Sherri Shepherd says, "Nothing predates Christ", King says "Make Mine Lindsay and Britney," and Bush says, "Only Last Week."

I was thinking just today, "What would be a good easy blog post for a lazy blogger like me?"

And then Sherri Shepherd of "The View" gave it to me.

You may remember her from this very blog back when she said she didn't "know" if the world was flat. After I got over my feelings of unctuous superiority, I let it go, figuring Shepherd, who seems amiable and not unduly stupid on the show, had just got into a defensive crouch on Christianity, and lost her way during the argument with a silly rhetorical dead-end. This, from Wikipedia, seems to confirm that: "The very next day, Shepherd explained that she never had to defend her religious beliefs before, and that she became overwhelmed with the many questions that were being thrown at her. By the time Goldberg added her question, Shepherd was nervous and did not fully comprehend what was being asked. She stated that she knows that the world is round."

This clip, however, seems to contradict the idea that Sherri really does know the world is round, or, for that matter, anything else other then Jesus is the Lord our God. In her defense, she was raised in the Jehovah's Witness cult before becoming a Born Again, so I have sympathy for her, but it's still a little worrying to see such a lightless worldview spoken aloud, and to know that others share it.

Click here for the clip, and tremble.

Also, Stephen King has cast his vote for who he thinks should be Time's Person of the Year. He nominates Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan. He thinks they'd be a good choice because, "[they] symbolize the media's growing obsession with issues of personality over substance. People care more about the details of Spears' child-custody case than they do about where the billions the U.S. government has poured into Iraq have gone. It's time for a discussion about whether the news media have chucked their responsibilities and run off to Tabloid Disneyland."

This seems like a good idea. Since Time magazine has punted on choosing an actual person the last couple times, last year's choice goofy choice being "You", and a year or two before that the syrupy "the American Soldier", I think a protest Person of the Year might be good for us. Like King, I'd like the media to have a more serious discussion then they've been having about themselves, though I may be more pessimistic than Steve because I don't think that, ultimately, a new discussion on the current state of Infotainment would do anything to amp up the Info and diminish the 'Tainment.

Finally, the CIA released its NIE (National Intelligence Estimate) on Iran's nascent nuclear weapons program, and it states that the consensus among all 16 US intelligence agencies is that Iran shut down its nuclear weapons program in 2003. Bush said in a press conference today that he only learned about the NIE findings "only last week," even though there's mounting evidence Bush knew about the NIE much earlier and, along with Vice President Cheney, had been working to quash and alter its findings. If this is the case, then Bush's comments in October of THIS YEAR about a nuclear-armed Iran posing a threat of "World War III", or Cheney's comments, also in October of THIS YEAR, in which he said that if Iran, "stays on its present course, the international community is prepared to impose serious consequences," exposes these men, once again, as shameless liars. It may be that Bush's statement this morning that he only learned about the NIE "last week", may become a scandal all of its own. It's clearly a lie, but if any one comes up with hard proof of it, he may have to face the music. But then again, Bush has been confronted with so many of his lies and he's faced up to exactly none of them, so why would he face up to this one?

Oh, January 2009 seems so far away.