Rosencratz and Guildenstern

"But such officers do the king best service in the end: he keeps them, like an ape, in the comer of Ins jaw; first mouthed, to be last swallowed: when he needs what you have gleaned, it is but squeezing you, and, sponge, you shall be dry again."  Hamlet

With all the political polarization in today's America, there seems to be one universally accepted maxim - John McCain and Colin Powell are decent fellas. Whether you agree with them on a particular issue or not you have to respect them, or so the theory goes. Staunch conservatives admire their congeneal moderation, liberals respect their principled - if misguided - stances. Am I missing something here? How did these two fucks become so goddamn likeable? Every time I start to fall under this tempting misapprehension, I have to remember that each of these two men has stood behind virtually every political disaster for which we have appropriately excoriated George W. Bush. I have to remember the bold-faced lies of Colin Powell in front of the UN, lies that directly contributed to the deaths of untold numbers of Iraqi lives - lives we are told are not even worth the time of our nation's most industrious and ever-burgeoning list makers and profilers (my somewhat questionable library reading list they know, but a rough estimate of dead Iraqis is beyond their scope). I have to remember the sight of John McCain stumping for Bush, despite all the torment that the Bush campaign cost his family, out of reverence to his career and his party above his country. These men are much more than pushovers to the coal-powered locomotive will of Karl Rove, they are enablers of the worst sort. They actually lend credibility to Rovism, giving it a glossy statesmanship it so dearly lacks, provided of course that their names can somehow remain unsullied by all of Bush's combustible incompetence. But I refuse to see them any longer as any more than their actual politics warrant. To take a over recited page from Bush's ideological comic book, those who harbor Bush are as guilty as Bush himself! Despite the occasionally charming moments of rationality, in the end McCain and Powell still represent the worst in this great country.