Great White Shark on the Menu!

Sheriff Dick Cheney secretly runs the administration from his bunker/crypt. Deputy Dubya Bush catapults the propaganda from a teleprompter screen crawl. Donald Rumsfeld, the "Great White Shark," swims around through the bureaucracy voraciously devouring departments and budgets until the entire federal government has nothing to do but produce bad Pentagon television campaign commercials designed and marketed by a second-rate snake-oil salesman, Karl Rove. Now that I have succinctly described how the current manifestation of the schizophrenic, double-thinking Lunatic Leviathan in fact operates, let us proceed to address what significance, if any, a sentient citizen should attach to the meandering mind-drool (or, "memo") supposedly addressed from the shark swimming away to the propaganda catapulter suddenly left staring at a blank teleprompter screen.

I served eighteen months (after a year of preparatory language and counter-insurgency training) in the Nixon-Kissinger Fig Leaf Contingent (Vietnam 1970-1972). As a bitterly experienced implimentor (i.e., "stander-upper") of the "Vietnamization" (i.e., "Yellowing the Corpses") policy, I fully recognize and understand the "new" "phased" (i.e., glacier race) nature of our contemporary Cheney-Bush Buy Time Brigade. Its ever-ongoing "Browning the Bodies" mission poses no analytical problem whatsoever for me, as it should not for any other ambulatory carbon-based life form on Planet Earth, either. It requires a human population unimaginably stupid to think that on any day of any week America possesses a functional government. No empirical evidence whatsoever supports this fantastic supposition. Where it required the "Best and the Brightest" to reduce us to FUBAR and SNAFU four decades ago, it only takes the "Worst and the Dullest" to screw up the same soup sandwich this time around -- only faster. Our "leaders" have lowered our expectations for them to nothing -- and still they disappoint us.

I really wish I didn't have to live through yet another bizarre spectacle of American public-policy-makers endlessly reiterating Orwellian mixed metaphors and flawed figures of speech as a substitute for reasoning and acting rationally. If I hear or read once more of the tipping point turning the corner in the next six critical months (now known as a "Friedman") connecting the ink-stained dots on the flypaper dominoes in the tunnel at the end of the light -- I think I'll scream. Such cardboard caricatures as float to the top of America's political sewer cannot possibly mean the same thing by "reading" and "writing" -- much less "thinking" -- that I do. So please, media mavens everywhere, spare us public-school peasants the ersatz effrontery of "analyzing" transparent -- and all-too tardy -- attempts by discredited reactionaries to rescue their ruined, reptilian reputations even as they try to avoid having the doorknob hit them in the ass on their way out. Dignifying such drivel -- by taking it seriously enough to debunk -- debases us all of what little dignity our "leaders" have left us.