The Decade In Videos: From Gore To Whatever

Want to jump out the (first floor) window all over again? Because we’re on a strict One Video Per Year regimen, let’s just skip right past Y2K and the whole dismal Summer 2000 presidential campaign and the USS Cole bombing and the Concorde crash outside of Paris and, uhm, Elian Gonzales, because we must Economize, for history. We kind of vaguely remember watching this pathetic performance from Gore and thinking, “Well, at least he’s not HUMAN, so he won’t cry or whatever,” and then also thinking, “Oh good lord this is going to be awful, George W. Bush is the Cow Demon.”

Your editor shook hands with GWB Junior “Dubya” #43 exactly once, in 1999, at the tacky Ronald Reagan office building, two blocks down from the White House and the Treasury. But what was the reason? MUST LOOK IT UP BRB …. Yes, it was young helmet-head Ohio congressman John Kasich dropping out of the GOP race for president and kissing dumb young Dubya’s ass for a handful of reporters. (I was covering this for UPI.) Very exciting. Days later, a weekly news magazine proclaimed that this Bush character had pretty much wrapped up the nomination, money-wise.

As for Gore, your editor only recalls leaving Staples Center in the middle of his nomination speech in Summer 2000, because his speech was terrible, and Joe Lieberman was the Dem nominee for vice president. Oh jesus christ if any of us *knew* what was coming, we would’ve all committed suicide, for dignity.

2001

This thing enraged me, at the time. (Yeah well so much for the Royal We, because there was no Wonkette until 2004, and I wasn’t here until 2006.) Why did the entertainers need to do celebrity telethons? Couldn’t they all just, uhh, STFU? Remember what it was like to have the Cable News on around the clock, going to sleep to that terrorist insanity, waking to it again along with another stack of fat newspapers full of detailed gloom. (“A Nation Challenged,” my fucking god.) AND: Instead of posting a clip that seemed “good at the time,” maybe that partially restrained U2 song or that strangely un-sucky Bruce Springsteen number, let’s just sit back and retroactively slit our wrists over Tom Cruise (?) talking about religion at Ground Zero — and weren’t the Scientologists trying to convert rescue workers on the scene, to the space-monster faith? — and this braying fucking donkey in a too-tight evening gown, blurting shit.

2002

Murder-snipers roam the DC suburbs, the Dow “bottoms” below 7,200, and “voice of the youth” Mitt Romney is CEO of the Salt Lake City Mormon Olympics! (And oui oui oui, Mitt speaks the French!) Nothing else happened in 2002.

2003

Remember when the Iraq War ended, in May of 2003? Neither do we! But here it is, on ABC’s World News Tonight, before Peter Jennings and the Network Evening News died. That war ended, do you GET IT? And have you ever even seen the original on-the-boat propaganda speech? It’s here. Enjoy?

2004:

This was the year when Facebook began, at Harvard. So you already knew this year would suck. Earthquakes and Hajj stampedes and plane crashes and Madrid terror bombs killed the usual piles of people everywhere all the time, and movies about The Hobbits (“Avatar”) won the Oscar Awards. Oh yeah and we learned about the Torture Sex Horror Death Show going on at Abu Ghraib Hell Prison, in Iraq, with the U.S. meth hillbillies torturing and raping whatever Iraqis (old people, children, etc.) unlucky enough to get swept up and locked inside one of Saddam’s most notorious prisons (although now run by Freedom Fighters).

Okay, tune in to Part Two, later this week!