My bags are packed, I'm ready to go....

No offense to the fine folks at Google, but I'm jumping ship and heading over to Wordpress to continue the dreaded drop-in-whenever-the-fuck-I-feel-like-it style of blogging.

I've played around with Wordpress a bit for the past two days and I think it's a little better. It has better features, and the template choices are a bit more varied and a bit less ..ahem.. garishly pink.

Here is my new address: http://futurecorpse.wordpress.com

And here is a direct link

Many, many thanks to all who've read, commented, and e-mailed and I hope you'll come visit the new place.

Letting Go of the Anger (keeping the sarcasm)

I wish I were a listmaker and had kept count of the grievances I've had about the Bush administration over the years. It would be interesting, in these heady first days of lame duckacy, to revisit and reflect on it over a nice bottle of wine for a few hours. Most certainly it would have been a long list.

If I had to choose just one, I think it's the rudeness that has always peeved me the most. All of them, with the exception of Condi Rice, are appallingly lacking in the social graces.

Below is a link to video of George W. in 2000 on the David Letterman Show. In it, he is taking his customary liberty with peoples' personal spaces to a ridiculous end by wiping his glasses on a show staffer's jacket during a commercial break.

He doesn't ask permission, let alone even acknowledge the woman. And the blank look on his face indicates that there was absolutely no consideration whatsoever that this woman might consider an oily patch of George Bush DNA on her jacket repulsive. Which, I shudderingly hasten to add, it is.

Classy guy!


And here's cuddly old Dick cheney waiting to catch the bus to a Bears game:



Wait, no, I'm sorry. That is Dick Cheney while he is REPRESENTING AMERICA at a ceremony of international leaders gathered to mark the 60th anniversary of the liberation of AUSCHWITZ. Somber and oozing with respect, huh?

To be fair, though, his fancy knitted cap is embroidered: "Staff 2001". Siiiiigh. You'd think, wouldn't you, that at least Lynnn would have had some innate sense of decorum to take Dick aside and tell him that he was dressed a bit innappropriately. And like an asshole. But clearly not. For fuck's sake, what is wrong with these people? Oh, and I would be remiss if I didn't add that shooting one's friend in the face is also a bit of a faux pas.


In the latest example of Bush Admininstration rude thoughtlessness, we have Donald "Mr. Condescending" Rumsfeld from a few days ago. These are his parting words to us about the Iraq war during his deliciously uncomfortable farewell press conference:


"It is not well known, it is not well understood, it is complex for people to comprehend"


Oh Donald, now that's just plain mean. I'll grant you that we were dumb enough to elect George W. Bush twice, but it's unfair for you to take the next leap and assume that average citizens are a bunch of window licking retards. If you'll recall, you creeps gave us at least 4 different reasons for going to war in Iraq and most of them turned out to be absolute lies. And the one that you've decided to stick with is proving to have a rather lofty and unnatainable finish line. Yet whenever we ask you to explain to us once again, pretty please, why we're over there, you get defensive and irritated and insinuate that we must want the terrorists to win.

What nerve you have to blame the American people for failing to understand the war when it's your fault that we don't. How can we possibly understand when we've never been told the truth?

You, and the rest of those barnyard animals you call an administration, have a very bad habit of blaming everyone but yourselves when things go badly. And it's for that very reason that voters came out in droves and you were so deservedly stripped of your power. 'Cos, see, we may be stupid, but we're not that stupid.

Hope

As shitty as things have been on planet Earth of late, it's really quite a magnificent time to be alive in America right now. The crushing lows and the sweeping highs that roll, dip, and wash over us in waves (of amber grain - I swear, it's amber fucking grain!), gives one a sense of what living with manic depression might be like.

Many of us are in in a full-blown manic state this morning.

Being at best sarcastic, and at worst, curmudgeonly, I rarely begin sentences with the words "I am bursting". But there's just no better way to put it. I am simply bursting with faith and pride in America today. Once again, we have hope.

As I type this, C-SPAN is drifting in from another room, and I can vaguely hear a press conference featuring a conservative group who are angrily expressing their disappointment in the Bush administration. I just padded over to the TV and saw their faces all pinched and bitter. They are seriously pissed off.

I guess it's now A-OK to come out and lay the fuck right into George W. Bush. It's funny how that works, ain't it? Even Rush Limbaugh has turned on Bush. He said on his show today that he feels liberated by the trouncing because he no longer has to "carry the water" of those who he feels don't deserve to have their water carried. My my my!

There will, in the coming days, no doubt, be many more attacks on Bush for betraying the cause of conservatism. But it's all just self-serving snivel by people who've put all their eggs in one philosophical basket.

George W. Bush betrayed America. And the people and groups coming out in droves to denounce him now should be held accountable for their dishonesty and their patriotism should, as happened to so many who dared speak out against Bush from the start, be questioned!

September 11th was the defining moment of America's future. But Bush only saw it as the defining moment in his life; his God-given destiny to become the next Lincoln. There was hope for positive change and renewal after the attack and the chance to make us better. But he wasn't smart enough to see it, nor humble enough to imagine that bringing about a quiet revolution could be just as glorious as trying to achieve it through tanks and guns and force.

So instead, he made us ever aware of our fear, and pitted us against each other. And we voted for him again. And Iraq became the problem it was destined to become. And hope dwindled.

And last week, Dick Cheney said that it didn't matter what the public thought about the administration's plan to continue "full speed ahead" in Iraq because they weren't running for office.

Such astonishingly naked arrogance from a charmless, malignant prick. But the American public have stood up to it.

Conservatives in high numbers, people who voted Republican their entire lives, either abstained or voted Democrat or Libertarian. Young people, also in high numbers, sensed the importance and came out to the polls. In Michigan, it was the highest voter turnout in a non-presidential election ever.

We The People are paying attention and the Democratic process worked. And again, we have blissful strands of hope to cling to. Unfortunately, we also have two more years of Bush.

I have no illusions that he'll learn any lessons from this and that he will put America's needs over his own need for political surival. But at least we've got some brakes on the locomotive. It says a lot about the state of this country that that alone is worthy of wild celebration.