My Fellow Americans,
It is a dark time for the Republic. As we enter the 21st century, we are a willfully ignorant nation that luxuriates itself in, glories itself in, prides itself on its ignorance. I know. I heard George Lopez tell me so on Superbowl Sunday; if he didn't know when the last Korean War started, his daughter shouldn't, either. Perhaps she will tell her daughter the same about the next Korean War should they be reviving old sitcoms in 2030. Should anyone live. For in this gleefully ignorant age, inverterate liars occupy the highest offices in the land, and we find our ignorant selves being led to global war by a bloodthirsty, coke-addled simpleton, on whose behalf elections are stolen, recounts dismissed, records disappear, and a dumb, amnesiac silence billows over the Republic as surely as oil tankers run aground do billow plumes of noxious slime into the dark, defenseless sea. For this is the Age of the Chimp and we are all prisoners in his zoo, standing passively outside the smirking simian's cage, slack-jawed and agape, seemingly powerless to move as he ook-ook-eeks and hurls his shit and monkey-cum at us on national television. Yes, my fellow Americans, friends, and citizens of the world, the state of the Union stinks, and because I love it more than I hate George W. Bush, I'm going to bitch about every last reason why.
I hate the president. I readily admit this. I hate him with a dark, hard, cold, anthracite hatred made out of shattered illusions and dead dreams of democracy and the bones of dinosaurs. I hate him because he's rewarded for all of my flaws. I hate him because he's continually proved me right, and that upsets me, for I am stupid, and on a deep level, deeper than the cynicism and mistrust any American develops like scar tissue after they're dipped into the caustic dreck of an election year, I believe what I was taught: America, democracy, the Constitution, fair play. And I believe this in spite of everything I have read, or learned, or seen. And so, while I hold on to my petty human hatred of our Commander in Thief, and often hold it up to the light and polish it with a lapidary passion, my basic stupid faith in the goodness of man and the fairness of the system and other necessary American fictions prevent me from calling for an outright coup or worse. I want Dubya to lose and lose fair, and I want him to live to a ripe old age, widely acknowledged and ridiculed across the land and over the seas as the most disgraceful excuse for a president our nation has ever had. Because he is. George W. Bush is, as ancient White House correspondent Helen Thomas pointed out, the worst president we've ever had:
"This is the worst president ever. He is the worst president in all of American history."
If I were to come to you on Sept. 10, 2001, and inform you that in less than two years, a terrorist mastermind would: shred the Fourth Amendment; detain American citizens indefinitely without access to a lawyer or a trial; propose putting the entire country under surveillance, lied to and spied upon; authorize the CIA to assassinate whichever American citizens it saw fit to target without further approval or oversight; authorize the Mossad and God knows how many other foreign agencies to conduct assassinations on our own shores; take a record budget surplus and plow it into a record deficit, thereby condemning future generations to penury; and, finally, declare preemptive and ceaseless war on the world, you would most likely suggest that this nefarious criminal be hauled out into the streets and shot before he could choke off any more of America's freedoms. Osama has done none of these things. Saddam has done none of these things.
Wave to the chimp in the cage.
I needn't point out, of course, that bin Laden has not been brought back "dead or alive"; that this White House has proven incapable of linking al Qaeda to Saddam; that the anthrax killer still roams free; that the Bush junta ignored dire warnings from both the outgoing administration and the Hart-Rudman report on our nation's vulnerability; that Afghanistan remains a smoldering wreck; that Bush hasn't even made good on his promises to the fire fighter he threw his arm around in the smoldering wreck of the World Trade Center, after he saw fit to scurry out of whatever undisclosed locaton he was cowering in while the nation looked to the mayor of New York City for resolve. I needn't point out any of these things, being a paraleiptic. Why linger on old or unfinished business when you can turn to, say, finished businesses -- specifically, what the economy looks like in the Age of Bush.
Let's play "Spot the Trend." Here is the Dow Jones Industrial Average:
Here is the Nasdaq:
Here is the S&P 500:
Here is the 10-year bond market:
But wait! There's more!
Not everything is going down. The number of people in our nation's "correctional" system is going up -- 6.6 million at the end of 2001 and rising. Unemployment is up, at an eight-year high of 6% and holding steady -- but layoffs are up, too. Don't have health insurance? You're in another growing crowd. And if you disapprove of the Chimp's job performance, more people are joining you every day.
So what's the President got planned to help fix all this? What can we look forward to in tonight's cavalcade of cacophonous craptitude? Tax cuts, war, drug money for churches, and pills for grandma. Now, I love my grandma, and my grandma didn't raise no dummy to raise no dummy. How about the evidence, George? Will you be talking about any of the evidence that more and more Americans would like to see and hear about before you send their sons, brothers, fathers, husbands, mothers, wives and daughters to war?
In a word, no. In three words: Wait "two weeks".
Hear that "Splat!"? That's the monkey.
And there will be many a "Splat!" tossed about tonight, we can be sure of that. Maybe George will even pull something about his "affirmative access" plan for de facto resegregation out of his ass and hurl it at the crowd. But the sun's coming up, and, lo and behold, even I'm tired of bitching. What we need in this difficult time of doubt and terror and lies are answers and solutions, not more monkey shit.
Instead, we've got George.
"Splat!"
