GEORGE W. BUSH HAS BEEN LABELED BY MANY AS THE WORST PRESIDENT IN AMERICAN HISTORY:
MAYBE SO, BUT LET’S WAIT AND SEE WHAT AMERICAN HISTORY HAS TO SAY ABOUT THAT

By Max C. Bookman

His ascendance to the Oval Office was forged in a kiln of gripping Floridian controversy and unprecedented judicial action. On a rainy Washington morning, he became the forty-third person to bear the title President of the United States.

America has come a long way since January 20, 2001. We’ve toppled a conniving and despotic regime in Afghanistan. Predictions of a trillion-dollar surplus have given way to alarms of a tanking economy. Gas prices have climbed significantly. New York City’s iconic skyline is short two towers.

And then there’s Iraq.

By Alex Pinto

Fast forward to January 2009: a new President is in office for the first time in eight years, and with him or her comes new foreign policy. Each candidate still viably in the race — as of now, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and John McCain — brings to the table his or her own background, ideology, and experience.
John McCain has preserved his stance on the War in Iraq throughout his campaign, the same one he has held almost throughout the war. He is a stalwart supporter of the war, emphasizing the need to stay and not let Iraq fall to anarchy — and if it takes more troops and more casualties, so be it.

By Mac Smith

Atlanta—
State legislators in Georgia, recently stricken by horrible drought, are trying to annex land in Tennessee by restoring the border to its 1818 status, which would push it North past the Tennessee River. This act of desperation comes after the Georgian government seems to have exhausted all of its other bright ideas, like when Governor Sonny Purdue led a prayer for rain on the steps of the State Capitol.
Idiots.

By Max C. Bookman

“Shame on you, Barack Obama.”

-A visibly angry Hillary Clinton, berating rival Barack Obama for a campaign mailing that she argued had false statements about her record. Obama responded that the emotional outburst was “tactical.” The media has not been kind to Senator Clinton over the past few weeks, portraying her campaign as in its final throes. WT wonders: Real Obama momentum or setup for biggest Clinton comeback in history?

By Bridget Treco

I know that in these past few weeks we’ve all been rejoicing over the end of the writers’ strike. As of February 12, 2008, it’s official the writers will be moving from picketing in the street to sitting at their desks…um, writing. But for myself and many like me the only real important thing about the end of the strike is…

THE OFFICE IS BACK!

Yes, The Office. For some people, it’s just a quirky show with inaccessible, dry humor. For others, like me, it is an essential element to life. Now, I know we were all distraught about the corporate vs. writers’ struggle, because they deserved their money but honestly, the thing that bummed me out the most was that for over three straight months, I was unable to gaze into the eyes of Dwight K. Shrute. Well, re-runs helped, and so did my collection of DVDs. But that just makes me sound like a huge nerd. I’m not a nerd. Dwight is, and he is awesome.

Couldn’t catch a name?

Submit your love anonymously to:

www.thewatertowernews.com/iwantyousobad

Come Tuesday and Thursday, thou are most near/ Yet defft, for thy tricks pass without tail./ Poet, doest thou know me better than habbits told?/ Soy milk is but a most vile substance/ And to me not anything dear or close/ Nor those shoes of notoriety, waning old/ “together with all other forms and shapes/ that can denote me truly, for such indeed ‘seem’”/ to mark my character cold, like those lines/ May seem befit you, a poet unknown./
When: Romantic Age
Where: History 014
I saw: A Woman
I am: A Woman

Read on for more submissions…

By Lea McLellan

Class participation. It’s fifteen percent of our grade, it inspires overzealous students to raise their hands to the point of obnoxiousness, and it requires the rest of us to actually do the reading… or does it?

Last semester, there was a boy in my class — let’s call him The Participator — who had a comment or pertinent question for every occasion. He was essentially the class participation extraordinaire. When the professor asked us if we “had anything to add” or if he simply paused to take a drink of coffee (or breathe) The Participator’s hand would be the first in the air.

One day, we split into small groups to discuss the novel that had been assigned. I was in a group with The Participator. I expected him to contribute his every thought and feeling, pose deep-reaching questions, and generally dominate. Instead, he shrugged his shoulders and said, “I didn’t read it. I have no idea what’s going on.”

