Outlook Remains Grim: Bush to Remain President for 76 More Days

0215 Wednesday 5 November 2008: As Gerald R. Ford, 38th President of the U. S., famously declared, “Our long national nightmare is over.” Not the eight yr. Bush nightmare (that one is just starting to be felt, & good fucking luck President-to-be-if-they-don’t-shoot-you Obama) but the two yrs. of campaign idiocy is just about behind us. We suspect the pathetic losers will give the nation (via its biased liberal elite media) several wks. of hand-wringing, recrimination, finger-pointing, playing of the blame game & such (but little to no acceptance of responsibility) & three zillion (minimum) "think-pieces" entitled some variation of “Is the Republican Party/Conservatism/Reagan Dead, Dying, or Just In Need of Some Mouth to Mouth?” After that, well-deserved winter fund raising, cruising Caribbean climes w/ the aging, wealthy & gullible conservative faithful & their checkbooks. And before you can notice the silence & calm, & say “Isn’t it nice & quiet in here?” they’ll be back bitching & moaning about the socialist agenda of the “messianic (We can only assume that Sen. Obama, in comparison to G. W. Bush, is so eloquent that it seems supernatural to the already superstitious & easily frightened right wing.) Marxist,” as if it were the 1952 election & Norman Thomas or Gus Hall had somehow been written in & squeaked past vote-splitting Eisenhower & Stevenson. “Back to the ‘50s” concept inspired by Bob Herbert in yesterday’s NYT. No reason not to let him finish this item, is there?

The U.S. is also a country in which blissful ignorance is celebrated, and intellectual excellence (the key to 21st century advancement) is not just given short shrift, but is ridiculed. Paris Hilton and Britney Spears are cultural icons. The average American watches television a mind-numbing 4 1/2 hours a day. At the same time, our public school system is plagued with some of the highest dropout rates in the industrialized world. Math and science? Forget about it. Too tough for these TV watchers, or too boring, or whatever. “When I compare our high schools with what I see when I’m traveling abroad,” said Bill Gates, “I am terrified for our work force of tomorrow.” The point here is that as we approach the end of the first decade of the 21st century, the United States is in deep, deep trouble. Yet instead of looking for creative, 21st-century solutions to these enormous problems, too many of our so-called leaders are behaving like clowns, or worse — spouting garbage in the public sphere that hearkens back to the 1940s and ’50s. Thoughtful, well-educated men and women are denounced as elites, and thus the enemies of ordinary Americans. Attempts to restore a semblance of fiscal sanity to a government that has been looted with an efficiency that would have been envied by the mob, are derided as subversive — the work of socialists, Marxists, Communists. In 2008! In North Carolina, Senator Elizabeth Dole, a conservative Republican, is in a tough fight for re-election against a Democratic state senator, Kay Hagan. So Ms. Dole ran a television ad that showed a close-up of Ms. Hagan’s face while the voice of a different woman asserts, “There is no God!” Americans have to decide if they want a country that tolerates this kind of debased, backward behavior. Or if they want a country that aspires to true greatness — a country that stands for more than the mere rhetoric of equality, freedom, opportunity and justice. That decision will require more than casting a vote in one presidential election. It will require a great deal of reflective thought and hard work by a committed citizenry. The great promise of America hinges on a government that works, openly and honestly, for the broad interests of the American people, as opposed to the narrow benefit of the favored, wealthy few.

And good luck w/ that, America!! As if every one of you bastards out there wouldn't sell your own grandmother, let alone honest, open gov't., merely to be noticed by one of the favored & wealthy.