caught, can i get a witness?
Intercontinental Blogging Champion Billmon writes that the proto-facist, group-think the Bush Administration both revels in and openly cultivates is bearing its gnarly teeth, reminiscent of the bunker mentality the very excellent movie Downfall portrayed. Go read, as they say on the big blogs. But for what it's worth, I don't give them as much credit as the ultra savvy Billmon does, or for that matter, the happily fucking ignorant do.
As New Orleans rots, I've been mulling a remark I'd heard Dear Leader make almost in passing a few weeks back after signing that shitty energy bill in New Mexico:
This bill is not going to solve our energy challenges overnight. Most of the serious problems, such as high gasoline costs, or the rising dependence on foreign oil, have developed over decades. It's going to take years of focused effort to alleviate those problems.
What struck me about this statement was that it sounded -sounded, mind you - like he was half-admitting the hard road the country has ahead of it - Long Emergency, or Peak Oil Crisis, or whatever you want to call it. And maybe not so remarkably, he half-admits that it's not the President of the United States' concern:
This bill is not going to mitigate the looming energy crisis. But donors and pet industries got to get paid. Take it from Turd Blossom - I'm Audi 5000 in like two years, and there's a host of corporate boards a-just waitin' for a slab of hot right-wing figurehead like yours truly to sit on their boards snd shake hands with their proles every so often. Let Hilliary or John Kerry - hell, let what's left of the Repubs, they'll stop being my problem then too - let alla them deal with that shit.
Pop political thinkers like to refer to the GOP as the "daddy party." I don't really have an opinion on that, but it kind of makes sense I suppose, if you're dad steals money out of your college fund and talks shit about saving yourself for marriage while he beats off to heavy-duty S&M pron or something like that. I daresay that the Bushies have introduced a new spin to the mommy and daddy party thing - the White Trash Family Party: going deep, deep, deep into debt with no eye towards what anybody else in the house may need, now or in the future; telling ridiculous lies and then getting angry and offended when they're caught; holding the most atavistic and ridiculous beliefs about the rest of the world, tempered with a weirdly reactionary and hypocritical Christianity; shirking parental responsibility whenever possible; acting like overgrown children who believe they deserve to be pampered, and never, ever taking responsibility for anything, never ever - shall I go on?
There's a line in Oliver Stone's mostly goofy Nixon, and I think it be in some of HST's writing around the 1972 election, that Tricky Dick may have somehow connected to the dark side of the American spirit. That may be true. I am no Nixon expert. But I have a handle on white trash, and I know trailer park when I see it. Perhaps the slavishness some supporters have for Bush and his gang of fuck-ups run deeper than just homophobia or (conversely) codpieces. Maybe he has a connection to our weakest links, the trashier side of the American spirit. White trash is usually just sad and at worst, annoying. They demean only the poor souls they live with. A national, and indeed, international white trash policy, well, that's something else entirely.
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