Let's Knock The Grin Off

Twice in the last two days I found myself trying to write some kind of detailed response to Bush's SOTU address. But each time I was forced to pause and ask myself the same question: are you effing kidding? There's no good way for me to contradict this soaring patriotic horseshit and these transcendingly dishonest platitudes with an argument otherwise. You spend hour upon hour dealing with the hated nuance of crucial qualifications and real statistics to debunk a single paragraph of his sentimental and misleading rhetoric.

Of course the Dems, just ten seconds after the speech was done, set about to do just that -- as they should. But America must know by now what they're dealing with. They must see that Bush's game is to express admiration and belief in the very thing he seeks to subvert. If the subject is foreign policy and freedom, and the action in question is using military force on a beleaguered nation to the tune of hundreds of thousands maimed or killed and hundreds of billions (so far) of American taxpayer dollars spent, and the motive is strategic access to oil through regime change and to foment general chaos in Arabia hoping to see something good when the dust settles, then the rationale becomes one of altruism and hope -- freedom's march. But this is nihilism's march, my friends. It's the politics of the shit-eating grin: taking ideals like freedom and civil rights into the latrine of a "preemptive" war bloodbath and attempting to walk out with clean hands.

The people that are out there in America who still support this president and have faith in his judgment do so in the face of a convincing presentation (much of it made by former allies) of damning proof against him; against his judgment, against his motives, against his administration's competence outside the realm of public relations, and yes, against his speechifying.

At this point, you are either with him or against him. If you are with him, then I finally believe that you are against America's best future -- and I am against you.

Yet the destination of history is determined by human action, and every great movement of history comes to a point of choosing. Lincoln could have accepted peace at the cost of disunity and continued slavery. Martin Luther King could have stopped at Birmingham or at Selma, and achieved only half a victory over segregation. The United States could have accepted the permanent division of Europe, and been complicit in the oppression of others. Today, having come far in our own historical journey, we must decide: Will we turn back, or finish well?

At the end of Bush's speech, he compares our actions in Iraq (and his agenda's vision, in general) to Lincoln's emancipation of the slaves, to the civil-rights struggle, and to our intervention in Europe in WW2. This, on the very day that MLK's wife, Corretta Scott King, passed away. Any questions?

Let's take this huckster and anyone that looks, acts, thinks, walks, talks, jogs, smirks, stutters, blinks, or swings a golf club like him DOWN. Let's save America one greedy shit-eating grinner at a time. We may not want to, BUT WE MUST! Because we're running out of choices, and these people are taking America for everything it's got.

**Already, some have taken the previous paragraph to mean that I believe we should arm ourselves and shoot anybody that we perceive to be wearing a "shit-eating grin" including our president. NO! I was thinking more along the lines of electoral politics -- taking them down from the" soap box" or at the ballot box. Okay, bye. Peace and goodwill toward men!