In a twist on the old axiom, "The more things change, the more they stay the same," life in America under the Bush administration more closely resembles, "The more things stay the same, the more they stay the same."
Will the real President Bush please stand up?
Are we even certain who the acting POTUS is? Dick Cheney seems to think it's him. Of late, the news crawl lines across the bottom of the TV screen often reveal a quote from Tweedle Dee, of the foreign policy duo Tweedle Dumb and Tweedle Dee, who seems to be making an increasing number of public statements about anything and everything. Many of the comments concern his continued efforts to poke at Iraq . . er, . . .Iran with a sharpened stick.
Anyone over six remembers when the job of the vice president was to sit phantom-like in a back office and wait for something to happen to the president. Apparently Dick Cheney never got the historically traditional memo that contained this job description.
Closing the Wrong Border
Is there an unrevealed reason the American public should fear Canada? Then why now require Americans and Candians to have passports at the northern border while illegal aliens of all stripes roll in daily, unchecked, under the radar, and in droves, across the Mexican border? To heroically save Karl Rove's son from picking tomatoes is probably not the right answer. Could the right answer loop back to Dick Cheney's continued poking Iran in the eye with a sharp stick?
To fight Iran openly mano-a-mano would require something America hasn't seen for a while. A draft. Given that a recent poll conducted by the AP-Ipsos revealed that 61% of Americans consider the Iraq War a mistake, it's likely that forced conscription of Generations X, Y, Z, and maybe even Me, for an expanded war in the Middle East is not going to be well received by the electorate. Some draftees might even try to run across the border to . . . . . Oh!
George Bush Bikes While the Cabinet Practices for Disaster
From a story in today's Washington Post comes another possible indication that George W. Bush is not really the acting POTUS. He rode his bicycle Saturday while top-level administration officials practiced for disaster. Or was the disaster riding his bicycle while top-level officials practiced governing?
The report did not indicate if Dick Cheney was present at the drill. He may have been otherwise occupied using his Iran poking stick to practice his war drums. But if George W. Bush is not concerned about potential disaster on the streets of America, then Americans should just relax.
John McCain and the '08 Election
The 2008 election will be Senator John McCain's third attempt to get himself elected president. He was a viable candidate in 2000 until he got KO'd in Round 3 by the Rove-Cheney political machine. In the interim, he has been busy being for Bush's war but against a small war, against a surge unless it's a big surge, against conservative Christian "agents of intolerance" until he remembered he had to tolerate their intolerance to get elected.
Mr. McCain appears confused about what he believes, so he may finally be ready to hold the highest office in the land. He has snapped up into his campaign's employ every political machinator and swiftboater that muddied the issues in '04 and got President Cheney . .er, . Bush re-elected.
Now that McCain has gone Bush League, his will be an interesting campaign among '08 presidential campaigns.
Sunday, February 25, 2007
Thursday, February 08, 2007
Ignorant Congress? Or Most Ignorant Congress Ever?
The actor Richard Dreyfuss went to England for two years to study Civics at Cambridge or Oxford, or one of those high-fallutin' British colleges. Then he appeared as a panelist on the fall season of Bill Maher's Real Time where he waxed poetic, almost lectured with Bill's tacit permission, on the subject of Civics in America. Or rather, the lack of Civics in America. Either way, he was correct. Too bad this Congress wasn't watching.
This Congress is not getting it. They have substituted civic duty for a glaring example of political and personal expediency. One now has to leave the country to study Civics while they self-centeredly dance around the one issue that Americans hired them to put to bed for good and all. It's embarrassing. It's embarrassing to the country in the face of the world. It's embarrassing and maddening to those citizens that last November sent a loud and clear message that enough was enough with Bush-Cheney-Iraq already.
Is this new Congress even aware that Americans already view them as impotent political hacks--puppies chasing their tails and pulling the fur of toothless old dogs to show they're tough? If Civics can be defined as the rights and moral and ethical duties of a society's citizenry, then the civility of this Congress resembles Frankenstein's monster. Many more children will return home in many more coffins while Congress hops haplessly around on one foot trying to decide which course of action will get them re-elected.
