Eighteen months ago, I relieved myself in Karl Rove's Cheerios on the morning of a resounding Democratic victory in Congress. It was a great relief because a lot of pent up distress was finally done. The conversation of "what is America doing?" finally got away from topics chosen by George W. Bush and his no-talent assclown friends. But it was a short-lived relief. Soon I was being disapointed in ways I had only previously dreamed of as Nancy "Offtabler" Pelosi quickly cleared her workspace of any instruments that might be seen as a threat to the minority party whose asses her constituencies had just kicked out of power.
Today I come before you after a steady evening's drinking of vinegar and asparagus, bladder once again swollen and tender, to relieve myself in a different way as we contemplate the REAL closing of a sordid chapter in American Politics. And how things have changed in that time. The price of oil, for example. The value of the dollar. Sure, there's hope. And it's a good thing, or I would be beside myself right now at what's become of our nation.
I told my very conservative boss, during the run up to the 2000 election, that I thought George W. Bush's nomination (before it happened) would kill the Republican Party. I said "If he gets to be President, he's going to be the last Republican President ever. He's got such a history of screwups behind him that he's got no chance in hell of being adequately prepared to run this country. And when he's done screwing it up, no Republican will be able to run for President after him."
I was mocked. There were those of us who mocked right back.
If only our real media had been so honest and forthright then, and in the days following that dark moment. If only they had displayed the barest courage to say what everyone with intelligence and perception could see. We had allowed our Presidential Office to be treated like a third-generation sinecure. We had enabled to the highest office in the land a man-child who could barely string two coherent sentences together, who had failed at every significant venture of his adult life, and who would have never been anything but a gong-show distraction were it not for his family connections.
How did it come to this?
Meet Grover:
Grover, as far as I can ascertain, has never worked for his living. After graduating from college he did what most well-pampered trust fund babies do, and that was go and get a position (it's not a job unless you're putting a roof over your head with it) at a conservative think-tank. There, he learned that the Government Would Not Just Leave Him Alone with his Fucking Huge Piles of Money. This made Grover blue:
So he founded Americans for Tax Reform or some such bullshit-named organization, to sound as if it were a popular uprising of dissent, and with the full backing of the non-working elite behind him turned our government and national finances into a 3-ring circus.
It's sad, really. Children born in 1980 could expect to live longer, own more, eat better, and have in all ways a more affluent lifestyle than their grandparents from 40 years prior.
Under Ronald Reagan, and with immense help from Norquist's lobbying and agitation, our government's debt went from half a trillion dollars to over four trillion dollars, or roughly equal to the GDP of the day. This took until around the end of the first Bush term, when the country appeared to wake up to the spectre of this man becoming President some day:
What a waste it is to lose one's mind. Or not to have a mind is being very wasteful. How true that is.
The Holocaust was an obscene period in our nation's history. I mean in this century's history. But we all lived in this century. I didn't live in this century.
I believe we are on an irreversible trend toward more freedom and democracy - but that could change.
P-O-T-A-T-O-E
Americans looked at Dan Quayle's brain and saw this:
Dan Quayle was literally a poster child for stomping out the aristocracy. He was rich, and he was fucking stupid. Those of you under 30 don't remember that it used to be an embarassment to be caught saying something stupid in public. This was in the days before jackholes were idolized for their jackholery. At any rate, americans understood the risk that he might be President one day, and promptly voted in this guy:
Don't let the indelible whiff of hillbilly fool you. He's got some book smarts. He was quite capable of running the government, and even keeping our books balanced, but had the personal common sense of one of these:
And couldn't keep his hands or other pseudopods off of these:
After eight years of that, Americans were doing this:
Of course, behind the scenes while we hadn't really been paying attention, our media had been bought up by a cadre of urinal scrim that are too gruesome for me to even post ghostly artist's renderings of. Needless to say, the gentleman above (not the one with his head on the desk) had quite a bit to do with it. You all know who we ended up with.
Stupid people. That's the problem. America became the Land of the Stupid. It was "elitist" to be of above average I.Q. Talking with a fake Texas accent became amusing. Making shit up became "giving proper balance" to the issues. You couldn't tell "both sides" of the story without telling "both sides," the truth, and the obscene, stupid lie. Of course the lie got repeated 300,000,000 times more often than the truth because it was convenient.
Lazy. Stupid.
Like this stumbling fuckwit:
So we didn't do anything about our national debt. We didn't do anything about our use of gas and oil. We didn't improve our nation's infrastructure. We didn't do anything about education. Or when we did we allowed our leaders to fob off something monstrously deceptive and false as a solution.
When History is done with these people it's going to describe them as the ruin of a generation. My generation. My kids' generation. Anybody who has had to grow up between 1980 and 2008 will remember those days with bitterness, because people with even a flickering bit of intelligence could see that we had problems to solve. And that we had a time limit on how long we had to solve them. And instead of solving them we were told we could have our cake, and eat it too. By people who should have known better, if they were decent people at all. Which they weren't. Instead they frittered away our national treasure on shinies and nonsense and had a hell of a party. As I and my children are cleaning up this party, we'll be taking names. And making notes. And sending some bills.
But the party is over. It's staggering out the door now, to be dragged across the lawn (I'm taking some of the guests by their arms and letting their faces trowel through the wet sod -- it's the least they deserve) and into the waiting police cars to be booked to the drunk tank. And we've got some new management at the place. Someone I trust because he's straight with me about what his motivation is. Right now, right now we don't have time to get really ugly with the departing guests. It's just not worth the effort it would take to hold them down and rake my knuckles across their faces for the two to four hours running that it would require to make a good, solid reckoning of the night's damage.
But word is going to go out on these jokers. People will know what to look for. If their kids come around again, some day, we're going to let them know how severely not welcome they are. Bank on it.
Until then, I've got my Reagan toilet bowl decoration, and I'm pissing hard into it.
Update: one of my photos turns out to be not quite fair use so I re-created my own version of it. H/T to the Onion for the concept of Reagan as Pharaoh.