Irked (with love)

DEMOCRATS AREN'T PERFECT. We've had our share of dissemblers, flakes, forked-tongues and smarm meisters. The opposition, however--the Limbaughs and the Brit Hulmes, the Bidens and the Mehlmans--these gentlemen are seriously trying to gain traction for idea that there can be no legitimate outrage at the cavalcade of deadly GOP lies and no legitmate rebuke until, preposterously, we can claim perfection in all of our own transactions. It's a misdirection tactic if ever there was one; laughable, dismissable. I have every faith in the public's ability see it for the sophomoric game that it is. I hope my faith isn't misplaced.

For who can be unaware that virtually all Bush's political intimates have notoriously had stomachs for baring false witness and executing particularly unconscionable political hatchet jobs that know no curdle or churn? There's Mehlman, for one recent, odious example. Orin Hatch is another. (Boy, I'd like to ask that man how he manages to incorporate such lushly embroidered BS into his senate oratory and still live with himself.) Who can name a Democrat operating at an approximate level of guile? I defy anyone to produce one.

No, it's unmistakable that our errors, our dishonorable behaviors and even our liars tend to look pathetically penny-ante lined up against theirs, and any conscientious Republican would have to concede that that's not blinkered partisanship talking.

People who have tended to live their lives with a certain automatic honesty--who by and large conduct their transactions and relate to their intimates with a basic sense of fairness--have all the intellectual and ethical equipment they need to know that the real truth-fucking, truth-despising, death-dealing lies have been issuing with remarkable regularity from Republican quarters. You don't have to be a Rhodes scholar to catch on. All you need is an mostly good, mostly decent heart, and I believe that describes most Americans.

A handful of stragglers, however, are still struggling, snookered, outside the loop. For instance, I found this exchange singularly irksome:

On Air America last week, the host (Al or Randi) explains to a mixed-up caller that The 9-11 Commission debunked the claim that Niger sold yellowcake to Iraq. The caller replied, "Well, you can swallow that story if you like, but myself, I don't read too much of what the left wing media has to say."

The 9-11 Commission Report is the left wing media.

I'm at the point where I don't care whether this person was being disingenuous or was merely ignorant. By refusing to yield blind partisanship to a sober-minded, bipartisan extraction of fact (or engage a newssource with sufficient journalistic integrity to report the Commission's published and ubiquitously quoted findings), as far as I'm concerned he and all the intrepid Bush faithful--however well-meaning, basically goodhearted and/or misled--have given their blessings to liars, mayhem inciters and narcissists, and are therefore proportionately responsible: for the dead and maimed in Iraq, the sorry state of homeland security, our persona non grata status abroad, the compassionless dismantling of our domestic social supports whose calamitous effects haven't begun to unfold.

If these stragglers weren't so busy aping their president and cherry picking their own damn intelligence--they'd know by now this Administration will screw anybody they get an itch to screw, and Ma & Pa Rah-Rah Go-Bush no exception. Wait for the bellyaching to start when Bush issues a domestic fuck-you that trods on their precious toes, but until then I guess we can count on these folks to keep on propagating the spore of falsehood wherever they go, and to that hideous self-interest I say Bush, man, time to give those toes a stomp.

Have a sizable chunk of the American people always lacked some basic, bedrock personal integrity? Certainly never before in such numbers. We have witnessed the (eager!) moral capitulation of millions of our fellow Americans, all for the love of some semiliterate little fellow from Crawford TX. Why?

And what powers of intimidation some of us granted him! Benefits of the doubt inexhaustible! Credulity stretched far beyond so-called "respect for the office." From whom in our history besides this unlettered tin god have we taken such a beating, allowed such moral trespass, countenanced such slipshod leadership? In 2000 I'd never have thunk the news media would end up taking this puddin'head seriously, much less kowtowing, cowering at his feet. Phenomenally surprising turns of events.

But the worst of it is the work this president and his villainous friends have done on the minds and morals of the American people. Half our mostly good, mostly thoughtful, potentially valiant voting population ceased to care about truth or untruth, straight dealing or double cross, concerning themselves only with victory for their man. To them he's the picture of moral rectitude, a real straight-shooter. King Dissembler, exemplar of Honest Abe full disclosure. How backwards and wrong. So screwed up you're tempted to think the folks who believe the funhouse-speak have been hexed.

Which is why I still have much mercy. We've all watched in dismay as friends and family members took an ethical dive for W the impostor. We've witnessed them tacitly promise, as if under an evil spell, to unmoor their ethical tethers if in exchange he might call them his own.

Somehow or other this president managed to temporarily scramble our national moral compass. When all is said and done, however, good Republican folk will have to sit down and be quiet with themselves for a while, take moral stock and examine their susceptibilities.

But what a fiend George Bush is for trying to fuck with us. For the bedrock truth is, red or blue, churchgoing peeps or freethinking freaks (said with love), book smart or street, budget-minders or zany spendthrifts, straight or gay, beer and pretzels or biscotti and chai--at heart ANY OF US, at ALL points of the compass, are better and truer Americans, and kinder, more honorable people than the Bush gang will ever be.