Questionable Convictions

Well a lot has happened in week, hasn't it folks? I swing between nausea and frustration with an occasional sense of tragedy and a fleeting sense that the world might yet come out all right.

The weekend began with a nauseating wave of Bushie flag waving (over coffins and smoking ruins, no less) and Martha bashing. The former is no more (in fact far less) than I expected. Bushies will push the only button that looks remotely successful in the voting bloc and that's the fear button. If these ads don't begin to get people sufficiently anxious and scared enough, I am fully prepared for a "terror alert" to postpone the vote itself if Bush's polling numbers aren't close enough to Kerry to engineer a literal win if he can't generate one lawfully.

Oh, you laugh; maybe not, if you've been paying attention. I'm not joking in any way shape or form. Of course I'm a blogger so I obviously have no life, I get all my news from Slate and Drudge and have a porn website on the side (or resell everything I have ever owned on eBay). I know simply writing online relegates my opinion to the scrap heap of the conspiracists and neo-everythings, but I'm just one of the only people who seems to be paying attention, or perhaps the rest of the press just doesn't have the energy or sufficient outrage to try to do something about it, if only expose it for what it is. November is coming, though a lot can happen in 8 months. I shudder to think what chaos a panicked Vice master can generate.

Now to Martha, sweet Martha. The pundits have been picking your carcass cleaner than the turkey the day after Thanksgiving. I don't quite understand the glee that so many are taking in your demise. I think it's likely they are either too stupid to understand the circular logic of your conviction or they are too blinded by the sense of inferiority that your mission to inform the world of all things genteel generated within themselves.

I, for one, embraced your at home finishing school via magazine and then TV. You made vellum paper, balsamic vinegar and heirloom seed cultivation accessible to those of us who may as well have been raised by wolves. You taught me to make a killer buttercream. You turned me on to Victorian paper angels. You showed us how to tat, how to tin pierce, how to refinish old furniture and how to do it "well" - not just as a gradation of execution but a state of being. "Wellness" took on new heights with you, you taught a generation that a single fresh flower in a simple glass vase was certainly preferable to dried potpourri from K-Mart. When we saw the elegant ease of gentility and began to embrace the label maker and the sans serif font in every demographic, you brought your downscaled version of elegance to the quintessentially non-genteel market of the blue light special itself, K-Mart.

It must not be much satisfaction to you to know that the people too stupid to get that you have been railroaded will certainly reap a government that regularly imposes martial law and imprisons people for being rightfully paranoid they will overstep their bounds. The lady was convicted of covering up a crime that the judge said she did not commit. WHAT?!? The only thing remotely reassuring about this charade is that I can work my tail off to unseat this idiot from the bench, being so close to the city. I don't think I could stand this if I wasn't a New Yorker and didn't have a voice in who gets to continue to sentence and mete out...er, was that supposed to be "justice"?

To those of you out there who, like me, are waiting for Rod Serling to walk out of the periphery and "submit for your approval, a woman who..." It aint gonna happen any time soon, baby. Ashcroft, as frighteningly menacing as he is, is as real as the computer you are sitting in front of. This administration is crossing so many lines, I think that even God himself might picket 1700 pretty soon.

The two events articulate perfectly the hypocrisy and the double standards that pervade our culture. Bush drapes himself in a flag and evokes the "courage of the moment" he displayed during 9/11. Yet, the guy was so completely hidden that ABC's news anchor dryly observed the afternoon of 9/11 that the President could "not remain incommunicado forever" and sure enough that evening W. addressed us from an "undisclosed location" via closed circuit.

That the only favorables Bush can generate relate directly to 9/11 bodes ill for either the President or the citizens he pretends to represent. The green light that "terror" elicits for George and Dick may have to turn orange in order to capitalize fully on the dread and fear that Al-Qaida and their ilk handed to the GOP on a silver platter. If the public doesn't think through this (in the same way they cannot seem to think through and see the insanity of the logic of Martha's conviction) then the GOP will probably connect the dots by first inferring that a Kerry administration is a target of Al-Qaida; then leaking that the First Puppet and his President of Vices are personally targets of Al;-Qaida; think of the hand wringing, the references to the "unavoidable confusion" that resulted in 9/11 - as though every incoming administration is as diffident to its citizens safety or as so resolutely nationalist in its approach at the outset that it refused to look beyond its own borders at any foreign policy matters.

This morning GOP operatives are all over the airwaves whining about Move-On and Kerry's overheard statements to folks on the dais that the people he was running against are as crooked and rotten dirty as they come, do you think he was referring to the refusal of Cheney and Bush to cooperate with investigations as important as the terror attacks or Cheney's energy meetings just before the trebling of energy prices in the west ion 2000?

Could the "dirty rotten" ethics be fabricating evidence to the UN and American public about nonexistent weapons and chemical arms factories to justify attacking a nation that posed no threat to anyone but its own citizens? Could the "crooked" antics of Halliburton securing a hefty contract to rebuild Iraq after we destroyed it on purpose, then its blatant overcharges and the administration's refusal to pull the contract or mete out some sort of consequence to borderline war profiteers?

Could the fact that Martha and Ebbers have hit the chopping block but yet Kenny Lay (Bush's #1 contributor in the 2000 election) walks free unindicted while his company and everyone, from retirees to stockholders to employees were defrauded? Yes, wring your hands all you like about Clinton dispensing ONE questionable executive order, but then have your anger raised equilvalent to the level of patronage in W's administration.

Remember the Congressional inquiries over a few travel agent jobs in the White House? Yet this Congress has no compunctions about allowing Supreme Court Justices to rule on cases where they have an evident conflict of interest? The level of corruption self evident in the GOP that extends to the Oval office and Vice Presidential bunker is so egregious it defies logic. Crooked and rotten are gentle criticisms -- I call the Republican ethics of the last decade felonious, hypocritical, cowardly, xenophobic, greedy and pathological in its half truths, outright distortions and its blind insistence that it is morally superior despite all evidence to the contrary. Bush (et al) and their public personae have nothing in common with their actions. Their supposed positions, moral and otherwise are rendered moot by the very absence of any sense of conscience or guiding ethos; in the same way America and Martha Stewart received a sentence but no real justice.

I say it now: if all else fails, an orange alert will appear timed just before the elections. If the resulting sympathy/fear bump isn't enough to give W a full 6 point poll lead then the "O alert' will extend through November postponing elections.

You heard it way back in the stirrings of spring, America. When September brings an evil wind, don't say I didn't warn you.

the Curmudgeon