The midterm election was a long night, and I didn't rise until the next afternoon, but when I did finally drag my hangover to a TV set, I discovered aimless panic as though Godzilla were coming down the Ginza. Donald Rumsfeld has already been hurled from the train. Rush Limbaugh was pounding his fists and bellowing that he'd been "carrying water" for all the wrong people. Talking heads who, when I'd passed out, had been wired to the RNC and Karl Rove were no longer even Republicans, embracing some weird, amorphous "libertarianism." Tucker Carlson had ditched his fatuous bow tie. Others were pointing out that it really wasn't much of a Democrat victory, because the winning Dems were kinda conservative, and that all would basically be business as usual. George himself made an appearance, and every third word was "bipartisan." A few Bushite pundits even had the enduring gall to issue threats while still scuttling like roaches at the light. Henry Waxman was advised to keep his subpoenas under the bed, and John Conyers to forget his articles of impeachment, because vindictive investigations of the White House would not be in the national interest.
Though the post-victory haze, I perceived a final pathetic spin, based in the fiction that the people still respond to Bush's supposed charisma: that to lay a Democrat glove-of-impeachment on the president would alienate the electorate big-time. We were being urged to forgive, forget, and all get along. As in forget the lies and the spies, the Constitution and Geneva Conventions, the war profiteering and the body count. Forget that New Orleans's 9th Ward is still in ruins, forget the inflated homophobia, the decimated middle class, for-profit health care, reproductive rights and embryonic stem cells, and all the small-time insanity, like the Terri Schiavo debacle. Forget My Pet Goat and the War on Christmas? And the accusations of everything from treason to dementia leveled at most of my friends?
Believe me, I have no inclination to forget any single damned thing, or to make any attempt to get along. I want to see every dirty secret dragged out and exposed, until George W. Bush is doing the Nixon perp-walk to the helicopter.
Couldn't have put it better myself.
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