I got an email this weekend from my friend Sue. Yes, that’s her name.It was a forwarded email; a “résumé” for George W. Bush… comprised of his ostensible embarrassments, offenses, and failures - personal as well as professional; some real, some fictional. Reeked like it was composed by some moveon.org axe wound who spends his evenings writing “Draft Al Gore!” blog comments on the Daily Kos from his parents’ basement.
I replied to Sue simply, “What made you think that I’d enjoy this?”
I’m well aware that I hold unpopular opinions within my demographic, given my identity and my location. Irreconcilable (and unignorable) political differences have played at least a partial role in the demise of three serious relationships. (I just can’t imagine one day raising little ankle-biters with a husband who would want them to mature into shit-eating Socialists.) But while the constant “dull roar of blue-state,” Los Angeles, has yet to persuade me to genuflect at the alters of socialized medicine and anthropogenic climate change guilt, it has reinforced the message of the Golden Rule.
I have a personal policy against needling people. I love an honest and feisty argument, but I think twice before spewing unprovoked personal antagonism. I didn’t always have this policy, and I’m not perfect about following it, but I’m pretty damn good. It’s a karmic thing, I suppose; I didn’t call my lefty friends to say “neener neener” after the 2004 election, and I expected the same from them in 2006.
My conversation with you though, dear reader, is not a personal one, so I’ll spew whatever vitriol in this space I please.
This week I have some!
Like any respectable citizen, I watched the State of the Union address on Monday night.
Bush did pretty well, I thought, stumbling over only a handful of words here and there, and proposing only minimal new discretionary spending.
The interesting part of the Address, however, as with any stage show (such as the Oscars), was the people-watching.
I noticed Barack Obama seated next to Ted Kennedy. They strike the eye as terribly odd bedfellows, but I imagine that Barack would be feeling pretty chummy with Teddy right about now, having just picked up his endorsement for President this week. Another small victory for Obama’s campaign of “hope”. (“Hope” for what exactly, I’m still not sure, but it’s easier to stretch a vacuous speech into an hour if the theme is “hope” rather than “Quaaludes”.)
It’s a perilous endorsement, of course, and I’m not even referring to the fact that it pokes the Clinton machine squarely in the eye. No, above and beyond that bridge burned, Ted Kennedy’s brave hop into Obama’s “Hope” camp will likely draw him the ire of the vast and dangerous “anti-Hope” crowd. God bless your political courage, you pudgy grey drunk. For your next act of maverick defiance, you and your friend from Illinois might try introducing a Senate Resolution endorsing Pounds, Miles, and Gallons; thereby pissing off the well-heeled and influential Metric System lobby.
Another word on Ted: When Bush proposed fortifying the No Child Left Behind act, Senator Kennedy simply sat and maintained his inebriated scowl. Does the phony bastard think we have no memory? He co-wrote NCLB! How can you not applaud it when the President is complimenting its results??
On the topic of the ladies, Condoleezza Rice looked fabulous as always. Hillary Clinton I don’t have much to say about, except that that number she was wearing looked to be the same shade of red as Laura Bush’s lipstick.
The real story of the State of the Union, of course, doesn’t break until Good Morning America the following day, so that the President’s message can be diluted with pundit spin. I don’t watch GMA (or Today or The Early Show or American Morning), but no doubt it was laced with snippets from Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius’s Democrat response. Which actually started off somewhat inspirational (if stilted) but rapidly decomposed into lame entreaties for Bush to drop his mean-spirited, right-wing agenda, and reach across the aisle to help the Democrats implement their well-intentioned (read: half-baked) plans.
This brings me to my central frustration with Washington. It’s not that there’s too much fighting. It’s not that there’s too much special interest money. It’s not even that Kool-Aid drinkers like Dennis Kucinich don’t have to pass a sanity screening before serving in office.
It’s that the people in Washington act as though they’re putting on a stage production for an audience comprised exclusively of nitwits. Seriously, dear Reader, don’t you get sick of all the puppet shows and window dressing?
The nauseatingly overused stock phrases, like “my opponent was for blahblahblah before he was against it”. Wow. Original. The endless anecdotal parade of victims to tug at your heartstrings, like the Eskimo Girl a few weeks back who broke down into tears before Congress because Global Warming (she claimed) had melted some Alaskan snow. Please. The flat-falling, decidedly unclever turns of phrase that they use to try to appeal to the baser forms of human cognition. I heard one fat suit comment to Bush after his Address, in reference to his tax rebate plan, “How can you give a rebate to folks who didn’t throw in any bait in the first place?” So goddamn lame. The fact that I agree completely with his sentiment doesn’t diminish my desire to crush his nuts with a pair of pliers.
The press, I might add, makes this lamentable state of affairs even worse; packing their news reports with “dispassionate” pedantic analysis of this political bilge. And then presenting it as though they and their viewers alone can see above the fray, and ergo can busy themselves with the higher pursuit of wondering how the D.C. circus show might be swaying the opinions of the great unwashed. I can just hear it on “Face the Nation”: “For analysis, we turn now to our South Carolina political correspondent, Wilford Brimley. Will, how do you think Mike Huckabee’s threat that terrorists ‘will see the gates of hell’ might play with Evangelicals?”
!The posturing, the pontification; it’s all so sickeningly formulaic. It’s like
watching “Small Wonder” or “Step by Step”, but without the wholesomeness r the humor. The next politician to call for “a return to civility in Washington” deserves to get capped. Somebody throw a fucking punch
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