A Blanket of Illusion

May 26, 2006

Last night's presidential contrition bore the familiar finger-print of the Democratic Party's collective boogeyman, political wunderkind, Karl Rove.

"Give them some red meat, Dubs," you can almost see the Architect advising.  "If we give the American People some personal grist, look what we stand to gain.  One, it shows the American President in touch with the emotions that have riven the nation.  Two, a recognition of mistakes made presupposes that corrections are underway to ensure victory.  And three, it deflects the debate from Constitutional abrogation and. . . well, you know . . . war crimes."

You could almost see it coming with Alberto Gonzalez's acknowledgement that the FBI's Saturday night raid on Democratic Congressman Jefferson's Congressional office strayed into the grey zone of executive over-reach.

[Fade to a balding curmudgeonly gnome pressing the breath to the Presidential auricle}   "Dub, strike before da steel anneal, mon!  You be catch dem flat-foot," he counsels.

It took 219 years for the Executive to summon the chutzpah to raid the offices of a Congressional opponent with even a single tentacle of its overt network of guns and badges.  While I am no historian of political eclectica, I would imagine that the precedent for an American President sealing documents in a criminal investigation is no historical commonplace.

The embattled Consiglieri's daunting task is to turn choleric effluvia into oatmeal for the American people.  Since the winnowing of the Iraqi wheat has left no grain and only chaff, it is Rove's job to make this politically indigestible by-product into, if not an appetizing or nutrifying mainstay, at least a major component of the American electorate's duty-bound diet.

The Architect understands and seeks to capitalize on a presidential windfall in a troubling American demographic.  There remains a recalcitrant and unapologetic underbelly of pap-smackers in America's blindered heartland that have not yet fully gotten it, but whose renaissance cannot be completely ruled out.  Bush's Brain would like to divert the subject from the Iraqi meat-grinder to somehow make fuzzy and cuddly his paternalistic boss's authoritative theft of candy from the newly swaddling American electorate.

If the oral dysentery of "Bring it on, Mission Accomplished," and "Wanted Dead or Alive," and comparable outtakes are the greatest regrets of the Leader of the Free World, then we as a nation are momentarily sunk.  Is this America's nuclear quarterback?  Do we really want Dubya's hands on the football?

Rove understands, likely better than the President himself, that a lot more is at stake in November than the House and the Senate.

"Mistakes were made," acknowledge Bush and Blair in public and private.  But they exaggerate their folly and failure.  When they speak of "mistakes" they play Rove's orchestration of societal brainwash.  Mistakes were NOT made.  Only one mistake was made.  Just one. 

Iraq.

And those hard-pressed and humble-pie admissions of error?  Those are admissions of trying to rationalize, justify, lobby for, and execute an illegal, pointless, objective-less, costly, and catastrophic war.  Those acknowledgments from on high of mistakes made?  These are no personal foibles.  Dem be war crimes.

Rove knows that hucksterism will play with the deluded brain-dead cajoled that this train wreck has, somehow, something to do with America.  In fact, this war is the embodiment of everything that our founding fathers struggled amongst themselves to strip astride their own curious historical fulcrum of any potential Constitutional legitimacy.

Even those among us that have a begrudging respect for the President's persona and wish ardently to be able to see him as "meaning well," and "resolute," and "plain-speaking," and all those other hoodwinking morasses of malarkey, must accept responsibility for our meandering morality and our tacit support for covert treason and stepwise governmental incursions on time-honored ideals, like life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

The sitting American President has conscientiously violated American and International Law repeatedly and very clearly manipulated domestic opinion through bald-faced lies in his illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq.  The list of outrages is legion. 

X-Men 4:  Armageddon script-writers, it is in fact reputed, are drafting a new mutant to be named Shrub.  His extraordinary powers include the ability to extend thorny brambles across wide reaches of the planet that deflect intelligence and imbue otherwise decent citizens with moral blindness and national dysfunction.

Today, the ever controversial British politician George Galloway, head of the ironically named RESPECT upstart political wing of British politics made the outrageous statement that Prime Minister Tony Blair's assassination would be a militarily fair target of Islamicists.  In so doing, Galloway missed the whole entirety of the beat that was presumed intuitive and doomed himself to a barren kitty-meowing future which quite possibly might involve his own eventual suicide.  The extremeness of his position, sad as it may be, nevertheless segues awkwardly with an arguably more rational and dignified expression of outrage.

I would expect the United States to rain steel and fire on any nation or group or individual that should ever conspire to assassinate any single one of America's governmental stewards, be they national, state, county, or municipal examples of the global standard-bearers of ethical and moral governance:  Norway.

The crimes of which the American president is self-admittedly guilty include crimes for which the death penalty, imposed by an American jury or military tribunal, are arguably reasonable in a society like ours that embraces such barbaric stabs at justice as capital punishment, particularly given the egregiousness and genocidicity of the overall campaign.

I am not moved by the President's scripted mea culpa for making provocative statements that resounded with populist sentiment at the time.  Hell, that was not a mistake then, nor is one now, just a recognition of the dynamics of comfy Peytonian politics.  I am instead moved by high crimes conscientiously perpetrated at the highest levels of government and enforced upon the rank and file, to whom criminal behavior may have mostly been a learned rather than an innate behavior.

The Architect, who may have a cell looming on his own horizon, is crafting crackered edifices on borrowed time and edgy money, and the hapless Commander in Chief, who turns out thankfully to not be stupid after all, is not fighting for his political life or his legacy anymore, both of which are already clearly irretrievable.  He is fighting for physical survival against a formidable machine whose Daddy he no longer is.

The darkest days of American apostasy dawn all around us, and it's red meat bleeding on the American heartland.  Longstanding vegetarian Democrats have long grown omniverous, and those new, breath-holding, begrudging, Republican convert-vegetarians?  Insipid wet tentative tongues lick thin, grimly smiling, bloodless lips, and bleached teeth beam through as eagerly palpitating nostrils gather the emanations of the steaming blood sausage on the plate.

This be America, and we be mightily well-born and endowed with the facility for both death and birth, and the divide be our election.

This is an editorial.  This is only an editorial.  Had this been an actual fact you would have been advised to withdraw to your nearest fact shelter to await further instructions.  We repeat.  This is only an editorial.

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