OVER/UNDER
If you haven't seen these two lists (workingforchange.com: The Most Overrated and Underrated Stories of 2002) yet, you might want to familiarize yourself with any of these news items you somehow missed because of something allegedly more important happening at some point this year, that the 24-hour news channels and major media sites somehow ran out of time or webspace to mention.

If one's memory was short enough, one might have come to believe that Iraq and Iran are no longer mortal enemies, and have in fact formed an axis with North Korea (what do those three countries have in common? Anything?), and that it turns out it wasn't really the Taliban (a name already fading into footnotehood) or Osama B. Laden who orchestrated 9/11 (let alone some other group, like, say, a cadre of Saudi extremists, wink wink) but Saddam Hussein himself! Who knew! (And here I figured on 9/11, Saddam was, oh I don't know, watching a smuggled videotape of "Friends" and eating hummus out of some concubine's navel or something, instead of working the phones.)

Uh, yeah. I'll believe that when I believe that the corporate corruption scandals are now all fixed and the stock market crisis is over.

On the up side (there's an up side!), it's nice to be reminded that not everyone in the rest of the world hates all Americans, though:

Sure, much of the world does [hate the USA] (for good reason), but a substantial number simply think our government is run by certifiable lunatics. That perspective almost never shows up in US media.

This rant is a bit cranky and way cynical, I know. But these are cranky and cynical times.