Dubya Jumps the Shark While The Reign of Terror Begins

"O liberty! How they have played with you."
- Moderate girondist Mme. Jeanne Roland de la Platiere's last words before her death on the guillotine.

"Domestic carnage, now filled the whole year
With feast-days, old men from the chimney-nook,
The maiden from the busom of her love,
The mother from the cradle of her babe,
The warrior from the field - all perished, all -
Friends, enemies, of all parties, ages, ranks,
Head after head, and never heads enough
For those that bade them fall."
- William Wordsworth

There will never be a quiet part of the world until somebody knocks the patriotism out of the human race ... and it is nearly impossible to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind. These were the first thoughts that rang through the preznut's Horticulture Festival Wednesday night, watching Dubya jump the shark during the State of the Union conundrum - and it was a rather powerful thing to witness from the vantage point of a red state hotel lobby. It had a greasy and aberrant pace to the delivery that seemed more NASCAR pile-up at turn two - not unlike most oratory endeavors for the Chimperor - where the squeal of bleached tires and screech of twisted metal fills the air and the crowd at home is all glued to the television screen for signs of carnage and the pit crews bite away at their bottom lips from sheer stupidity.

The hammer came down rather suddenly, just as Dubya was finished basking in the glory of a "spontaneous" moment with a red-haired Iraqi woman who looked more like Elizabeth Edwards with a skin condition. After 15 minutes of rambling around with a list of meaningless drivel, which approached the dull stammering velocity of a borderline retard assembling Nerf ball kits at a Goodwill Industries sweatshop, our child preznut reached back and jumped out swinging ... The whole thing was, of course, televised nationally, from the moment he man-kissed Joe Lieberman back to Tel-Aviv and cited Iran and Syria as "sponsors of terrorism" and wandered along the tone of "democracy can't be bad for the Middle East because it selected me" when the system was thrown a monkey wrench in the forms of baby brother and Kathryn Harris in Florida, until some mere 45 minutes later when Herr Cheney and Kommander Hastert could be seen reaching for shin splints caused by repeated shifting to their feet while Democrats were hissing their way to dreams of a felony bust for Dubya's number two - and, even perhaps, Redrum Rumsfeld - that would result in at least four or five years in a plexiglass cage like the one they used in Silence of the Lambs to keep Hannibal Lecter separated from culinary experiences with human flesh.

It was a scandalous development. Dubya had just received notice from his Rethug politicos that not even the party could withstand another assault on Social Security without sending a good junk of the base to the blue corner, but the Chimperor pushed ahead undaunted so fast that not even the moderates could get him to temper the sound bite. Sitting in the audience was Doktor Bill Frist and Marshall John McCain, two perceived front runners for 2008 - if there could be some at this point, as long as the nation made it to the finish line on Dubya Incorporated - which is a highly dubious proposition at the dawn of 2005, because it is clear that this preznut is going to leave the cupboard bare for the next unfortunate selection to the Big House, assuming that he doesn't declare martial law and dub himself Sultan of Saudi Arabia West.

That was the fallout from Wednesday. Dubya could hardly contain himself for the next crisis of his tenure and ordered the Big House kitchen staff to get him a case of Jim Beam for the cabinet ... and then he called Daddy down in Texas, who warned him about Reagan's second term.

"What problem?" said Dubya, like he had just been jerked by the collar. "Ain't it all wine and roses from here on out?"

"Hell, no," Daddy shot back. "You've got about three weeks on this Social Security idea. Before guys like McCain and Frist and Lugar start running their mouths on the Sunday shows - and begin to leak evidence on all the indictable stuff you thought Cheney washed under the rug."

Dubya went hard and silent, then tossed himself to his knees like a crack addict looking for stray rocks and cried in front of his staff, who by then figured that the Big Guy was running low on his thorazine level.

The fuel tank holding his political capital is now on empty. And even as his weeping and screaming echoed through the hallways that night, while the White House staffers hunkered down for afterhours strategizing - which turned to shouts and accusations and threats and pure bitching by the next morning - the talking heads had already taken to the airwaves, with sardonic takes on the Iraqi-Army Mom choreography and rumors of Social Security reform failure even before the preznut's mobilization effort could gain steam. And after the payola scandal that rocked Armstrong Williams' career - which is sure to implicate others once the political tide finally turns into a whirlpool - there is not even one respected voice who would reach out for a cash settlement in advance, much like what happened before the administration considered that it needed more spin for No Child Left Behind and the Post-911 World garbage that has squeezed an entire generation from all sides.

