for venting.

Bob Keeshan was a TV personality with more of a positive lasting impact on our lives.

Capn – I watched the Capn hundreds & hundreds of hours and learned important things for life.

Timmeh – Parts of a few shows here & there. I learned that I had to change the channel if I didn’t want to replace the teevee. “Where’s the fucking follow-up? Get him to answer your goddamn question! Do you know he is lying to you, or don’t you care?” FFFUUUCCCKKK!!!”

Politics is not a horse race. It does a disservice to all of us for the media to simply handicap it as such, and it offers up the opportunity for cynical political media handlers to manipulate the narrative.

We have one political party which is often venal and incompetent, and another which is militaristic abroad and authoritarian at home. The truth is not found by staking a position precisely in the middle between the two. Russert, however, embodied this approach, which is really perhaps the only viable strategy to maintain some vestige of journalistic integrity while at the same time living the life as an inside-Washington power player.

For the professional pundit, the key to longevity is to walk the middle ground, no matter how thick the sewage is across the path.

RIP, Tim. You were good at what you did. It’s a shame that what you did, IMHO, did not serve the best interests of the Republic or the world, but peace be on you and your loved ones.

Bob Keeshan was a TV personality with more of a positive lasting impact on our lives.

My first thought about Russert will always be that Cheney’s group saw him as a vehicle for getting their message out. That kind of says it all.

I’m sorry, I mean sad for the man’s family but really – a journalistic giant he was not.

Too bad there was no one to say, as Tim Russert was leaving courthouse after his testimony in the Scooter Libby prosecution, “Say it ain’t so, Tim.”

When small men cast long shadows the sun is going down.
~Venita Cravens

I can’t remember which Olympics it was but Jones was calling a race and he got the winner wrong. How did he handle it? “It is nobody’s fault but our own.” It was beautiful. I knew people who knew him though I never had the pleasure of meeting him personally. All who knew him said the same thing–you didn’t like Charlie and you didn’t like people. I’ll miss him.