© 2006, UrbisMedia
Will daddy Bush please buy little Georgie a baseball team, or a new X-Box, something other than a country to f**k up, so that we can begin to get back some semblance of the pre-Bush America we knew. It takes a big man to admit his mistakes, and wee Georgie is the type of guy who gets bailed out, gets to hide in Alabama when his daddy got him on the Georgia Air National Guard drinking team.
But it looks like George will stay on his course. The course he believes is his destiny despite all the lies and deceptions and delusions about his war that lie behind it. He may be the last person on earth who believes that! And so he is more and more likely to turn the White House into a bunker. Like Hitler, he has already shoved aside the advice of his generals, and now he will do the same with the Iraq Study group and even politicians from his own party. His former Secretary of State has turned on him, his ejected Secretary of Defense fired at pissy memo at him, his appointment at the UN has cut and run, his new Secretary of Defense says, de facto , he is losing his war. Less that third of the country believes the reasons he gives for his war and they have stripped him of his congressional majority for it. He will become more isolated and petulant. He doesn’t perform well under such conditions (not that he performs well under any conditions).
Will even the Republicans rue the day that their little idiot stole the 2000 election? With only two years to run before the next presidential election Georgie Boy has them between a rock and a hard place. This is what happens when you have a guy who thinks he was anointed, the messiah that is supposed to deliver America from 911 and the marauding hoards of Islam. Indeed, there are dangers of that sort, but they need to be looked at with clearer, far more intelligent, eyes than those clouded with years of substance abuse and the beatific vision of born-again-ism. George was the wrong guy (really for any time, not just the current age), with the wrong values, who chose the wrong enemy to fight, but is constitutionally incapable of overcoming his self-delusions and changing direction.
Some Republicans have come to this realization, and turned away from Bush in the mid-term election, helping the Democrats regain the House and Senate. But what looms is possibly losing the White House and even more congressional gains for the Democrats, especially if Bush hangs in there with his war, as day by day the American and Iraqi body count tallies, and the chaos worsens, as the other enemies of George become more emboldened and America inexorably loses not only its moral influence and reputation but its military reputation as well before the rest of the world. Moreover, it is being weakened every day in its ability to fight the real war on the terrorists. This is what George’s war seems to be “winning” for us; Iraq is pretty much a lost cause, because it was the wrong cause to begin with.
Like the rest of his life, George’s “accomplishments,” even with the assistance of a rich family’s influence in getting him into the right schools and bailing out his business blunders, are very thin—and questionable. His presidency has accomplished moving a lot of American wealth in the direction of people like his family, toward the corporate elite. He has paid back the religious fanatics who helped elect him by getting in the way of important medical research and filling courts with judges who quote from the bible more than they swear on it. He’s reversed all the important environmental legislation, pandered to the drug companies, and especially his and his vice-president’s energy. There has been no important social legislation, and at least he has failed to dismantle social security and is still trying to ruin Medicare. George is no friend to the little people of Red states who helped to elect him because he’s said he would keep gays from ruining the fabulous institution of American marriage that ends in failure literally half the time, and other of Satan’s works. Even some of them are slowly beginning to “get it.”
It’s the corporations that have cleaned up under George, not the people. George’s war, mis-directed at the enemy who is supposed to force ladies in Red states to wear burkhas and pray five times a day toward Mecca, has been basically a fiasco that has killed as many of their kids as there were Americans killed by 911, maimed tens of thousands more, and has filled to coffers the war profiteers. They fight and die so Georges’s friends and campaign contributors can get fat, but buy into his praise and promise of support for troops he sends back time and again to be little more than bomb fodder and targets.
This has been an especially bad bunch of Republicans, emboldened to pursue an increasing twisted set of values they call American values, but a are now exposed to be the sort of corruption that the polity wants stopped. Exposed for their sleazy Abramoffs, their racist Trent Lotts, and self-serving Frists, and their denying Hasterts, and hypocritical Foley’s, for using poor Terri Shiavo for political advantage, for unleashing Swift Boat Veterans and some of the dirtiest campaign practices in history and crooked elections, and on and on. And lying about it all.
Still, there are those Republicans—and we all know some of the personally—who remain in denial, who cling to the label out of stubbornness or stupidity. They should cut and run to the light, but will they?
So it needs to be said, with no apologies to those on them—because there is too much at stake here—you are on the wrong side, both politically and morally. Where you stand is where your leader has divided the nation—where we are either posing phonies like George Bush, or Americans that the worlld can admire and respect. Where you are leads to not just being despised abroad, but to gated communities, to becoming isolated from any friends and loved ones who have tolerance for those who are different. It leads to perverted humor, to jokes with a smirk. It leads to judging people by the labels and stereotypes that you attach to them. It leads ultimately to a form of social genocide, a paranoia that brings you actually or metaphorically to wearing camouflage and caching weapons in Montana, or spiritually awaiting some insane and inane notion of the “endtime.” You delude yourself that there can be some “morning in America” re-constituted by some actor who was well into the evening of his life and faculties, or an America that would bludgeon the world into “democratic” versions of itself. You fail to see the irony, the internal contradictions, the sheer denial of it all. You delude yourself that you are the majority; but you are in fact, and in demography, cobbled together by a Machiavellian cloud of fear, not just of the Islamic hoard, but of the ultimate mid-toning of our melanin, of the names of other gods, the rights that others rightly demand for their privacy, their sexuality, and their spirituality. You still claim exclusively for yourself the rights of those of first arrival, begrudging social and physical space, protecting the prerogatives of the rich by your own counterintuitive accessions to additions to their privilege. You scorn the homeless because they “do not respect property values.”
In this you are mean in thought and spirit. Worst of all, you think that America is defined by your narrow vision and mean spirit. And that is why I don’t pity you, and I give you the wariness that any threat to both the idea and essence of America deserves. It’s not your America by tenure, by right or by righteousness, and you shouldn’t delude yourself into thinking you will get it without a fight. You cannot arrogate the morality of America to yourself, especially when it is a morality of intolerance. You cannot arrogate patriotism to yourself, because the vary act of doing so is unpatriotic. Your notion of freedom is perverse because you regard it as your prerogative to grant. And if you faintly understood what democracy really means you would shut up and realize that it is something that people take for themselves; that it is not gifted to them by self-annointed hypocrites.
When you followed the likes of George Bush you crossed the Rubicon, you crossed to the other side, the Dark Side, the wrong side.
And I say this with all due respect.
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©2006, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 12.26.2006)