"If..."

Two letters that can represent great possibility and an open doorway to achievement.

And they can also be the biggest quagmire imaginable, making it utterly impossible to move forward or, in many cases be taken seriously. "If we'd done this" or "If this hadn't happened" are fine statements to include in an overall review of events and policy. But after awhile, they're as useful as old fish and smell little better.

With that thought in mind, feel free to read this Newsweek piece by David Rakoff, in which he shows an attitude that still whines about the 2000 presidential election and the outcome.

I can understand how many people might like to dream about a world in which George W. Bush was not elected president. But every bit of energy expended in such a dream is energy that can't be used in order to deal with the world the way it is, and Rakoff's piece about how everything would have been better if Gore had won is just mean-spirited wishful thinking.

And it plays fast and loose with facts, too. Rakoff refers to a signing ceremony for the Kyoto Treaty regulating greenhouse gas omissions taking place in his alternate March 2001. Of course, President Clinton signed that treaty in 1998 but never submitted it to the Senate for ratification, which would make a "signing ceremony" a bit of a redundancy.

Ah, but who cares! The article's point was to take snide jabs at all of the author's favorite targets by giving them fates he felt they deserved, and to show how everything bad that happened from 2000-2008 was President Bush's fault.

So at least one person had fun with it, anyway.