smoke and mirrors redux

can i just say…

… this crap about cheney shooting somebody needs to end. i’m sick and tired of the bait-and-switch, and i’m damned tired of watching the media take the bait.

remember what was happening at the end of last week’s episode in white house corruption? tom delay had just been appointed as the fox over the henhouse, scooter libby was spilling his guts all over darth vader’s desk, and michael brown was once again demonstrating to the nation how a spineless worm can indeed sit upright and testify before congress, spinelessness notwithstanding. once again, alberto gonzales showed us what a walking talking weasel might look like if it were removed from dr. moreau’s island. talk about your human/animal hybrids – this guy’s a freaking poster child. someone should really notify the president.

and then over the weekend, cheney shot someone hunting. my husband is understandably pissed at the idiocy of the vice-president, who used to be his hero due to their shared fantasies about nuking the middle east. what will this do to the NRA? he wonders. probably nothing, is my thought, given the short attention span of the american public. (oh and i double-checked with my experienced hunter of a husband – it doesn’t matter in the slightest that whittington walked into cheney’s sight-path. if you’ve got the gun, it’s your fault. period. there are no hunting accidents, he says, and i’m inclined to believe him.)

in the meanwhile, people who were left homeless by Katrina, and remain homeless due to the unbelievable incompetence and wastefulness of national emergency services are about to be thrown to the wolves, even though there are thousands of brand-new trailers sitting around empty.

in the meanwhile, like a land-poor aristocracy desperately trying to keep the big house running, shrubco is trying to sell off bits of useless land – even though previous generations, those who truly believed in conservation, had tagged the land as public property. the land is being sold, they say, to finance rural schools and roads and stuff – because the budget cuts made by the administration shaved off original funding for these projects. granted, it's not a lot of land comparatively speaking (about 1 1/2 times the size of katherine armstrong's 50,000 acre ranch, where whittington was shot) but it's the beginning of an unhappy practice in resource management.

in the meanwhile, we’re still in a useless, expensive war, manufacturing plenty of justification for another one, and nothing – i mean, NOTHING – is going to stand in the way of this administration’s policies, because there is no effective opposition party in congress. which pretty much means that congress is a subsidiary branch of the executive house. and after the last two supreme court appointments, so is the judiciary branch. so much for our elegant three-part federal republic.

this is what happens when a democracy gets lazy and stops paying attention, when people are too cowed to even discuss politics and policies with each other, when questioning decisions made by our leaders is seen as disloyal or even traitorous, when … oh what the hell.

i see that my point has already been made by Robert Schlesinger of huffpo. i’m obviously not the only one taking note of the smoke and mirrors.