As I write this tonight, John Boner is desperately trying to recapture the reins of a republican party caucus threatening to run off in every direction like cockroaches running from a suddenly switched on light at midnight. He and the rest of the weasels trying to manage this jailbreak can’t seem to decide how to win gracefully in the face of increasingly panty-waisted democratic concessions. The congressional democrats have taken the clear political advantage Obama had a week ago and surrendered to Boner en masse, handing him the keys so fast that they have apparently freaked him out and made him run back to the rest of the kids to see if they should take them or keep pushing their pointy little heads in the urinal and making them cry.
Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi are the least inspiring lefties since Mickey Lolich. I saw Harry meekly trying to get himself worked up on the floor of the senate today and I wanted to go and dust him off. He looked like every bespectacled, rumpled, confused uncle trying to give a wedding toast when he can’t remember who the bride is. And Pelosi – god bless her for being from San Francisco but the woman can alienate listeners like no one else in recent memory. She almost single handedly fucked up Obama’s victory in the first 15 minutes of his term when she stepped up to the podium and started in on some hare brained quest – people started dropping over, eyes glazed and trembling like Japanese gamers having seizures from strobe lights and bad electronica. It’s awful…it’s embarrassing.
The only thing more disappointing is that the regular, serious, professional, legitimate media – everyone but Faux News and the Wall Street Journal - keeps acting like it’s an even fight between two well meaning and equally compelling alternatives with two carefully considered and thoughtful policy platforms struggling for the hearts and minds of a riveted population steeped in the historical back-story and well grounded in the competing arguments…Yeah, right…The meek but well meaning democrats keep caving in and offering more stuff to the bully-boy republicans who have no agenda other than to hate their own government so much that they are willing to dismantle most of it in the interest of the 1,000,000 or so rich people who run things.
At this point Obama is probably sitting in a dark room at the White House chain smoking and drinking the good scotch, wondering where in the hell he went wrong and why on earth reason doesn’t prevail. Can it be possible that they offer to cut programs intended to make life better for the middle class, only to have Boner appearing ever 30 minutes in front of a live microphone claiming that the democrats are only interested in greasing the slippery slope that will end up with us living like fucking Cuba? Can cutting programs for the poor and the weak and the old be – not only called not enough – but reflected back in a fun house mirror and made to look like they were the real problem in the country in the first place? If only the richest of the rich could keep more of their money and not have to pay taxes at all, we would put this country on the right track?
There are serious Libertarian voices out there that really do make a lot of sense in trying to reduce the size of government through a thoughtful assessment of programs, abandoning sacred cows, thinking outside the box, changing the paradigm – nobody who’s 70 years old and living in Palm Springs on $200,000 a year should need social security or medicare. The defense budget looks more and more like Jaba the Hut while we careen around the world chasing shadows that look like terrorists at the same time as – with no apparent irony – we build advanced strike fighters that cost over a billion dollars each to fly really fast, really high over the luxury compounds on the outskirts of Islamabad where the bad guys are smoking opium and playing cards with the bundles of $100 bills we’re shipping over there on 1,000 pound pallets. Maybe we should think twice about that research grant to study how mold reacts to slides of the Kama Sutra. OK, OK, we get it…
But do we really want to live this way, wallowing in cheap consumer goods, junk food, vodka and Marlboros, drugged by watching the extravagant slutiness of the Kardashians and thinking Lady Gaga really is talented? To quote Dean Wormer, “Fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life, son.” This spectacle was amusing for the first 6 weeks or so but it’s to the point where it really is making me sick and deeply, truly afraid for my country…if we are so stupid as to fall for this carnival sideshow magic act and freak show then we are in deep trouble.
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