Watching BushCo Crumble
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Ratings slipping, economy tanking, lies spiraling, credibility shot.
Try not to cheer
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Friday, July 25, 2003
©2003 SF Gate
sfgate.com
This is what happens when it's all a house of cards.
This is what happens when you build your entire presidency on an intricate network of aww-shucks glibness and bad hair and cronyism and corporate fellatio and warmongering and sham enemies and economy-gutting policies and endless blank-eyed smirks that tell the world, every single day, whelp, sure 'nuff, the U.S. is full of it.
Shrub's ratings have dropped below 50 percent for the first (and probably not the last) time since they surged hugely right after 9/11 and he was hoisted in front of a wary America and puffed out his chest and pretended like he could find Afghanistan on a map and promised he would bomb every damn country on the planet that didn't have a McDonald's or an Exxon or a secret U.S. chemical-weapons deal.
Shrub's numbers are down. The nation is catching on. The armor of money and power is cracking. The smirk is waning. Dick's defibrillator is running on fumes.
And Karl Rove, Shrub's master strategist, is scrambling, rushing down hallways, sweating hard, mapping out lib-killer tactics and frantically redirecting blame (CIA! FBI! The NSA!) as nine Demo candidates have a field day knocking all of Shrub's shortcomings out of the ideological park.
Maybe it's the regular slew of lies. You know the ones: "proof" of uranium purchases, "proof" of Iraqi nuke facilities, "proof" of WMDs, poison gas, plus two quick and "painless" wars, a robust economy, women's rights, gay rights, America proud and strong and respected the world over, a nice shiny oil-sucking SUV for every flag-waving misguided Fox News-drugged American. Ha.
Funny how the BS can wear you down. Funny how it can make you feel like someone's been piling huge rocks on our collective chest for the past three years and stomping on them with ugly polished right-wing loafers until we can hardly breathe.
And all you have to do is ask any schoolteacher or grandparent or health-care worker or conscious sensual attuned soulful organism anywhere, and the answer is unavoidable:
The nation is gasping for air.
Cities are desperate, basic services are being slashed, schools are broke, the environment's molested, the GOP has promised a ridiculous array of cuts and dedicated billions they can't possibly deliver in light of inane tax cuts and the biggest deficit in U.S. history. Hey, how's your portfolio doing?
Maybe the slip, the change in national timbre, is due to all the recently uncovered and aforementioned misfirings of the GOP machine, that frighteningly rich and seemingly omnipotent team of multibillionaire CEO Bushites who bought the presidency in the first place and who have steered the conservative agenda so brilliantly, so ruthlessly to this point.
Until recently, they've managed to stay viciously on message, trashed every liberal cause, demonized every social program, overhyped every fear, desiccated the poor and the elderly and gays and women and called it all Christian largesse, compassionate conservatism, which of course we all now know means, whoops sorry about all the unemployment and the raped environment and the dead Iraqi children.
Or maybe it's all those U.S. soldiers, more dying every single day, outright brutal guerrilla warfare with no end in sight, tens of thousands of American soldiers stuck in miserable and war-torn Iraq for years to come, proving that BushCo's policy of perpetual unilateral war in the name of a sovereignty we no longer have is just plain dangerous, if not downright immoral. Iran? North Korea? Liberia? Saudi Arabia? Wanna make your own list?
Maybe it's that feeling that we've reached saturation, that the nation can't really absorb any more misinformation and misdirection and snide switcheroos, Osama to Saddam, nukes to uranium, WMD to WMD intent, serious threat to "liberation," brutish recession to "temporary downturn."
Maybe we've just had enough. Enough of the macho all-American gun-totin' faux-cowboy ethos that says, if we just beat [insert nation/minority/progressive viewpoint here] up enough, they'll get the message and get in line and start complying with U.S. demands and we can expand our empire and crush all comers and their wimpy objections, too.
It is not yet time for delicious plates of schadenfreude. It is not yet time to relish Junior's slide into abject failure and scathing ratings and one-term histrionics -- you know, just like those suffered by his dear old dad. We are still too fragile, the feelings too raw, the wounds too recent from the current administration's mugging of the country.
But we are healing fast. We are coming back to life. We are opening our blackened eyes, realizing we have been massively and systematically and enthusiastically and intentionally duped by some very rich, very impotent white males three years running and it's damn near time for a domestic regime change and let's just float a Dean/Kerry (Kerry/Dean?) presidential ticket out there to the cosmic Void, see how it plays, shall we?
Because after all, that whimpering house of cards, it can't survive much longer.
©2003 SF Gate |
