Firas Durri

“No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.”
— H. L. Mencken

I don’t suppose that the backers of the Bush/Cheney ticket ever realized how much pain their horror of a candidate has caused.

From pulling funding from the UN Population Fund (one of the most horrid things a U.S. President has ever done, because it achieved nothing but political gain while causing more than 80,000 deaths per year); to putting those two magic words together—‘enemy combatant’—which, far from putting freedom on a march, left it in a gagged shriek for years; there is nothing that this man has stirred with his reverse Midas touch that hasn’t resulted in a grotesque travesty of all that used to be.

And the son of a bitch wasn’t even elected.

Garry Trudeau on George W. Bush, in an interview with the New Yorker:
“It took his brother, his father, his father’s friends, the Florida secretary of state, and the Supreme Court to pull it off. His entire life gives fresh meaning to the phrase ‘assisted living.’”

So we tried to figure out what the hell was going on. Was he a moron surrounded by bumbling idiots, or maybe a servile dolt taking neoconservative marching orders? There was also the slightly amusing analysis offered here and there of Bush’s goals being Trotskyite. Or maybe he was the Antichrist. Anything, anything to rationalize day after day of shocks from this government; from renouncing Kyoto to randomly deciding to invade Iraq; all those craven announcements shrouded in obscurantist secrecy and wrapped in xenophobic (if not Orwellian) rhetoric.

From the farcical newspaper The Onion ‘Nation’s Liberals Suffering From Outrage Fatigue‘:

According to a study released Monday by the Hammond Political Research Group, many of the nation’s liberals are suffering from a vastly diminished sense of outrage.

“With so many right-wing shams to choose from, it’s simply too daunting for the average, left-leaning citizen to maintain a sense of anger,” said Rachel Neas, the study’s director. “By our estimation, roughly 70 percent of liberals are experiencing some degree of lethargy resulting from a glut of civil-liberties abuses, education funding cuts, and exorbitant military expenditures.”

The right wing hate machine swings to aim at Clinton whenever he returns to the public spotlight. They have lists and lists of complaints; the Lincoln bedroom—!!!ohmygodthelincolnbedroom!!! and removed ‘W’ keys. How many holidays did Bush take? How many covert policy meetings did Cheney’s vassals have with industry executives? No outrage that can be mustered over Clinton, especially by any claims of wasting taxpayer money, can ever match the depths of Bush’s excesses.

There is not a scrap—not a scrap of redeemable traits in the administrative politics of the last four years. No excuse, not the most flimsy or pathetic; no explanation. This presidency has had the sole success of injecting pain and hatred in the world for centuries to come.

The mannequin stirs, now and then. He sputters that he is a War President, that history will be his judge. What a joke. History will judge you to have been neo-Nazi jackass you are, asshole. When the bloody lapdogged idiocy is swept from the Republican party, history will spit on George W. Bush. And all his lackeys.

From The American Conservative, ‘Kerry’s the One’:

Bush has behaved like a caricature of what a right-wing president is supposed to be, and his continuation in office will discredit any sort of conservatism for generations. The launching of an invasion against a country that posed no threat to the U.S., the doling out of war profits and concessions to politically favored corporations, the financing of the war by ballooning the deficit to be passed on to the nation’s children, the ceaseless drive to cut taxes for those outside the middle class and working poor: it is as if Bush sought to resurrect every false 1960s-era left-wing cliché about predatory imperialism and turn it into administration policy.

A few days ago, a major artist finally summoned the guts to say what jingoistic hysteria has been holding from from the mainstream for too long. Eminem in Mosh: “Fuck Bush.”

Precisely.

Fuck George W. Bush. Fuck Karl Rove. Fuck John Ashcroft. (Fuck Ashcroft, Fuck Ashcroft, Fuck Ashcroft.) Fuck Dick Cheney. Fuck Donald Rumsfeld. Fuck Tom Ridge. Fuck all of them.

While I’m at it, I hope that Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, Ann Coulter, Matt Drudge, The Washington Times, Glenn Reynolds, et cetera all join a suicide pact and choke on pretzels.

(PS. 2008, baby. We’ll be running the show.)

(PPS. I meant: January 2005.)