The Trials of the Stache

There are moments, rare though they may be, when you have to be at least reluctantly impressed by this administration's giant metaphorical testicles. John Bolton as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations? What the fuck, was Michael Savage busy? What about Oliver North, I hear he is looking for a decent nine-to-five gig between playing night-vision-goggled grab-ass with America's heroes overseas? Maybe I am being a little nitpicky here, but doesn't hating the underlying principle of an organization preclude you from working there? Obviously not. It's almost as if, and here is where you have to be slightly impressed, the administration tried to locate the person least appropriate on earth for the job and appointed him. I thought Negroponte was some kind of a bad joke, but now they're just fucking with us. Other than out of hypnotic deference to Bolton's mysterious and monstrous mustache, why would anyone within the international political community take him even slightly seriously? It's not that his ideological positions are remarkable for a Washington hack; it's just that they might be less appropriate in those great sissified halls of the pinko U.N. Some there might disagree a bit with some of Bolton's main arguments - i.e. that international law is for homos, that the Security Council should be four countries lighter, that all of the African countries' seats should be moved to the back row of the general assembly and that the 10 floors housing the ambassadors of the non-Israeli Middle East countries be vaporized to bring freedom to future generations of Arab ambassadors (I know, I am not sure exactly how it works either). What progress can we expect from a man that has to build relationships with those he clearly despises? I presume that is the very point - to make the U.N. the gridlocked, ineffective organization that Bolton has long claimed it to be. Can this administration do more to show how little it gives a shit about the U.N. First they bug your offices, then they send Colin Powell with some shitty pictures of mobile homes, childishly forged documents and a healthy lack of ethics to lie to your over-diversified faces and, as if that wasn't enough, they appoint the loudest, most ludicrously-mustached, critic of the fundamental premise of international multilateralism as the host ambassador. Baseod on this strategy, I shall be waiting with baited-breadth for a call from the Vatican to be the next Pope.

Electoral Rage

Well, it's official, Bush wins, mankind loses. Let there be no confusion, no recounts, no arguments about tainted ballots or dirty tricks, no question in our collective mind, George W. Bush has a mandate, albeit slight, from the people of this rapidly deteriorating nation to be our President for four more ominous years. As I write these painful words, a dark cloud descends upon all that is righteous and good in this once promising land. My lower intestines wrench like spaghetti noodles wrapping around a slowly turning spork. Pure, chaotic, voiceless rage. Balled fists of white knuckles make typing even more brutishly spastic than usual and panic colleagues with respect for company property. Fleeting moments of it-will-be-ok-ish thoughts are violently stomped out by a reverberating sense of impending doom. That little reddish-black dot in my peripheral vision is flashing and growing larger, as if counting down to something even more cataclysmic - presumably an end to which Bush is the frightful means.

The inevitable question jostles around in my head, eliminating capacity for other thought: How can people living in relatively similar conditions as I do vote this wickedly moronic dickhead back into office? How? Seriously, how? Have they no access to books, no knowledge of history, no innate sense of how atavistically, regressive this country is becoming? Have they no fundamental fucking decency? To those of us burdened by rationality, the transparency of Bush's incompetence, his violent inappropriateness to lead even the tiniest subsection of people, his pure, crystallized, intolerable stupidity makes it all the more difficult to understand. I want to grab those bulky, clueless red states by the sides of their empty metaphorical heads and shake the shit out of them, somehow try to force them to grasp the basic principles of humanity. I want to wake them from their long, thoughtless, Wal-martian stupor. But it's no use, confusion is but a mere symptom, ignorance is their disease. Rational argument can no sooner prevail here than with a newborn child, only a vast amount of education will do, and that requires patience I can no longer afford.

But for all the frustration and disappointment, I am firmly convinced that we, the anti-Bush crowd, have truly only ourselves to blame for this first election of George W. Bush. For all of the posturing on the left, all of the reluctant concessions made, all of the vacuous, self-fulfilled prophetic talk of electability, we have nothing, less than nothing, to show for our decision to proffer John Kerry for President. That decision was the single biggest mistake we could have made to ensure the continued empowerment of the Bushies. Herein lies the painful, irritating rub. We tried to run a watered-down conservative against a real one, and the real thing will always win that battle. We brought a knife to an ideological gunfight. What's worse, we did more than just lose an election. We got so caught up in winning the election, we forgot to be on the right side of the issues. Once Kerry got his first whiff of the Presidential poontang so to speak, the blood rushed out of his head and scoring became the only matter of consequence. We tolerated it, even apologized for it, because we vainly assumed that the goal of beating the idiot trumped all other considerations. There, in the seedy underbelly of justifiable politik, is where we really lost, not on November 2. We were focused on the wrong Goddamn enemy, playing grab-ass with the clueless spokesperson in the lobby while the real assholes liquored-up and sodomized our nation in the dirty backroom of their faux-wood-paneled hunting lodge. The problem is jack-ass Presidents don't change America, ideas, for good or ill, do, and we chose the guy that seemed the most devoid of any - and why, because he could pull 10 or 15 loyal Vietnam vets out of his ass at the drop of a television camera. I mean seriously, did I miss something. Was the idea that George W. Bush wasn't good enough at starting wars? I don't give a flying fuck if Kerry can excavate the rotting toothless corpse of General Washington for a posthumous endorsement, I would have just settled for someone who fundamentally disagreed with Bush. Sure, we would have lost the election anyways, but we might have won the argument. Maybe it's just me, but I think it better to lose big with the right message than lose small with the wrong one.

So what now? Solutions appear as elusive as elected office to progressives. Am I to simply fester for four more years, which in fanatic conservative years will feel more like 30? Should I move to Europe or Canada? How can I continue to live in George Bush's America, when our politics are diametrically opposed, when I disdain everything he stands for? He is adamantly against thought and reason, I am for both; he's unimpressed with literacy, I think its elemental to a good Presidency; he believes that a vengeful God will send dirty homosexual men to burn in fiery Hell for their indiscreetly-tight pants, I lament God's wretched non-existence; he thinks cluster bombing a populated Iraqi city is a viable liberation strategy, I find it to be the saddest of ironies; he thinks that claiming to be peaceful makes one so, I think not starting wars of aggression does. My only hope at this point is that the pendulum gets high enough to the right that the return swing is strong enough to get this country back on track, that is if it doesn't get caught in the muddy trough that is the current democratic party.