Wednesday, March 01, 2006
Night of the Living Dead
I listened to Attention Deficit reading Vile Victor’s latest missive today.
A year or two ago I would have been more angry than I am today, as their diseased movement sinks beneath the waves of history. But they will never be irrelevant. The same ignorant electorate that sent Drinky and his disgusting, sycophantic congress to Washington in 2000 and again in 2004 will rear their ugly heads again, mark my words.
Vile Victor, the neocon without peer, sees no problems in Iraq. That civil war that was supposed to happen? Never did. Elections show progress. Stay the course.
A vile piece, as usual, but pretty tame by Hanson’s standards. He only brutalized the truth a half-dozen or so times.
In Victor’s world, as I mentioned yesterday, statistics don’t matter. So just forget the fact that 80% of Iraqis want us out in a year. Forget the fact that 72% of our own soldiers want out within a year. Forget the fact that a majority of Americans are displeased or outright angry at the Bush Administration’s handling of the war. Forget the fact that several stories in the New York Times over the last month have described in detail how the electrical grid and water supplies of Iraq are as bad as they were two years ago and worse than they were four years ago. Forget the fact that despite elections, the formation of interim governments, and two years of training Iraqi security forces the level of violence in Iraq has not gone down one iota.
This is what “success” looks like in the world of Vile Victor. These are the preconditions that indicate to Hanson that victory is, of course, just around the corner.
Being an imperialist is bad enough, but being a stupid imperialist is truly bad. This is just one facet of his Vileness’s profound dementia. People like him should be in a mental ward, not publishing grist for the mill of the right-wing hate machine, and they certainly shouldn’t be the President of the United States, the Vice President of the United States, and the Secretary of Defense.
I look forward to the day when neoconservative warmongers like him are consigned to writing angry letters to the president like PNAC did in the nineties. Back to the cage with you, animal!
Your president is a failure. His presidency has been an unmitigated disaster. He raped the environment, exploded the national debt, threw money to corporate cronies like a drunk Carnival partier throwing beads to pretty girls, lied our country into a criminal war, bungled the war, slandered dissenters, jailed foreigners indefinitely, extradited suspects to countries like Syria for interrogation and torture, presided over the abuse and torture of prisoners under guidelines his administration set, spied on Americans on American soil without bothering to get a warrant, and strong-armed Congress into stonewalling any and all investigations into his numerous crimes.
He destroyed and undermined small, efficient programs for no other reason than they helped the poor. He put more former lobbyists in positions of government designed to monitor the industries they had just lobbied for than any president in history. He pushed the envelope in competing with Reagan for the most vacation time ever taken by a president. He appointed a man whose full-time job for eleven years was the director of an Arabian horse association as the head of FEMA and was then shocked when FEMA mangled the response to Hurricane Katrina. He played the guitar as New Orleans sunk beneath the waves. He lectured us on the “dangers” of “irresponsible debate.” He smirked at inopportune times. He mocked a woman on death row. He mangled the English language like it was a recent acquisition if his, making himself and his country look stupid. He ignored and insulted foreign countries and isolated his country internationally, giving encouragement to foreign dictators to do the same. He paid journalists to write positive stories about his administration’s policies, in America and in Iraq. He let a gay male escort with virtually no journalistic credentials into the White House Press Room to toss him softball questions.
In short, your president sucked like Rich Gannon. He was, by far, the worst president in history. The nine billion dollars “lost” in Iraq and the billions of no-bid contracts given out to companies like Halliburton quite simply dwarf, in absolute or inflation-adjusted dollars, any of the graft in the Grant or Harding Administrations. He has displayed all of the brutality, oppressiveness, secrecy, and lawlessness of Nixon without any of Nixon’s intelligence or political astuteness. He has looted the treasury, undermined the operations of the federal government designed to protect consumers and the environment, lied, and ignored the basic functions of his branch of government like Reagan but without any of the folksy charm or inspiring charisma. He has waged brutal, imperial war like Eisenhower or Johnson without any of the humanity of either man.
He now has an approval rating of 34%, the lowest of any president since his father, and the lowest of any president since Nixon during a time of economic well-being.
