VBVW for April 11, 2008: Going For The Gold

• The Very Best

While the Olympic torch continues to dodge protesters wielding fire extinguishers, the Very Best thing China can report on the Olympics is that authorities have detained terrorists who were planning bomb attacks and meat poisoning at the games. Surely everything will be fine now.

20-year-old Abbey Curran is the Miss Iowa contestant in this year’s Miss USA pageant. Abbey has cerebral palsy. Couple this astounding event with a black guy who has a shot at being president, and you might just start to believe that America is once again the land of opportunity.

Hillary Clinton is against the proposed U.S. free trade agreement with Colombia. Her husband (Bill Clinton) and her former chief strategist (Mark Penn) have been paid more than $1 million to help Colombia get that same agreement passed. If this isn’t the basis for the greatest sitcom of all time, we don’t know what is.

• The Very Worst

In Florida, every day is take-your-gun-to-work day. Though sharply opposed by business owners, lawmakers passed a bill allowing anyone with a permit to bring their firearm to work. Now if only we could get more of those guns into our nation’s schools….

What is wrong with this picture? Government starts a war which leads to high fuel prices; airline loses money due to high cost of fuel; airline cuts operating costs, including maintenance, to save money; government forces airline to ground planes for cutting maintenance; airline goes broke; government bails out airline. Now that’s American.

The Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in Eldorado, Texas finally turned over hundreds of children to the state after the church compound was raided. Many of those children were the wives of old men. And you thought Catholic priests had a monopoly on sexual deviance.