Just Another Terrorist Organization Gone Terminal on Itself

jumping the shark
1. when your favorite show starts to flag and go downhill, as when Fonzie jumped the shark on waterskis. We all knew that Happy Days was on its way down then.
2. a semi-popular phrase for "selling out" or turning into shit.
3. the precise moment when you recognize that something is really over although it's momentum carries it on for a few steps.
     source: UrbanDictionary.com

There was a strange vibe all over the globe last week. Terri Schiavo finally went off to her maker, the Pope took a turn for the worse in the aftermath of another Easter Parade, The Wall Street Journal and Newsweek's Master of the Obvious Howard Fineman declared Tom DeLay dead on arrival, a real and significant Democratic leadership still hasn't emerged long enough to grow some cajones, the preznut's commission on weapons of mass destruction found that America's spy agencies were "dead wrong" in most of their judgments about Saddam Hussein's WMD capabilities - and just about everywhere else in this shrinking world, including Afghanistan, either Dubya or members of his immediate family were being hunted down like a pack of rabid animals before they could sink their fangs into another uninfected creature or constituency.

Karl Rove and Karen "Man Hands" Hughes, in the mean time, flew back up to the Big House for a series of late night strategy sessions to consider the alternatives along with Dubya, which all seemed to be growing bleaker with each passing morning and evening news cycle. Chimpy from Crawford was still hunkered down in the Oval Office with spent Jim Beam bottles and a few bad intentions and some choice words for his predecessors' paintings, too distressed to venture close to the Briefing Room and cursing the worm that had already started to turn on his presidency from blowing every bit of politcal capital he once had, which he foolishly brandished like a loaded 12-gauge in the salad days of his November re-election, by rolling the dice on a braindead woman in Brother Jeb's home state of the damned, a place filled with steroid-addicted rednecks looking for skull sessions with trailer trash degenerates proud and eager to serve them.

Some have called this outrageous episode a microcosm of our time. That a standing president would gamble everything on the fate of one tug of the feeding tube from deceased speaks volumes about his arrogance and otherwise good fortune. But Dubya had to win this battle with the courts and our Constitution, it was argued amongst the religious fanatics. Even now - after having issued edict after canon followed by dictum through the legal pad and hollow squak box that has become Karl Rove - he still needs his right wing base to articulate a position that clearly stands on the wrong side of his addictive need to control the ebb and flow of our collective morality ... just as he did with WMD, Saddam Hussein and the Saudi Royal Family. It's a deprived sickness worse than black tar heroin. Out of one side of his mouth Dubya will dig deep into all the reasons why we should put Arabs (pronounced Ay-rabs) on a magical mystery tour of Uzbekistan's best and most lethal torture huts - and so what if a few of them die during the funhouse ride - then on the other side of the morality scale, this corrupt and freakish hellhole of an administration spikes yet another few testosterone shots of greed and outrage and revenge ... then settles its gunsights on a perverse cocktail of homophobia, quasi-military fetishes for destruction at any cost and taking that dip into a rank and wretched conservative sewer known as the culture of life.

The rest of the somewhat free world just laughed, but the religious fundamentalists are clearly not amused. They are, after all, the reason why Dubya got the nod on the second go-round - and if the Constitution got in the way, so what? Laws are meant to be broken, and anyone who complained about it was probably a socialist anyway. They could be villified through the cable TV cuisinart once the boys and girls at FOX and MSNBC and CNN secured the White House talking points. And in the meantime there were enough religious maniacs to clutter the airwaves and carpet bomb the secular view on things. For them it was the only Godly thing to do.

Or at least that's how it was justified, for the moment - but in reality, once the message and its intention were stripped down to its bare essence, it was just another moronic white-knuckle form of terrorism that appeared on the nightly news about as terrible as anything normally blamed on Osama Bin Laden or masked insurgents or Chechen rebels invading a school.