“Suck” is simply insufficient to describe how ineffably bad this man is, personally, professionally, and morally. Only quantum physics or some other science with access to scientific notation and the concept of antimatter can describe how cosmically, incredibly bad George W. Bush is.
Do I hate him? Of course. The simple truth is this: if you don’t hate George W. Bush, there is something deeply wrong with you. You are undoubtedly demented, and quite possibly, as Driftglass would say, a rat-fuck failure of a human being.
Drinky’s legacy will hang like an albatross around the neck of tens of millions of conservatives, in Washington and elsewhere, who voted for him, defended his worst excesses, biliously slandered his opponents, called into talk radio shows and sung his praises, lied about his actions, and wrote op-ed pieces in journals and newspapers advocating him and his policies.
I will be one of many who will remind you of this for the rest of your God forsaken lives.
But first, the better half of this country is going to hang your beloved president from a gibbet. We will sue him court, impeach him in congress, flood the streets and the newspapers with protest, and destroy every initiative of his until the day he leaves office. Tom DeLay will not get re-elected and may very well go to jail for many years. A half-dozen senators and dozens of representatives face a battle for re-election this November that they probably can’t win, because they’re crooks, because they’re republicans, because they’re wrong.
We’ll talk about what democrats will do for this country after we’re done removing the criminals and rank traitors for Washington. This election isn’t about who has better ideas for running the country. Polite debates like that are reserved for times when two relatively honest sides debate the fine points of governance. This election is about simply restoring law and order to a congress that has gone completely out of control. We can worry about turning the electricity on in Iraq when we’re done capturing the people who keep blowing up the generators.
This is a situation that needs to be controlled. I remember the day when a republican congress granted a special prosecutor a mandate to investigate a democratic president for absolutely anything they could possibly think up, year after year, for seven years. You name it, it was investigated: a million-dollar real estate deal that looked fishy buried deep in the president’s past? Investigated. Some firings in the White House Travel Office that some people complained about? Investigated. The President selling access to the Lincoln Bedroom? Investigated. The V.P. making campaign fundraising calls on government phones? Investigated. All examined by a special prosecutor with an endless mandate and limitless, congressionally-approved funds.
Nowadays the republican congress has (surprise!) lost its enthusiasm for harassing and investigating the president. They suddenly believe that a president should have imperial powers. Their deference would make a 19th-century geisha blush with shame. The president leads the country into a war that is in clear violation of international law and against the will of the vast majority of the world based on evidence of WMDs and allegations of Al Qaeda links that all turn out to be completely false. Worthy of a special prosecutor? Apparently not. Congressional investigation? Still waiting for it two years after the fact. A few more years of stonewalling and Pat Roberts knows it will all be a moot point anyway.
You will never live this down, conservatives. You have officially nominated one too many criminal men to be your president, your senator, your representative. The wheels are coming off your party in a way that no political party has ever seen. Every year you cling to power with the benefit of gerrymandered political districts and razor-thin electoral victories cobbled together with scare tactics and nationalism is just one more year you will have to answer for, and I see the reckoning being messy, vindictive, and unfair. When both parties are crooked than the balance will be muted, but when you send George W. Bush to the White House, when you elect Tom DeLay as your House majority leader, you have crossed a terrible line, because there are no corollaries in the Democratic Party and there haven’t been for thirty years.
Because Joe McCarthy was your guy. Richard Nixon was your guy. Strom Thurmond was your guy.
George W. Bush is your guy. Dick Cheney is your guy. Bill Frist is your guy. Jack Abramoff wasn’t a pioneer for Al Gore. Orifice and Lush and Apartheid and Attention Deficit and Ann Coulter are your foot soldiers.
You’ve got nothing. It doesn’t take Einstein to connect the dots here. That lineup of perps admits no democrats and it admits no comparisons.
There simply are no corrolaries in the Democratic Party, no matter how hard I or anyone else looks. Do you want to compare Dan Rostenkowski with Tom DeLay? What democrat are you going to put opposite Richard Nixon? Do you want to do a side-by-side comparison of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush? Are you going to tell me that there has ever been a democratic shill as shameless as Lush or Orifice? Who are you going to target, Jerry Springer? Michael Moore?
