perfidy

We're still a few painful years away from the desperately overdue, gasping death whimpers of what will be considered the worst Presidency of modern history. The sheer breadth and depth of the incompetence just takes your breath away, you know? It's such a sad tale of empty bullshit promises, excuse-making, and desperate reliance on short-term memories.

• The people who created and fucked up the war in Iraq are the same people that created current tax policy
• The Iraq crowd told us energy privatization would result in a healthy market. As a recent WPost article makes clear, they couldn't have been more wrong -- every objective of these efforts has been a colossal failure. Well, except for the real objective -- to make money for their buddies in the Energy industry. A-1 success there!
• The Iraq crowd tells us that deficits don't matter. They tell us that debt doesn't matter. They certainly act like neither of these things exist.
• The Iraq crowd tells us global warming doesn't exist. Now they're telling us it doesn't matter.
• The Iraq crowd rammed the "prescription drug benefit" for seniors through Congress. Who wins? Drug companies, of course! Who loses? Everyone else. The kicker is the GOP-inserted clause preventing negotiation on prices. Exactly how the fuck did that get in there?
• The Iraq crowd "handled" Katrina with the same efficiency, effectiveness, and compassion that they give to other significant issues.
• In six short years, the Iraq crowd has managed to convince the majority of the people on the planet to hate America. Much more worrying is the fact that they've made excellent inroads on their long term project of convincing the rest of the planet to hate Americans. If you're like Bush and never bothered to leave the country prior to becoming its President, that doesn't even register as a problem. Especially when you're armed with "quitters are traitors" bumper stickers.
• They're not against minorities; they're for whites. See the difference?
• They're not against gays; they're for families. See the difference?
• They're not against foreigners; they're for America. See the difference?
• They're not against other religions; they're for Christianity. See the difference?
• But mostly, and above all else, they're for themselves. They're laughing at, and mocking, the rest of America for not doing the same. It's business as usual, baby.

So why Evil Twin Theory? Bush's Chief of Domestic Policy, Claude Allen, was arrested last week for a bizarre scheme involving fraudulent returns of goods to department stores. It turns out that Claude Allen has a twin with a questionable past. Could Allen's twin have been the one doing the crimes? Beats me. But it also turns out that the popular drug Ambien may have certain equally bizarre side effects, including sleepwalking and sleep-shoplifting, or something like that. So maybe all those long, exhausting nights of doing exactly what Rove and Cheney told him drove Allen to take an Ambien now and again, and he went on a sleep-fraud spree. Twenty-five times.

Is Bush on Ambien? Does he have an evil twin? Because I can't for the life of me figure out why, short of sheer stupidity and/or complete lack of interest, an honest reason for the continuous stream of fuckups the most pathetic administration in modern times has generated.

Way back when I asked a simple question: Find one moderately complex policy initiative of the Bush Administration that was proposed (with its predicted effects), that resulted in a success and the achievement of the desired goals. Just one, please.

I'll give you moral relativity: Evil equals the mass of your bullshit times the square of the pain you cause.

I've been mulling over a concept I'm labelling birthright, and I'll have more to say on it over the next week. It's the root of the current political dysfunction.

Remember, kids: Birthright trumps ethics.

[wik]I am feeling harsh today, so let me apologize in advance for feathers ruffled. Please keep in mind that my conservative compadres here have about as much in common with Bush as they do with Castro. Your party has been hijacked by cultural terrorists and vandals.