Mark Morford has a stinging, absolutely hilarious little satirical number in SFGate today, about Bush pre-emptively pardoning the entire Republican party. Seriously.
The funny thing is, I really don't think it's that far away.
Here's the part that made me burst out laughing:
"Come to me, you shockingly large numbers of corrupt and disgraced Republican senators, representatives, aides, deputies, secretaries, lobbyists, governors and mayors and secretly gay meth-snorting right-wing Christian evangelists, and I shall remove from you the burden of legal, ethical, spiritual and yes even genital responsibility for all crimes you have almost certainly committed under the dark umbrella that is me! I am the walrus!"
Bush was apparently emboldened by his unprecedented and widely reviled commutation of L. Lewis "Scooter" Libby's prison sentence just recently, a move widely considered to be one of the more repellent abuses of power in a kaleidoscopic drunken funhouse of abuses lo these past 6.5 years, though he appeared to be staring up at the heavens as he spoke, just little bit astonished that lightning was not striking him dead on the spot.
"DeLay! Gonzales! Abramoff! Rumsfeld! Frist and Scalia and Ashcroft and Rove! Hastert and Duke Cunningham and Dusty Foggo! Ralph Reed! Mark Foley, Ted Haggard and Jeff Gannon! Abu Ghraib instigators! Guantanamo endorsers! WMD believers! FEMA! Plamegate! Terry Schaivo hypocrites! Torturers and influence peddlers and domestic wiretappers, Halliburton bribers and no-bid contractors and dark Carlyle Group overlords!
"Also: Sex education misinformers, global warming deniers, scientist muzzlers, Energy Task Force liars, Iraq Study Group deniers, 9/11 Report ignorers, Medicare scammers, Diebold voting machine swindlers! Bogus Jessica Lynch and Saddam statue and fake Thanksgiving turkey event stagers! And all the rest I can't remember because wow there are just so damn many! Come to me and be not someone's prison bitch despite how you really, really deserve it! I hereby pardon you aaaaaalllll!" (Mark Morford)
But really, given the fact that we've been abandoned by the mainstream media and are missing even the right of habeas corpus, is this really so far off? We've got a year and a half, more or less, of Bush doing whatever the hell he damn well pleases, his isolation not mattering one whit because Democrats won't stop him anyway--mostly because, it should be pointed out, the Dems are still following legislative precedent and little things like the laws of the United States. When dealing with the lawless grab for power engineered by BushCo and Cheney (more the latter than the former, I'll admit), laws are only as strong as their enforcement, and dear old Patty Fitzie can only do so much on his own before Fox News pushes some goddamn nut to assassinate either his character or his corpus itself.
On a related note, I just finished reading Glenn Greenwald's A Tragic Legacy. The picture of a President trapped in a two-dimensional funhouse worldview where the more he's reviled for his unrealistic and fearmongering policies and tyranny, the more he clings to said policies and tyranny, is truly chilling.
Prescription: one Carnacki's most excellent rant, one Morford satire, and a good stiff drink. Maybe that will make me feel better.
Or maybe another goddamn election to give the Dems such a sweeping majority they can finally clean the fucking house out is in order. Only, you know, one question haunts me.
How long will it be before Bush decides elections aren't necessary anymore either? Since he's done away with habeas corpus and oversight, not to mention the rule of law when it comes to his lackeys and cronies.
Welcome to the new banana republic, my friends. It's the US of A. Prime export: toxic neoconservative warmongering. Dictator: Dubya, propped up by the MSM and his rich buddies.
Christ. Not even all the satire in the world is helping my mood today.