There are no comparisons. Dan Rostenkowski didn’t gerrymander his home state twice in three years, Tom DeLay did. Dan Rostenkowski didn’t sell his congress to lobbyists and the K Street project, Tom DeLay did. And while both men stole similar amounts of money and accepted gifts and graft, Dan Rostenkowksi never said “I am the federal government,” Tom DeLay did. And while both men’s parties scrambled to shield these criminals from repercussions, Dan Rostenkowski never pimped for sweat shops in the Mariana Islands and other crooked corporations, Tom DeLay did.
There has never been a democratic leader in a generation and a half who was as crooked as all the leaders of the GOP have been in recent years. Richard Nixon was the president. George W. Bush is the president. Bill Frist is the majority leader. Dick Cheney is your Vice President.
I haven’t even mentioned Spirew Agnew yet. But we haven’t forgotten. Nor have we forgotten Newt Gingrich, the leader of the “revolution” who was censured, humiliated, and then cast down as your Speaker five short years after he led this “revolution.” You would think this might have given pause to the voters in America, that they might have doubted a revolution led by a man who was so quickly ushered into the political closet and forgotten about, but they forgot, and you kept going, but we haven’t forgotten. And then Trent Lott, your Senate leader, was humiliated and forced from office, just like Gingrich, just three short years later.
And the circus of repudiated republican leaders continued, but you machine kept helpfully replacing one crook with another, and it didn’t seem to matter. DeLay came and he was humiliated and pushed from office as the leader in the House two years after Lott’s resignation. And now you have Bill “She Does Respond” Frist leading you in the Senate, like you never learned a lesson from three House or Senate republican leaders censured and sent from office in seven years.
Your leaders, republicans. Your presidents, your congressional majority leaders. An almost unbroken line of criminals.
I could throw in Ronald Reagan, who financed terrorists in Nicaragua, but why argue at this point. I might remind you of George H. W. Bush pardoning Iran-Contra felons when the investigations were wheeling in his direction, but why bother. I might laugh at his hypocrisy at championing family values when he had cheated on his wife, but let’s not get lost in the details.
These are your leaders, republicans, and while you may cry and thrash and stomp your feet no one will ever think that Jimmy Carter was as bad as Richard Nixon, or that your witch hunt in the nineties turned up more dirt than the shit bubbling to the surface in this administration without even the benefit of a skeptical congressional investigation. Your leaders are criminals.
While it’s amazing what a well-oiled corporate machine can do to keep the corpse of the Republican Party shambling forward through a blizzard of lawbreaking and humiliation, in an equally important way it only serves to remind us of how unholy your party is. It just keeps the bribery, greed, dishonesty, and dementia on display year after year for the whole world to see. It might have been smarter to lay low for a while and retool, but that opportunity has passed long ago. It is officially Night of the Walking Dead time, and to see the Republican Party shuffle forward to midterm elections and on to 2008 is so frightening, at this point, that I almost can’t bear to watch.
But what I and others want you to know, what we want to whisper in your ear before your legs fall off and you land face-first on the hard-packed earth is that when you regroup, when you bury the political bodies in the dark of night of yet another round of congressional leaders and unearth a yet another horrible new presidential candidate stitched together from the parts of previous degenerate republican politicians, we will be waiting, just like we were waiting when you had the arrogance to try to resurrect Robert Bork and appoint Nixon’s hatchet man in the Saturday Night Massacre to the Supreme Court. We will be waiting with video clips, quotes, congressional records, police records, and the testimony of witnesses. We will begin firing with all the ammunition you have supplied us for thirty years and more and we will keep firing until you drop, dead again, to the earth. And we will repeat the process over and over and over again until you are finally dead forever or until you are finally able to build a party not based on lies, ignorance, billionaire contributors, and fascism. And if and when you are prepared to join the community of responsible participators in government we will still brand you with a scarlet letter of shame as a perpetual reminder of where you came from and what is waiting for you if you ever fall off the wagon again.
Happy landings.
# posted by BitterHarvest @ 6:06 PM 
