politricks and other distractions

"Mr. Rove is operating as impishly as ever. At a party at the British Embassy when Mr. Bush and Mr. Card were on their way to India, Mr. Rove was asked by a group of guests how things were going.

"Everybody's away, so I'm running the country," Mr. Rove replied, playing off his caricature as an all-powerful behind-the-scenes puppet master.

And another creepy quote from the same NY Times article:

"An ingredient that's missing right now in the White House is that sense of urgency, that passion, that intensity," said Senator John Thune, Republican of South Dakota. "When you've had horses there that you've been riding for a long time, you kind of need to change them once in a while."

Now, getting past the creepy, tangy, sweatiness of thinking of Rove as a horse you're riding... which is an insult to horses everywhere... I think what's missing in the rest of the country when they look at the Administration is any sense that these people are like them. I mean, we've all been in offices where people have failed up (they're related to the boss, they're sleeping with one of the bosses, they're too litigious to fire, etc...), but I think Average Jane American looks at these losers continuing to screw up and still have jobs and goes What the F***?!

And they're all a bunch of those pasty white prep school guys that we all hated, too. They're always the ones with the weirdest fetishes, aren't they? Speaking of which, we never did find out what Jeff Gannon did all those evenings in the White House, did we?

All that being said, she says trying to get back to seeming calm and classy, it's a great time to be involved in the debate. It has truly become like Stephen King's The Stand. There's the good and there's the evil (obviously through your own prism) and you have to fight for your own sense of the Good. The debate has never been so divided.

In environmental issues, the moral card is a winning card. People always call beautiful places "God's Country," so how far a stretch is it to connect that belief to our own innate belief that you need to take care of God's country (nature)?

With the way Bush and Co. are getting us into debt, there's a clear right and wrong: it's wrong to levy a birth tax on children. Now every kid who's born starts out in the "Debt" category. How is that right?

This may seem radical, but I also question why it's right that we're blowing up Iraq because "if we don't fight the terrorists there, we'll be fighting them here." What did the Iraqi people do to deserve to be our strafing range? If we really were the tough nuts Bush portrayed us as when he said, "Bring it on!" we should be willing to fight the people who did 9/11 in our very streets. Or, as I did, you can leave the Big Obvious Terrorist Target Cities, make some sacrifices, and revitalize rural America.

A lot of that option seems right to me. A lot more right than incurring astronomical debt to continue to finance a fiasco that's costing us millions - or is it billions? - per day and sending home troops horribly scarred. And it would certainly clarify the stakes for all Americans. It's like Guantanamo - someday these things will have to be stopped, but the guys in charge now refuse to be the ones to do it. They'll instead retire from the hole they've dug us into, cash in being on boards of directors, and shoot down the Democrats who eventually have to come in and clean up the mess.

The crap floating continues. "Ending tyranny in our time" or however Bush puts it is a ridiculous goal. America had many happy centuries upholding tyrannies that worked for us. How about shifting gears and trying: "protecting human rights across the globe?" or "ensuring that every person on the planet can drink clean water" or spreading the belief in "loving thy neighbor as thyself"... "doing unto others as you'd have them do unto you?"

I think the guy who's credited with those last ideas was -- heaven forbid -- one long-haired hippie.

Let's see... long-haired hippie vs. pasty white dough boy in the photo above? I know who I'd choose to follow - and I'm not even a Christian.