Innocent people were beaten down and had their reputations shredded forever. Whole towns were so bitterly divided over it that the terrorists gathered in churches on Sundays after having been energized by their preznut and outlaw Congress, who have distracted the rest of us long enough to write even more checks on the National Treasury like it's their own overdrawn personal bank account.

It has been political arrogance delivered at such a polished level that even party warhorses like John Danforth are no longer biting their tongues. The letter sent to the preznut from the "Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction" has been largely seen as a universal indictment on American interests in Iraq and around the world.

"We conclude that the Intelligence Community was dead wrong in almost all of its pre-war judgments about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. This was a major intelligence failure. Its principal causes were the Intelligence Community's inability to collect good information about Iraq's WMD programs, serious errors in analyzing what information it could gather, and a failure to make clear just how much of its analysis was based on assumptions, rather than good evidence. On a matter of this importance, we simply cannot afford failures of this magnitude."

Not even Ted Koppel could take it anymore. When he gave his closing thought on "Nightline" the other night he delivered the issue into a clear and blinding light - but the nation of fundies and beserk Jesus freaks were still reefed on that Holy Ghost power, dismissing the sanest newsman in the business as nothing less than leftist pinko commie swine.

"What bothers me is when politics and ideology get in the way of logic and consistency."

Indeed. And with that last take, Koppel announced that he was leaving the network at the end of December. And who could blame him? Why go on and play traffic cop to a news media overriden by dehumanizing voices of outrage and trivialization?

Why play along with the game at all?

We are getting into dangerous territory here, because we are still talking about a preznut who treats the entire country like it is his personal joystick to every gutter kink and ephemeral pleasure, after all. Dubya uses the military and our intelligence agencies like bathroom tissue and he pisses all over your future and your kids' future every time he declares "somebody will be left behind" or "we gotta major crisis on our hands" if nothing is done but jiffy-quick ... and he routinely hands over the regulatory keys to the most generous lobbies and most abusive corporate pimps after a single phone call that is always met with a home-spun Mayberry RFD "come on down and tell us how you want it sized, scoped and press released, partner."

Washington is no place for rank amateurs these days. Not even Don King could deal with the venality of it all. Take my word on it, Sparky - I've seen heartless and calculating thieves in my lifetime, and this crowd should be sent to a small and vacant island with no government of any kind and no extradition treaties where all the inhabitants would be found absolutely guilty, if only an impartial jury could be impanelled, and no crime against the state or humanity is regarded as too heinous to obtain acceptance into the club.

High-stakes freaks like David Duke and Manuel Noriega and John Poindexter and "Redrum" Rumsfeld would be sipping pina coladas poolside, along with Gordon Liddy and Oliver North and Tommy Franks, shacking up together as one big delusional and happy family in a single - albeit monstrous - Mandalay Bay-like existence all tucked away forever, with a fully stocked open bar and satellite TV beaming Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous reruns and overflowing platters of tropical fruit and Don Ho yodelling Tiny Bubbles behind the Hawaiian organ and hordes of tanned topless servants lapping the grease and shards of meat from their fat fingers while others comb at the thin hairs on the backs of their necks, insulating them from all the struggles of the outside world.

Meanwhile, the rest of us are going to witness some very strange doings on the TV sets stateside in the next few weeks. It should lead to some fits of very strange behavior on both sides of the aisle while the factions start choosing up sides ... But one thing is for sure: Tom DeLay will be sent off to the Cayman Islands in the dead of night before Ken Lay can roll over on him and the party loyalists are worried that the Bugman may outsmart all of them and make a run for Iceland with their stash of campaign contributions for 2008.

As for what it means to Dubya and his brother Fredo, there is no word yet from above on how all of this should play out - at least not until Dick Cheney can sort out that little problem with the Inspector General way in advance of the inquisition, and when the trail needs sweeping only Number Two knows where the bodies are buried. But these kinds of things always come together in due time.