Fortunate Son and Hair Apparent: the secret behind Bush's power?
Bubble Boy Blows on: a vision of the future?
Republican Brownshirts Show Their True Colors: compassionate conservatism in action?
Rove Scandal For Dummies timeline (latest news if any)
New Feature: Media Pinhead of the Week

FORTUNATE SON AND HAIR APPARENT

In France, the spiritual homeland of gastronomy, Jean Kerry, and uncompromising body odor, male pattern baldness is regarded as a symbol of virility. As a consequence of this Gallic peccadillo, French presidents are selected for their intellect, love of country and obvious baldness.

Dans l'Amérique, however, we don't like our presidents hairless. Not since the pre-Rogaine days of the Ford administration has a slaphead graced the Oval office with his presence and merited billable time to the once noble presidential scalp buffer. Intelligence, competency and honesty? A full head of hair is really the only prerequisite for the Commander In Chief gig. Any fool can start a war, but only a real leader can keep his hair.

Indeed it could be argued that American admiration for presidents increases in direct proportion to the quantity and quality of their hair. Reagan, for example, is posthumously deified as some kind of 'merican Churchill. This is because of the lush pompadour he sported, the heroic slick that stayed jet-black and generous for nearly a century. Don't believe me? Do you think it was creating the biggest national deficit in US history or bringing the world to the brink of nuclear war that got the Gipper on a stamp?

If you are still not convinced by my hair power theory, just have a look at George Bush speechifing. Watching POTUS attempt to string words together in semi-coherent order is like watching history's first Down Syndrome President on the job. But incredibly, the Bushistas would still have us believe that he's a smart guy. It must be on the basis of hair. Even many of his detractors are convinced he conceals true Machiavellian genius behind his carefully cultivated veneer of down-home dumbness and wiry terrier hair. After all, the logic goes, how retarded could you be to run America? The answer is very. And the reason is hair. A bald GW would be packing groceries. A hirsute GW runs planet Earth's most powerful subdivision. Thank God for Rogaine. (top)

BUBBLE BOY BLOWS ON

"You work three jobs? Uniquely American, isn't it? I mean, that is fantastic that you're doing that."
George W. Bush speaks to a divorced mother of three (Omaha, Nebraska, February 4, 2005)

2000 Projected 10-year budget:
$5.6 trillion surplus

2005 Projected 10-year budget:
$6.0 trillion deficit
(Source: Congressional Budget Office)

"There's no such thing as legacies. At least, there is a legacy, but I'll never see it."
George W. Bush, speaking to Catholic leaders (Washington, January 31, 2001)

It's depressing enough that the über cons of the neocon misadministration are screwing up today. That they are busily screwing up tomorrow, the day after, and well into the next duocad is even more of a bummer. It's like they've built some kind of incompetence time machine to spread chaos and destitution throughout the future with generations as yet unborn cued up to make the payments. The mists are clearing... I see the future. And it blows.

Slowly, through the fog of yet unfolded time, I see my year-old son. He's now got three mortgages, bikes between several jobs, and wonders how he'll ever be able to send my grandson to high school - let alone college. He's asking me about the famous Bush era/error. "Dad, what did you do in the great financial spaz-out of the 00s?" I sigh weakly into my oxygen mask and adopt a post-war German style selective amnesia. I claim we didn't know what was going on and I swear I never voted for it. Noone saw the holocaust coming... we never saw the train carriages, packed with tax revenue and retirement funds, rolling to the corporate death camps... we never smelled the dollars burning at Halliburton-Birkenau... We never guessed that upwards of $10 trillion dollars could just be wiped out in less than five years... Impotently, I hear myself saying "sorry you're broke 'cos we killed all the money." But saying that it wasn't my fault just feels a little hollow.

Sitting on my antique Lazy Boy talking to my middle-aged son, I now realize that the 'screwing things up for us' part was just the beginning. In the 00s they set our kids, and their kids, on the road to ruin and nobody gave a shit. Unfortunately for everybody, the parasites we happily invited into the gut of the body politic seemed to forget the golden rule of parasitism: Do not kill the host. Unfortunately for us (the host) we neglected the golden rule of preventative medicine: Do not ignore the problem.

So I pull the lever on the neocon time machine and rewind to '05 where Baby Bush skips hand-in-hand with the locusts of the free (lunch) market and frolics gaily with assorted foreign despots (the people our government prefers to call 'inward investors'). These bastards are slurping every last drop from the sippy cup of America's social, political, economic and cultural vitality simply to feed the greed that defines their soulless psyches. And we continue to sit by and pretend it isn't happening. Shame on them and shame on us for being pricks and idiots respectively.