"Remember a thousand points of light, my boy," his daddy emailed the next morning. "Might as well be a string of redneck beads on dental floss."

Dubya jumped the shark, for sure - jacked up on slick egotism and an overactive megalomaniac cycle that painted him in the corner in which he sits today - and a voice in the darkness with a really precise sense of political destruction is sitting in the weeds, painting the target with a laser beam that could cause utter "catastrophic success" at any moment.

It was the same day that reports of a recent memo, drafted by a senior White House strategist, hit the pages of The Los Angeles Times, in which it is alleged that the Rethugs are hoping to achieve an ambitious political objective: Ravaging the money stream and key voters from the Democratic side and cementing GOP dominance for years after Dubya cuts, ducks and runs for his fancy pansexual dude ranch in Crawford ... err ... on the outskirts of Houston.

One of the clearest examples is an effort to limit jury awards in lawsuits against doctors and businesses. The caps might not only discourage "frivolous" lawsuits, as Bush argues, but also deprive trial lawyers of income from damage awards that they could then give to Democrats.

"If we could succeed in getting some form of tort reform passed — medical malpractice reform or any of part of that — it would go a long ways toward … taking away the muscle, the financial muscle that they have," said Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), who ousted Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle last fall despite a heavy flood of trial lawyer money backing the Democrat.

[ ... ]

Are we doing it because it creates more Republicans? Or are we doing it because it's the right thing to do, and by the way, it also happens to create more Republicans?" asked Grover Norquist, head of Americans for Tax Reform and a frequent advisor to Karl Rove, Bush's chief political advisor. "It's both."

"Every one of the ideas for the most part has merits on its own, so … they're defensible," said Stephen Moore, a conservative activist who plans to raise $10 million this year to advertise on behalf of Bush's Social Security plans. "But I think, altogether, this was devised as a Karl Rove grand plan to cement in place a Republican governing coalition that could last for a generation or more."

So the bizarre story goes, and Dubya's strange collection of associates are devising even newer ways to prosper. The memo in question, authored by Peter Wehner, director of the White House Office of Strategic Initiatives, has been drinking from the same bottle as his master, acting all Robespierre-like by igniting Dubya's Reign of Terror against labor unions, frivolous lawsuits, the legal rights of citizens and the Social Security trust fund, rationalizing a windfall to Wall Street who would be able to further erode worker's rights and get fat on the advantage of personal retirement accounts. Not surprisingly, this balkanization of the current partisan minefield will become a prime example of Gresham's law of political morality: the bad drives out the good as everyone becomes corrupted ... while political life becomes not unlike the Hobbesian war of all against all in "a perpetual and restless desire for power, that ceaseth only in death." And in the end, the Rethugs will have no one to thank but themselves ... once the 51% of the misinformed public that votes for Dubya wakes up to the cold reality that the boos and hisses and special prosecutors that were aimed at William Jefferson Clinton will finally come home to roost on the head of The Chimperor. They will all blame the political "third rail" - which is the Social Security entitlement - but it will be more of an indictment on Dubya than it will the AARP, the ACLU, the DNC or the so-called liberal media.

By the time that the Social Security agenda hits the Senate floor his brain will have folded onto itself, from the constant taste of Jim Beam in his gills, and during the nights leading to his end it will be a White House aide who will be the only living thing that keeps Dubya from getting busted for public urination or violating the DC sealed container laws.

Our child preznut already seems to have no friends - only Condi, who telephones him every morning with fresh news on the crazy Arabs and disloyal Euros in her new role as rubber stamp to the doomed and freakish neo-con legacy.

"Terror is nought but prompt, severe, inflexible justice; it is therefore an emanation of virtue; it is less a particular principle than a consequence of the general principle of democracy applied to the most pressing needs of the fatherland."
- Maximillien Marie Isidore de Robespierre Address, National Convention, 1794