According to the weather reports as of Wed. Jan. 14, the weather for Obama’s upcoming Inauguration next week will be cold, an overnight low of 22 the night before, and snow that morning for that lovable den of iniquity more generally known as your capital city, Washington DC. This, of course, supports the contentions of bigots and religious fanatics everywhere who have said that hell would have to freeze over before a black man could become president.
It must be that time of year weirdness reigns. For example, in an odd example of the way even broken clocks are right twice a day, this week’s news cycle saw a trifecta of liars, buffoons and fools getting it right, to the point that it honestly bears acknowledging. George Bush, Nancy Pelosi and Sarah Palin all issued public statements that were both smart and correct. Former baseballer Bush actually managed to pull of his own triple play. With each of these three having such horrendous records at “getting it right,” Vegas odds-makers would have refused to even speculate as to the chances of such a convergence.
What next? Will it be revealed that Anne Coulter has a redeeming quality?
My personal favorite among the trio was Sarah Palin’s observation that the press and the political process were giving Carolyn Kennedy a break in her quest to be the next Kennedy public self-immolation. Palin accused that JFK’s “widdle-bitty-daughter-all-growed-up” might be getting special treatment because she is an elite in the class warfare of America.
Yeah. No kidding, Palin’s right. [It feels SO weird to type that]
The Kennedy family, like other longtime millionaire families in America, are part of a ruling class that shapes the lives of the rest of us the way rich kids on the beach build their castles - so their friends can traipse through them, wreak havoc and then fudge fat government contracts to fake at rebuilding them. The current Kennedy family earns extra credit for being only a couple generations removed from the time when her granddad smuggled in whiskey during Prohibition, putting that family on par with the Bush grandfatherly legacy of having been caught bankrolling the Nazis.
What Palin claims to resent is that Kennedy’s class gives her power and an unfair advantage. But even though there is wisdom in her observation, in the end Palin’s lament breaks down to a case of the lady protesting too much. Palin herself didn’t seem too upset a few months back when the money and power of that same group of elites were netting her a $150K wardrobe and private jets all over the country.
Pelosi’s case is a bit more complex. Despite the fact that the woman has not been able to honestly claim a shred of credibility since 2006 when she took impeachment off the table as soon as Americans had voted Dems into power specifically to attend to that very duty, this past week Nancy Pelosi made a very wise and apparently nonpartisan observation: Barack Obama is not keeping his campaign promises. As of yet, this observation can only be ruled to be “apparently nonpartisan,” for as Margaret Kimberly’s widely republished Black Agenda Report article “Freedom Rider: Bush Goes out a Winner” summarizes, thus far Obama’s efforts appear to be more in keeping with the Bush/GOP goals than his own party’s platform or even his very own campaign promises.
In specific, Pelosi was finally getting around to carping about Obama’s early on bombshell of a choice to jettison the populist promise of taxing the rich, a lie frequently foisted on a struggling public by a Democrat wanting to be thought of as a reformer. Of course when he was running for the attention of the American public, he could get a lot of mileage out of promising to thrash the rich. However now as president, Obama is also beholding to those very rich who own the country they let him claim to run.
All of which brings us to Bush and his swansongs for the press. Swaggering, bitter, and cockier than ever, in his final press conference the frat boy martinet Bush danced around owning up to the debacle that has been his presidency, though he did acknowledge the whole WMD thing was “a significant disappointment." In a “disappointment two-fer,” Bush also admitted that the Abu Ghriab prison deal was as well "a huge disappointment." Boy, George, you just can’t get much righter than that.
For Bush, however, these disappointments were merely a matter of misjudging policy issues. For the rest of u, the WMD and Abu Ghriab disappointments include the fact that, as the scope of the massive criminal enterprise of Bush lying us into unprovoked wars and tortures against our fellow man was revealed; as we came to learn the depths of the cruelty in our name and the layers of deceit employed to keep the American public from the truth; when we finally had it all proven and laid out for us how we, the American public, had been swindled into mass murder and enabling mass fraud; that we then still allowed ourselves to continue to be governed by the despot and to even be accused of voting the man back into office instead of having the traitor arrested. That is the greatest disappointment.
Which regretfully brings to mind Bush’s final and must urgent truism: “there's still an enemy out there that would like to inflict damage on America — on Americans." I have a clear idea of whom he is referring to. As of Jan. 20, the great criminal I’m thinking of may no longer be in charge, but he will still be at large.
--mikel weisser writes from the left coast of AZ.
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