If this now passes for American civics in action, then all hope is lost. Americans, their Congresses and presidents, have engaged in some stupid antics in the past. But because of the way America was, because she knew her Civics, she always produced at least a small posse of Congressional heroes who, at risk to personal gain, were willing to stand up and call out the Emperor for showing up naked. The lesson here is that virtue is its own reward. And in a society starving for virtue, it could be fabulously re-electable were Congress not so involved in Congressional American Idol to see it.
Would it help to play an endless-loop tape of Richard Dreyfuss's talk on Civics in all government buildings in and around Washington? Or is the political hackery too ingrained in both the persons and the system to be deprogrammed now? As the youth say, it's looking like. And, ah, the poor youth of America. Doomed to live with the failures of their parents who can't pull it together long enough to set a wise course for America's future. Well, look at that--The "Me" generation has made it all about them. If nothing Congress is attempting to do is turning out right, maybe it's because none of it is being done for the right reasons.
There is no acceptable or believable excuse in the universe for Congress's failure to step up to the plate and do their civic duty to suck the poison out of a failed pre-emptive war and the failed leadership of the current administration, and to do it for the future of the nation and for their fellow Americans. It is no less than America's floundering citizens deserve after six years of neglect by Washington. It is no less than the practice of Civics.
This Congress is not getting it. They have substituted civic duty for a glaring example of political and personal expediency. One now has to leave the country to study Civics while they self-centeredly dance around the one issue that Americans hired them to put to bed for good and all. It's embarrassing. It's embarrassing to the country in the face of the world. It's embarrassing and maddening to those citizens that last November sent a loud and clear message that enough was enough with Bush-Cheney-Iraq already.
Is this new Congress even aware that Americans already view them as impotent political hacks--puppies chasing their tails and pulling the fur of toothless old dogs to show they're tough? If Civics can be defined as the rights and moral and ethical duties of a society's citizenry, then the civility of this Congress resembles Frankenstein's monster. Many more children will return home in many more coffins while Congress hops haplessly around on one foot trying to decide which course of action will get them re-elected.
If this now passes for American civics in action, then all hope is lost. Americans, their Congresses and presidents, have engaged in some stupid antics in the past. But because of the way America was, because she knew her Civics, she always produced at least a small posse of Congressional heroes who, at risk to personal gain, were willing to stand up and call out the Emperor for showing up naked. The lesson here is that virtue is its own reward. And in a society starving for virtue, it could be fabulously re-electable were Congress not so involved in Congressional American Idol to see it.
Would it help to play an endless-loop tape of Richard Dreyfuss's talk on Civics in all government buildings in and around Washington? Or is the political hackery too ingrained in both the persons and the system to be deprogrammed now? As the youth say, it's looking like. And, ah, the poor youth of America. Doomed to live with the failures of their parents who can't pull it together long enough to set a wise course for America's future. Well, look at that--The "Me" generation has made it all about them. If nothing Congress is attempting to do is turning out right, maybe it's because none of it is being done for the right reasons.
There is no acceptable or believable excuse in the universe for Congress's failure to step up to the plate and do their civic duty to suck the poison out of a failed pre-emptive war and the failed leadership of the current administration, and to do it for the future of the nation and for their fellow Americans. It is no less than America's floundering citizens deserve after six years of neglect by Washington. It is no less than the practice of Civics.
Thursday, February 01, 2007
Impeachment: What is Congress Waiting For?
In the minds of many Americans the idea of impeachment is not only not "off the table," as newly installed House Speaker Pelosi said it was, it in fact sits dead center on their kitchen tables, taking the place of grandma's heirloom vase.