And as the mess gets messier, the self-loathing, frightened 'conservative' voter squeals in outrage. But their red anger is neatly deflected. It never occurs to conservatives to get mad with the guys who are doing the screwing. Instead, the 'Heart Land' ('cos it sure don't seem like the 'Brain Land') finds itself preoccupied with all kinds of dumb shit that has nothing to do with anything. Red anger rails in martyred woe against the Faux News approved targets of ire such as Islam, gay marriage, abortion, stem cell research, blah blah blah... but doesn't raise a murmur against the morally bankrupt administration of thieves that is ruining the country on their go ahead. Perhaps this misguided, cognatively dissonant form of self-destructive outrage, so ably exploited by the GOP, should be reclassified as 'inrage.' Goddam it, I'm so pissed I could give a tax break to a billionaire.

But who should give a fuck, really, if two dudes want to shack up in matrimony? Who should give a fuck about the boneheaded born-again blatherings about the 'evil' of Islam? Who should give a fuck about clumps of human cells being flushed away when upwards of 1,800 full grown adults have been flushed away in Iraq to service the greed of the born again Anti-Christ? Unfortunately, it seems, many do. Personally, I worry more that we are under the thumb of history's most spectacular Thiefdom. I worry about governments of the reckless and corrupt spending our tax money, like crack whores with stolen credit cards, and leaving the unborn to pick up the bill.

So when the multi-trillion-dollar chickens of George 'What Me Care?' Bush finally come home to roost in the decades to come, our children will have to get used to paying income tax like Swedish millionaires while simultaneously looking with envy at the social security infrastructure and living standards of Sub-Saharan Africa. According to Peter G. Peterson (former Nixon apparatchik and card-carrying Republican) in his book 'Running on Empty', Bush's financial incontinence is going to require taxes to be raised 38% or Social Security and Medicare spending to be halved by 2014 if America is to avoid bankruptcy.

In short, Bush loving fuckwits, we's all gonna be as broke as yer ass in twenny years. So thanks for voting, Scooter! I hope, on behalf of myself and my disenfranchised son, your crappy church gets dry rot and all your kids grow up to date gay mullahs and move to Paris. (top)

REPUBLICAN BROWNSHIRTS SHOW THEIR TRUE COLORS

Cindy Sheehan's 24 year old son, Casey, was killed in Baghdad in April. Since then, she's been trying to meet the President to ask "what was the noble cause my son had to die for?" It seems like a perfectly reasonable request to me. She's not seeking millions of dollars in compensation, she's not trying to shame or embarrass Bush (would he really need the help?), she just believes that the death of her son deserves an explanation. But at the ongoing anti-war/pro-war standoff outside chez Bush in Crawford, it's been reported that the pro-war side of the road has taken to chanting "we don't care" in response to the Sheehan supporters' chants of "Bush lied, soldiers died."

Funny, I always believed that America was all about the big ideas (the preservation of liberty, the fostering of democracy, free speech and all that good stuff) however clumsily or disingenuously upheld by those in power. So when did America suddenly become the kind of miserable, peevish little toilet of a country where people are actually motivated to get off their asses, travel to Bumfuck, Texas and yell "we don't care" at a grieving mother and her supporters?

You might be tempted to conclude that the tactless chanting was proof that some people just don't know when to shut up. You would be wrong. According to Tracy in Crawford, the Christian Conservative pro-Americans have no problem shutting the hell up when TV cameras show up lest the viewing public see them for the compassionless, ignorant shits they really are.

And what Karmically challenged master of spite thought America was a good place to sell the "Go home Cindy" t-shirts? If there is justice in the world, the Republican party fat wallet who paid for this sorry-ass travesty to get listed at the top of the Google sponsored links will soon find out it's not.

Not depressed yet? Try the story in today's news about shots being fired near the Cindy Sheehan antiwar encampment by farmer Larry Mattlage (one outraged redneck). "In the morning I usually wake up and see the morning sun. Now I wake up to stuff hanging in trees." whined Mattlage, psychedelically, about the protest banners that provoked him to load up his twelve-gauge. Apparently, his demonstrative mode of self expression is totally legal in the great state of Texas, even if you live across the road from POTUS, so what's the fuss about?

But, whatever your P.O.V., even if you agree with the illegal invasion and subsequent deaths in Iraq, in what Bizarro World America would chanting "we don't care", blasting shotguns or selling "Go Home Cindy" t-shirts be deemed appropriate responses? (top)

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GREAT PIONEERS OF NEOCON THOUGHT #13

"The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer."

Henry A. Kissinger

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