This ran in the Chronny on July 4th. Fitting, no? We discussed
it over flags and fireworks...By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
So there you have it. Bush shrugs and smirks and then commutes the easy
soft-focus sit-on-your-ass-all-day-and-knit white-collar prison sentence
of a hollow political lackey who, in turn, took a bullet for his sneering
mafia thug of a boss, Dick Cheney, who in turn was complicit (along with
lead flying monkey Karl Rove) in the appallingly illegal outing of a CIA
operative, which itself was a tiny but particularly nasty link in the
giant chain of lies and deceptions undertaken to lead our wary and
tattered nation into an unwinnable impossible costly brutally violent war
that will now last, if current estimates are correct, until the goddamn
sun explodes.
You have to laugh. You have to laugh because if you do not laugh you will
likely be overcome by a mad desire to stab yourself in the eye with a
sharp feral cat and/or shoot yourself in the toe with a high-powered
staple gun, over and over again, all while tearing out pages of the United
States Constitution and crumpling them into tiny little balls and hurling
them into the smoldering firepit of who-the-hell-cares as you shiver in
the corner and swig from a bottle of Knob Creek and wail at the moon. Or
maybe that's just me.
But really, you do have to laugh at the vicious antics this
administration, and perhaps Dick Cheney in particular, that most nefarious
molester of U.S. law and ignorer of all political integrity and deeply
homophobic father of a creepily lesbian daughter and overall gruntingly
guff sneerer at all moral principle, masterful mocker of everything you
somehow still manage to think, even in your most despondent and ethically
disillusioned state, that American politics is somehow supposed to be
about.
For it was Cheney, you well know, who yanked Bush's puppet strings in
order to get Libby off the hook. It was Cheney who whispered sweet, oozing
nothings into Dubya's ear to convince him to screw the goddamn law and
mock the American jury system and further lock down America's standing as
the most corrupt and least accountable nation in the entire developed
world.
What, are you surprised by all this? Of course you're not. It is, of
course, all about the cover-up, all about preventing Libby from revealing
the real criminals in all this, about Cheney's nefarious role in the Plame
case, all about ensuring the cabal remains intact and unassailable and
throbbing with misprision.
It was so cute as to be actually damaging to the soul. Bush actually
ambled forth and said that, while he "respects the jury" in the Libby
case, the 2.5 year sentence was simply "too harsh." Baby, if 30 months in
a comfy well-stocked rape-free Martha Stewart-decorated facility for
compromising national security is too harsh, I've got a draconian little
thing called the Patriot Act to sell you, cheap.
Here's a swell side note: You know who gets harsher sentences than 30
months in white-collar prison, George? Pot dealers. That's right. The
average sentence for a convicted marijuana dealer in California is 3.3
years. In real prison, George, not that namby-pamby Club Fed where Scooter
would've played badminton and sipped tea. Hell, in places like Oklahoma
and Alabama, you can get a life sentence for possessing a single marijuana
bud, which is ironic indeed, given how if you live in Oklahoma or Alabama,
there is nothing that would serve your miserable id better than to be
deeply and thoroughly stoned every single day and twice on Sunday. But
that's another column.
Just a hint of perspective, George. See, we all know you drank like a
monosyllabic fish and were rumored to enjoy your share of premium flake
during all those years you were skipping poli-sci class in college as you
snorted money from the silver spoon you were born with, so maybe you can
appreciate this viewpoint. Or, you know, maybe not.
You know who's now done more jail time that Scooter Libby? Paris Hilton.
Paris Hilton has now accomplished more in the eyes of the law to pay her
debt to society than the VP's former chief of staff ever will for
assisting BushCo in corrupting the soul of the goddamn nation. Isn't that
cute? Cute enough to cause sharp stabbing pain in your abdomen requiring
great amounts of scotch and marijuana to anesthetize? You bet it is.
Lest we forget, Dubya's latest abuse of law follows hot on the heels of
Dick Cheney declaring himself a unique and unassailable branch of
government, free to ignore the law and refuse to hand over detailed
reports of how he's handled classified information to the federal,
Bush-approved oversight agency in charge of making sure people just like
Dick don't take too many liberties with power and ego and dictatorial
megalomania. Whoops, too late.
Just another appalling notch in the belt for Dick, really. To be added to
the collection, right alongside the bit where he endorses torture, or how
he initiated the secret detention of foreigners in brutal Eastern European
prisons, or his love of military tribunals, or the hard-on he gets for
detaining foreigners illegally, for years, at Guantanamo Bay, or the way
he works to derail freedom of the press, or how he abuses environmental
law and rearranges the federal budget as he sees fit all while sucking up
Halliburton kickbacks, and...
Oh my. The list is long indeed. And it is, in its way, far uglier and more
dangerous than that of his bumbling, inept boss. But you already knew
that, right?
All in all, you could say it's much like a very bad episode of "The
Sopranos," all thick-minded thugs and boorish mafia tactics and the
childish calling in of violent favors, all about ruthless loyalty at the
expense of, well, everything else: humanity, integrity, decency, the will
of the people. And there is Bush, the hollow figurehead, the smirking
decider, with Cheney as the henchman, the hangman, the guy at the door
with the black gloves and the baseball bat and the black van waiting
outside.
Except wait a minute; in this endless episode, there's no deeper sense of
existential angst, no smart-tongued therapy sessions full of humor and
revelation, no hint of greatness, no darkly heroic Tony Soprano character
who transcends it all and suspects there is more to life than this world
of blood and violence and war and even craves, somewhere in his soul, to
find it.
OK, check that. It's not "The Sopranos" at all. It's more like a
particularly noxious episode of "Mama's Family," all Neanderthal redneck
inbred imbeciles doing bad accents and idiotic pratfalls and slapping each
other in the face to the tune of an insufferable, forced laugh track, all
centered around a laughably dreadful character who blurts out sarcastic
one-liners so stupid and inept they make your skin crawl.
Except no one's laughing. And tens of thousands of people are dying. And
the country is rotting at its core. And the world, oh the world, the world
knows this degrading, deeply humiliating show cannot be cancelled fast
enough.
