Are you a Republican looking to relive the olden days, back when you won the presidency and the world was yours for the taking? You're in luck, as the newly revamped National Republican Congressional Committee online store has that special something just for you. Provided you like George W. Bush, that is. You won't find mention of Mitt (despite the obvious sporting goods potential of a name like Mitt, I mean c'mon, what creepy right-wing grandpa wouldn't want to get his off-offspring a nice leather glove emblazoned with the face of the man who single-handedly dispatched Republican stalwarts like Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum), but if you want to proclaim your love for pre-discredited George Bush, enjoy:
Notice the attention to detail. The logo looks just like the bumper stickers an embarrassed nation has finally gotten around to scraping off their cars. The
'00 hearkens back to a time before 9/11, before two wars, before the ballooning of the deficit and before the
unpleasantries of worldwide economic collapse. It was a heady time, back when
compassionate was paired with
conservatism with something nearly akin to a straight face, and when the pundits did their level best to convince the world that the illegitimate son of George Bush the elder and Vice President Dan Quayle was a deep-thinking business-minded crackerjack of a man, a man whose only faults, if he had any at all, would be kept in check by the consummate diplomatic mind of Richard Cheney. No
Bush-Cheney '04 here, my friends. Here, it is naught-naught forever.
(Note also the subtlety with which the '00 is rendered. It could be a year, or it could be the and zero cents part of a written check. Pay to the order of America, in the amount of Bush Cheney and zero/100ths of a dollar. It is a good, round, unaccountably large number.)
Not willing to go so far as to proclaim your love for the Boy King in public? Then consider a rather pricy mousepad sporting the glassy-eyed visage of the president most Republicans no longer mention, along with one (and just one) of Mr. Bush's many pithy sayings (possibly by a speechwriter):
"I BELIEVE THAT GOD HAS PLANTED IN EVERY HEART THE DESIRE TO LIVE IN FREEDOM."
Note the certainty of the conviction: human beings generally prefer freedom. This bold all-caps stance is at once anti-slavery, anti-dictatorship, anti-despot; surely, no non-Republican could have ever elucidated such an unambiguous
freedom is good and stuff stance. Coupled with the knowledge of the Bush years we have now, the message is even more clear: thou shalt be free, oppressed peoples of the world, or we shalt bomb the crap out of thou until thou changes thy mind on that one. It was the Bush-Cheney doctrine to the world:
Give (you) liberty, or give (you) death. Possibly both.
God is invoked, as He should be on any self respecting mousepad. God is in fact invoked on all NRCC goods for sale, save the Bush-Cheney '00 t-shirt; in that case, Cheney may be standing in as God's eager surrogate. The remainder of the store features God Bless America t-shirts, God Bless America phone cases, and nothing else. You too could be a walking Irving Berlin reference—see if your friends compliment you on your choice of hyper-genericized patriotic treacle. Or just stick with the mousepad.