Monday, August 15, 2005

Dog Days in Bumfuck

Billmon's got a good take on Mrs. Sheehan, Hanoi Jane, the wingnut dilemma, and Bush's French-style five week vacation.

It's as good an explanation as any, I guess, although to me the expression "dog days" has always called up images of rabid canines, their muzzles dripping with foam and blood from their own self-inflicted bites, writhing in crazed torment under the blazing sun while their virus-riddled brains gradually turn to mush inside their narrow, wolfish skulls.

Which, more-or-less by coincidence, appears to be the effect that Cindy Sheehan is currently having on conservatives. Except for the gradual part.
In fact, if Cindy really is a front woman for the Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy, as the wing nuts now claim, then you'd almost have to conclude that Bush was in on the planning, too. Hauling the entire White House press corps down to Bumfuck, Texas, so they can spend the better part of August playing cowchip bingo, was a move that seems, in hindsight, almost custom-designed to generate massive media coverage of Cindy's protest. In Washington, she'd be just another face in Lafayette Square (the designated "free speech zone" in front of the White House.) In Crawford, she's the only thing making news within a 500-mile radius. That seems like an awfully high political price to pay to move Bush and his imperial retinue from one volcanic pit of heat and humidity to another for five weeks.
The machine can try to demonize Cindy Sheehan. But it can't demonize those questions -- not any more, not when so many others are asking them. Here in the dog days of August, it appears the rabid curs of the authoritarian right have finally met their match, in the form of a middle-aged woman in a sunhat, holding in her hand the metaphorical equivalent of a rolled-up newspaper for wacking bad little GOP doggies (and presidents) on the nose.

Be sure to read this one. It's a hoot, and brings up some stuff about the anti-war sentiment/movement that I hadn't previously considered.

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