You Make Me Sick
It’s been mentioned to me recently that it’s been a while since I’ve submitted a political article for the site. This, for the record, is not something that I don’t realize, and there are a few reasons for this. For one thing, the DRS editorial staff has actually been handing out assignments, and all of the writers have attempted to make this Priority One to honor. Second, a close friend of mine just died – but you guys already knew about that as I wrote a tribute to her a couple of weeks ago. Then there’s the matter of my daughter, who has just turned twelve and has been an extreme handful and… aw hell… I could keep coming up with excuses that sound good and seem to make sense, but… the truth of the matter is that I am going through one of my frequent periods of absolute disgust and repulsion with the current political landscape. I’m at the point where I grow nauseous even thinking about the state of our government.
So, fuck it. This column is going to be a simple rant about everything currently pissing me off in regards to the state of politics.
1.
It should go without saying that the Number One beef I have with Washington is President Bush, or as I more aptly refer to him, President Bush, Inc.
Now, I’m the sort of person who tries to look at all angles of a political situation, and I’m not above changing my mind and admitting I’ve been wrong about certain politicians and initiatives. Well, five years of being stuck with Bush, Inc. have failed to change my mind about either Bush the man - a poorly-spoken, lazy, unmotivated, over-aged rich kid with zero leadership skills - or Bush, Inc. the presidential entity – a shady conglomeration of oil men and special-interest wonks who represent the most blatantly corrupt and self-interested Cabinet ever to inhabit the West Wing.
While Bush HAS had his moments of unintentional entertainment value – crashing a Segway and waxing philosophical on the hardships of "putting food on your family" chief among them - he has mostly embodied the worst aspects of both major political parties. He spends money like a social-engineering Democrat but trickles down like the most hard line corporate-welfare maven. And there hasn’t even been an attempt to create a pretense of this man’s personal competence. It’s a sad state of affairs that even Bush’s supporters know he’s categorically incapable of running the show without Rove, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, et al, and they don’t care. Even sadder is the fact that the members of his cabinet are gleefully profiting from nearly every initiative sponsored, from eased EPA restrictions on big business to the American military presence in Iraq. Which of course brings us to…
2.The Iraq war. We’ve been sold so many different bullshit stories on why this bloodbath is justified that I’m not sure I’ll even be able to enumerate them here without leaving something out.
The existence of WMDs was the first excuse we heard. It seemed plausible enough – we knew Saddam Hussein had used them before in an ethnic purge committed on Kurdish nationals while he was still our enemy-of-my-enemy ally in the late 80’s. Even Bush’s political enemies agreed Hussein was sittin’ on some poison gas here and there. But even when early reports began rolling in that intel indicating WMDs were still being manufactured in Iraq was almost certainly faulty, Bush, Inc. stood firm on the story – Hussein had WMDs by the metric ton that he was busily dividing between missile silos aimed at every major US city and briefcases with which to arm Al Qaeda operatives. That, of course, led to the ironclad ties that Bush, Inc. assured us DEFINITELY existed between Hussein and bin Laden. They were practically brothers!
Then there were the atrocities committed upon the Iraqi people by Hussein and his two brute sons – people being rounded up and arrested for no apparent reason, tortured and beaten… at least this part was true, although we lost quite a bit of moral high ground when it became apparent that our own forces were pretty much doing the same thing after we went ahead and invaded Iraq.
Some people say we were right to invade that country no matter what, even though all but one of the above-listed rationales was proven worthless, because it benefited the Iraqi people. That’s all well and good, but what about the benefit to OUR people? While an estimated 22 million children in the US don’t have any form of healthcare insurance, we’ve dropped almost 300 billion dollars on armaments and social programs to benefit Iraqis. And worse yet, while the amount we’re paying at the pump continues to climb, more than doubling the average cost per gallon of gas from the Clinton era, the Saudis and the US oil companies are cutting a fat hog in the ass because we applied our military might to plugging up the holes in the Iraqi black oil market that were driving the prices of oil down.
3.The American public. Yep, you read that right. The current political climate in the US is as dismal as it is for many reasons, but at the end of the day the biggest reason is very simple – the American public is lazy, spoiled, ignorant and easily led by punditry dressed up in poor drag imitating legitimate news.
With all the evidence mounting that Bush, Inc. is a special-interest lapdog, corporate whore and bloodthirsty warmonger, all it took were a few crackpots to go on Hannity and toss out a few spurious and irrelevant accusations at Bush, Inc.’s chief rival in the Presidential race to get heads spinning with confusion, hearts racing with ill-defined fear and red-state voters packing the booths to sheepishly defend the hulking corporate monolith as "the lesser of two evils". What did they think John Kerry was? A scythe-carrying serial killer?
This is what disgusts me the most – we’re in this lousy, leaky boat for four more years because Americans seem to have forgotten how to build their intellectual capacity beyond the mental age of five. I have yet to hear anyone give a convincing reason why they re-elected Bush, Inc., but here they are still in power, handing out corporate welfare, dumping more money into the Iraq war and hiding key information about their new appointees for Attorney General, CIA chief and now a new Supreme Court Justice nominee. And worse yet, I don’t see this changing, as long as we are so easily dazzled by Hannity’s alarmist rhetoric, Laurie Dhue’s pretty shiny lips, and Rupert Murdoch’s scripted news.