The best kept secret about America, of which beltway insiders are unaware, is that too many mainstream Americans are struggling too heroically to hold it all together to find the shenanigans of Washington palatines even slightly amusing. Perhaps the orbiting constellations around the former Ivy League frat boys at our nation's helm can afford to take a boys-will-be-boys view of their antics. But Jane and John Q. Public can't and won't. Thank God.
Perhaps the last of Washington's moral center did spiral down the drain in December 2000. But Jane and Joe Average-American's moral center is still largely intact, and that in itself is a miracle. However, central to that miracle is a level of disgust generally reserved for the likes of a Jeffrey Dahmer. The comparison is apt because these leaders, having been left to run amok for six years, have also eaten America's young.
So, how many more times and in how many more ways do Darth Vader and Alfred E. Know-nothing have to show their asses, our asses, to the world before someone, or 535 someones, actually decides to take some action and stop them? Colluding to perpetrate a national lie, then attempting to destroy every critic of their skeevy machinations, and now having the resulting blood of thousands of human beings on their hands is not enough? Must they also hold a toga party on the White House lawn complete with human sacrifice in the Rose Garden as the grand finale before American representatives are embarrassed enough to say "Enough!"?
In a homicide investigation, one always looks first for the smoking gun. The highest leaders of our land have stuck on their persons so many smoking guns that the subsequent fog hovering above them could be pegged as a major contributor to global warming, which they have also colluded to lie about.
In six short years America has descended from a well-meaning superpower whose leaders sometimes get it wrong to the bully in the schoolyard whose leaders take turns footballing the globe around the Oval Office like a hacky sack. The world now hates us. They should. It's become hard to live here and love this country and not simultaneously hate the collective us.
At what level of hubris and fiasco and state of denial will our representatives, who represent an angry and repulsed population, decide to stop worrying about what is good for American politics and finally have the courage to do something that is good for America?
It is embarrassingly past time for members of both parties of Congress to stop waving the flag and trying to decide if "these colors don't run" or not. It is time for them to stand together and decide if these colors still mean anything exemplary in the world.
The best kept secret about America, of which beltway insiders are unaware, is that too many mainstream Americans are struggling too heroically to hold it all together to find the shenanigans of Washington palatines even slightly amusing. Perhaps the orbiting constellations around the former Ivy League frat boys at our nation's helm can afford to take a boys-will-be-boys view of their antics. But Jane and John Q. Public can't and won't. Thank God.
Perhaps the last of Washington's moral center did spiral down the drain in December 2000. But Jane and Joe Average-American's moral center is still largely intact, and that in itself is a miracle. However, central to that miracle is a level of disgust generally reserved for the likes of a Jeffrey Dahmer. The comparison is apt because these leaders, having been left to run amok for six years, have also eaten America's young.
So, how many more times and in how many more ways do Darth Vader and Alfred E. Know-nothing have to show their asses, our asses, to the world before someone, or 535 someones, actually decides to take some action and stop them? Colluding to perpetrate a national lie, then attempting to destroy every critic of their skeevy machinations, and now having the resulting blood of thousands of human beings on their hands is not enough? Must they also hold a toga party on the White House lawn complete with human sacrifice in the Rose Garden as the grand finale before American representatives are embarrassed enough to say "Enough!"?
In a homicide investigation, one always looks first for the smoking gun. The highest leaders of our land have stuck on their persons so many smoking guns that the subsequent fog hovering above them could be pegged as a major contributor to global warming, which they have also colluded to lie about.
In six short years America has descended from a well-meaning superpower whose leaders sometimes get it wrong to the bully in the schoolyard whose leaders take turns footballing the globe around the Oval Office like a hacky sack. The world now hates us. They should. It's become hard to live here and love this country and not simultaneously hate the collective us.
At what level of hubris and fiasco and state of denial will our representatives, who represent an angry and repulsed population, decide to stop worrying about what is good for American politics and finally have the courage to do something that is good for America?
It is embarrassingly past time for members of both parties of Congress to stop waving the flag and trying to decide if "these colors don't run" or not. It is time for them to stand together and decide if these colors still mean anything exemplary in the world.
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