Aquarian Weekly 5/16/07
REALITY CHECK

FRAT HOUSE FRACAS
A Month Of Peeling Back White House Mayhem

Have you left me the last
Of the dum dum daze
Then the sun goes down
And the boys broke down
- Iggy Pop

This is truly a country run by lunatics.

It is the only explanation.

The days of discussing the evil intent of the body politic, the corruption of power, and the insidious nature birthed by the grievous land-baron history of this great but flawed republic are finally buried beneath an avalanche of Herculean incompetence. It's official. The Bush Administration rivals the most dysfunctional parade of rogues ever to tread the halls of this government. No small feat when considering some of the scabrous cretins to hold this nation's most cherished titles. In one month, give or take, the house of cards held together by the flimsiest of shreds has tumbled down in an almost humorous heap on the head of our flatlined Boy President.

Let's start with this nonsense surrounding embattled Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who has spent weeks awkwardly defending himself and the justice department against flaccid charges of political intrigue, when all he had to do was tell congress to fuck off. What kind of lawyer is this idiot? What is he hiding? Agenda? Agendas make up the whole of Washington. No one goes to the toilet without ulterior motives in DC. Presidents have absolute power over the federal government's law officers. He can fire one for denting his car. No explanation necessary.

For reasons only known to those in charge, Gonzales is on trial for defending the administration's honor. Honor? Again, I ask, what kind of lawyer is this jack ass? Just because he kept Bush from political oblivion in Texas by hiding a goofy DWI does not make him attorney general of save-face. Forget what you think of the spirit of the law or political agendas, you want the head of your nation's justice department acting like a sixteen year-old girl with a pocket-book full of speed and condoms jabbering out cheap excuses about holding them for friends?

Gonzales is so pathetic under cross-examination he makes his predecessor, John Ashcroft, a vapid troll who once lost a Missouri senate election to a corpse, look like Honest Abe.

On the heels of this freak show another Bush reject, Paul Wolfowitz, head of the World Bank, whose dim-witted fantasies fueled the ill-conceived Iraq invasion, is busted handing over a cushy job and a huge pay hike to the woman he's currently screwing. Soon he will join the growing list of administration boobs who were forced to resign as miserable failures.

Fast forward to former CIA Director George Tenet and his laughably exploitive tales of woe and finger pointing in At The Center Of The Storm, wherein the author comes off as a holy amalgamation of Saint Paul meets Gunga Din. But as with all fiction there's a core of truth within, one that has been echoed in this space for nearly seven years now: Stupidity and hubris out duels fiendish scheming every time in Bushland.

True, Tenet is as gutless and wormy as Richard Clarke, who also claimed to know and warn and bellow everything known to modern souls only to continue to cull a government pay check while remaining silent until booted. If there is such a thing as guilt, it falls on him, as it falls on the others who not only bungled everything since 9/11, but the months leading up to it.

Again, as written here mere days after the towers went down, of course Bush and Rice and Cheney and Powell and the CIA and the FBI knew about a potential attack on a major American city. They fucked up. Big time. Blood is all over these people, and that's how the job goes. Run a nation, nation is attacked, you're to blame. No matter how many countries you bomb. Plenty of blame, jack. But once again these petty smear campaigns and the endless back-biting childishness is a glaring reflection on how things are running and have been run around here - like some soused frat house bungle wretched with blind cronyism and kegs flying through windows, bad boys dick-fighting and puffing chests, stumbling around hallowed halls fist-fucking the constitution.

And it's too bad.

Bush was the mediocre elite's last shot at greatness. He was our boozehound coke fiend C-student who would run America like a Texas ho-down. It was to be a freewheel, but then he mucked it up by bringing in his daddy's has-beens, recycled fossils who saw one last chance at the brass ring. Not a one of them could keep from dragging our hero and his puppeteer, Karl Rove down with them.

I was rooting for Rove. I was. He helped defeat one of the vilest of human diseases, Al Gore, by cheating and stealing everything this country claimed to hold dear. It was a thing of brutal beauty, half-mad, half-genius. Rove was as close to invincible as a democracy could hope to produce; a chronic masturbator with a weakness for jellow-shots and The Stooges' "Raw Power" on vinyl, but someone mistook him for an intellect and gave him the keys to the president's brain, which he recklessly commandeered into disaster.

Now Bush's approval ratings flounder somewhere in the mid-20s, close to a Watergate low. Stunning, even for a monumental screw up. His war is now officially a suicide anvil roped around his neck and Jesus has abandoned him. He no longer speaks in private anymore, at least not anything close to coherent. In public he manages to burp out weird things like "internets" and some Seussian nonsense about "Victory is not no violence." Insiders say he lives in constant fear there's another Scooter Libby stumbling drunk and angry through the White House looking to dump more foul odors on his office. Key aids are on 24-hour notice to keep him informed if the vice president shoots anyone else.

And no one who used to make decisions around the man has a clue why the Secretary of State is running around Syria trying to get warlords to put the hammer down in Iraq. Talk is she missed a sign or is bunting on her own, because it's madness-squared and will put us in further debt to religious goons, the very reason we're in this shit storm in the first place.

Hey, laugh if you wish. I know I'm laughing. You can't make this stuff up. Believe me, I try. Every day. But it pales. Nothing comes close to this mania. Nothing.

I've got it on pretty good authority that the president's dog has been appointed Secretary of the Interior.

Tell me you think that's a joke.

Reality Check | Pop Culture | Politics | Sports | Music