It is like some sort of virus. It is like some sort of weird and painful rash on your face that makes you embarrassed to walk out the door and so you sit there day after day, waiting for it to go away, slathering on ointment and Bactine and scotch. And yet still it lingers.
Some days the pain is so searing and hot you want to cut off your own head with a nail file. Other days it is numb and pain-free and seemingly OK, to the point where you think it might finally be all gone and you allow yourself a hint of a whisper of a positive feeling, right up until you look in the mirror, and scream.
George W. Bush is just like that...
...I was having cocktails recently with a group of people, among whom were two lifetime Republicans, each in his 60s, corporate businessmen, one admittedly slightly more moderate than the other (to the point where, after once hearing a senator read off a long list of Bush's hideous environmental atrocities, actually let his conscience lead his choice and ended up voting for Kerry) but nevertheless both devoted members of the party.
Bush came up, as a topic, as a cancer, as a fetid miasma in the air...
...What a difference a handful of years makes. Now, overseas, we are a joke. A threat. A toxin. We are considered reckless and arrogant and ignorant, dangerous not just to the rest of the world but to the overall health of the planet. No one anywhere understands how a man like Bush can be the leader of the Free World, stolen election or no...
...Which is just another way of saying we are currently stuck. We are swirling around the bottom of the drain, clinging on to anything that might hold us from going under for just a little while longer. We have to let the neocon disease run its course, and just pray that at the end of it all the scarring and the pain and damage will not be so permanent, and so hideous, that we can't be seen in public for a decade.
This is where it stands: Bush can in no way risk alienating the ultra-right-wing bonk-job contingent that put him in office (they are, considering Bush's 32-percent approval rating, the only ones left even remotely supporting him -- even though, according to many estimates, they're starting to abandon him, too), and hence all policy and all agenda items from here on out will be even more vicious and desperate in an attempt to shore up the base. Hence trying to mutilate the Constitution to ban
gay marriage. Hence attacking the New York Times and claiming newspapers are endangering American lives.
In other words, Bush's latest nasty, Rove-designed salvos and upcoming attacks to save a sliver of power and pride and sneering GOP control are just the beginning.
However -- praise Jesus and pass the scotch -- they are the beginning of the end.
Monday, July 10, 2006
"A Topic, A Cancer, A Fetid Miasma"
I can't believe I missed this commentary from Friday's SFGate location. A friend sent along the whole article cut and pasted into an email. Have a slice or a two and let me know what you think:
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
Nicely said, if I do say so myself.
Isure hope your summation is accurate, because if this really is just the beginning and not the beginning of the end, things are really going to get terrible- moreso than now.
Ah, disease as metaphor...well, let me tell ya, my beloved spouse is recovering from a nasty four-week-so-far bout of shingles, which broke out in his eye, on the left side of his forehead and scalp, and although his suffering has been considerable, it ain't nothin' compared to whatBush&Co. is inflicting upon this planet. And I also think things will get much worse, or even continue badly if we knock the GOP out.
There's an article in a recent New York Review of Books about Italy's heinous ex, Berlusconi, and his breathtakingly nasty politics, which is instructive. He either taught Rove everything he knows, or hired him as consultant, from the looks of it. Berlusconi has stated that he plans to fuck up the works for the next PM, and he can deliver on this becaue he still has his cronies in power in their congress.
For Bush's recent 60th birthday, I wished him shingles, and a plague of boils. Too good for the likes of him.
My family on my fathers side are lifelong repubes. My father an extreme repube. He told me this past year at lunch and unsolicited, that he is fed up w/Bush and will not vote repube again. He said their crooked and and care nothing of the citizens. His words not mine. He has finally retired and I think that now, he has to deal with the reality of what BushCo thinks of the elderly and its hitting him in the wallet among other things.
this coming from a man that used to call me a commie for my beliefs when we had the occasional debate when I was younger.
there is just not enough Scotch....
Post a Comment