Ow
There have been many moments in the past four years when it hurt to be an American. There was the election of 2000, when thousands of voters were disenfranchised and an executive at Fox News decided who would be the next president (his cousin). Then there was the whole squandering of international good will that occurred after September 11th, blowing it all on a bogus war. Now of course we're in the middle of an historically expensive and negative presidential campaign (Cheney today said that if Kerry were president in the 1980s and 1990s, the Soviet Union would still exist and Saddam Hussein would control the Persian Gulf and have nuclear weapons, neglecting to mention that if W had been president back then, cockroaches would be ruling the post-apocalyptic wasteland that used to be the Earth).But even after all these wounds that bleed away my ever-dwindling national pride, nothing has come close to the agony I felt upon hearing Steven Tyler of Aerosmith sing the National Anthem at the World Series.
I'm sure it won't be the last time in the next ten days that I'll say this, but...my soul hurts.

