Murphy's Law

It's Murphy's Law, isn't it Bush, that says anything that can go wrong, will go wrong? I've been thinking about that today, following the past couple of days' series of mini-disasters in our personal lives. Small things, really. We returned home from our weekend out of town to find that ours was the only house on the street, in the middle of the storm, without power. The electrical box in the broom closet looked okay. Our neighbors reported no problems. We couldn't survive the night (we thought! So many do!) without electricity, so we called in our friend the electrician on an emergency basis. It was the main power breaker that had blown, where the power comes in from the street. A temporary fix saved our lives for the night.

Then the car, yesterday morning: it was supposed to have been an hour's job. It lasted two. The paperwork from the purchase, nearly a year ago, was all screwed up, and my maintenance contract had been lost in the mail. More hassles. I got home, finally, to find my online connection gone--because of the power failure, I had to assume. A couple of calls to my computer guru (a UC Irvine student, pure genius!) got me back online…

Well, I know I promised I wouldn't burden you with all this, Bush, but there you go. It seemed relevant today, with so many other things going wrong. The dreadful weather here and throughout the country, deadly mud-slides, floods, accidents everywhere. And I can't help thinking, still, so much about those good people on the borders of the Indian Ocean, their lives destroyed.

And so I got to thinking about you, with everything going wrong in Iraq this month: the elections threatened by insurgent violence, the troops and the Iraqi police under increasingly bloody, violent attacks, the civilians' lives lost or devastated. And not only over there. So much here that's running off-track: train wrecks spewing chemicals, gas trucks exploding, and of course the weather--all the way to the nomination of your Bernie Kerik. A smooth recovery yesterday, with your latest nomination, by the way! Only Hillary could object. But I heard somewhere that thirteen previous candidates had turned you down. Is that the truth, or is that just more scurrilous rumor-mongering?

Anyway, my guess is that it must sometimes feel to you like Murphy's Law is the law that drives the world, one disaster after another. But maybe not. It may be, Bush, that you're a cool enough dude to be impervious to the vicissitudes of the world out there. Maybe you take it all in stride. Personally, if I were in your shoes, and judging by the way I jumped right off the deep end yesterday, I think I'd be getting a serious case of the stomach ulcers by now. Here's hoping nothing bad will happen for the rest of the day--for either one of us.