THE REAL ANDY ROONEY JUST STOOD UP



When Lost was a kid, younger than my own right now, a popular game show was called "To Tell the Truth." Contrary to what you might think, it did not involve politician contestants, bureaucrats and strategically used cattle prods. There was a "celebrity panel" of people who, with the benefit of hindsight, owed most of their celebrity to being a panelist on the show (Kitty Carlisle? Orson Bean?) . Anyway, the celebrity panel would ask questions of three people, all of whom claimed to be the same person, and out of those question and answer sessions, the celebs would have to guess which one was for real. The defining moment of each episode came when the host (Bud Collier? Bill Cullen?) would say "Will the Real blankety blank PLEASE STAND UP?"

Which brings me to e-mail Several times a week, many well meaning friends pass on spam type messages, purporting to be from various celebrities. Sometimes they come with cutesy drawings of the individual personality, like the one last week I received which had a caricature of Robin Williams at the top of it. As you may know or might have guessed, the body of the message purports to be "Robin WIlliams" on how to solve a group of international issues, or local political issues. The vast majority of these instances involve words never uttered by the particular celebrities, and frequently the messages express sentiments which no one has ever heard the celebrities utter in public, because they don't think that particular way. Every one of these that I have read over the years have tried to make out the celebrity in question into something of a closet uber-conservative, often times a bigot to boot. Times like these I make a short trip over the urban legends reference pages, like this one and check it out, then I'll send a quick e-note to my well-meaning friend. Still, the emails keep coming.

To make a short story long, last night Andy Rooney did actually say some things about international relations. Some very important things. If you didn't hear them first hand, you can go to CBS News and read them, or even find a video. It is worth watching. It is worth reading, over and again. For those who cannot navigate or choose not to, here's what Andy Rooney had to say.


"I'm not really clear how much a billion dollars is but the United States — our United States — is spending $5.6 billion a month fighting this war in Iraq that we never should have gotten into.

We still have 139,000 soldiers in Iraq today.

Almost 2,000 Americans have died there. For what?

Now we have the hurricanes to pay for. One way our government pays for a lot of things is by borrowing from countries like China.

Another way the government is planning to pay for the war and the hurricane damage is by cutting spending for things like Medicare prescriptions, highway construction, farm payments, AMTRAK, National Public Radio and loans to graduate students. Do these sound like the things you'd like to cut back on to pay for Iraq?

I'll tell you where we ought to start saving: on our bloated military establishment.

We're paying for weapons we'll never use.

No other Country spends the kind of money we spend on our military. Last year Japan spent $42 billion. Italy spent $28 billion, Russia spent only $19 billion. The United States spent $455 billion.

We have 8,000 tanks for example. One Abrams tank costs 150 times as much as a Ford station wagon.

We have more than 10,000 nuclear weapons — enough to destroy all of mankind.

We're spending $200 million a year on bullets alone. That's a lot of target practice. We have 1,155,000 enlisted men and women and 225,000 officers. One officer to tell every five enlisted soldier what to do. We have 40,000 colonels alone and 870 generals.

We had a great commander in WWII, Dwight Eisenhower. He became President and on leaving the White House in 1961, he said this: “We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. …"

Well, Ike was right. That's just what’s happened."

God Bless you,Andy Rooney. No one can ever joke about you needing a cattle prod To Tell the Truth.