By Colin Lucas

Impala flesh does not detach quietly from bone. Before my eyes in the pitch-black African night the teeth of a wild dog ripped meat from its freshly killed prey with the most sickening and exciting noise to have ever reached my ears. Ribs crunched, the exposed bone clashing violently with the dog’s sharp canines. The flesh put up an audible fight before tearing off in stringy, bloody shreds. We had missed the kill by only a few minutes.

The dog bit and chewed for a short period then darted around the carcass, ears perked to listen for larger predators such as lion and hyena, which would be happy to snatch up the antelope for their own dinners. Another wild dog, its muzzle painted red with blood, stood watch while its pack-mate attempted to get its fill.

By Alex Townsend

Last week great minds gathered, appropriately, at the Gathering of the Minds, where one of the many topics in question was livable wages, the minimum salary a worker needs to be able to get by, and how UVM wasn’t exactly providing them. The gathering had an open-mic forum, so anyone was welcome to express his opinion. In theory the people there could have argued back and forth over whether or not UVM gives adequate wages to its workers, but it was obvious within the first five minutes that that wasn’t what was going to happen.

By Alex Hemmer

As good environmentalists, many of us try to reduce the amount of materials we use and throw away each day. You know the routine: use a reusable mug instead of a Styrofoam cup for coffee, print on both sides of the paper, don’t let food go to waste, walk instead of drive, etc. Besides saving the environment, conservation also saves a lot of money.

But when a closer look is taken at our lifestyle, frugality and conservation are nowhere to be seen. My dorm room is full of shit I don’t need anymore and probably didn’t need in the first place. I can barely log onto the internet or open a magazine without being inundated with cheesy advertisements trying to get me to open my wallet.

By Charles Winkleman

The news has recently been dominated by Google and Microsoft duking it out to see who can be the strongest, most popular kid on the playground. While these two giants have been kicking sand in each other’s faces, Yahoo! has been caught in the crossfire. And while normally I could care less about multi-billion dollar corporations, as a Yahoo! mail customer I’d like to know that Yahoo! can keep me pleased in all my Internet, mail, and searching needs. And to anyone else who doesn’t have a Yahoo! account, a website is only as good as its homepage. And when looking at Yahoo!’s homepage, there is a lot left to be desired.

A day in the life of Alicia Smyth-Johnson

Created by Anya Brodrick, Illustration by Alexander Whitehead
This section deconstructs the styles of today. The tripartite nature of the section demonstrates the intersection of image-word-mathematics.

10:30 am: Wakes up, briefly considers going to her Psych 1 lecture, then decides to stay in bed. Granted, she isn’t in her own room, but still…hers is just two doors down.

11:45 am: Ambles over to her own room, grabs her toothbrush and brushes her teeth in the handicap bathroom. What’s great about never going to class is that she always has dibs on it. Puts on one of many pairs of uggs and schleps down to the Grundle.

12:05 pm: Immediately is spotted by half of the hockey team. Sits in the middle of the table and lets them each get her a soda, grilled cheese, fries and some cereal.

12:17 pm: Quickly spots some loser she hooked up with like, three weeks ago-how was she supposed to know he lived in L/L? Runs to the bathroom in shame.

By Peter Salerno

Over the past fifty years saying the word Cuba has meant Fidel Castro, and it’s an eerie feeling now that it doesn’t. His reign came to an end rather quietly as the alive but ailing Castro drafted a letter of resignation to be printed in the state sponsored paper.

He appointed his brother Raul Castro to take over running Cuba for him. Raul is also a revolutionary hero in Cuba and being only eight years younger than his brother, has been a figurehead of Cuba’s domestic and international political scene for just as long.
The question that needs answering now is, where does a non-Fidel Cuba go from here?

By Peter Casasa-Blouin

Middlebury is hosting a private show on March 1 featuring the hip-hop tandem The Blue Scholars. The Blue Scholars, who hail from Seattle, Washington, have been around since 2004 with the drop of their debut, self titled album. This is not an abstract group; Seattle is a traditionally pivotal city in American music and Emcee Geologic’s rhymes over DJ/producer Sabzi’s production continue that legacy. In one of their tracks Geo remarks there is “no rest for the weary” which leads me to believe that they would be willing to impart their knowledge on us if we exert the same type of energy that got two Wu dates.