All Hail Dear Leader!

Wait a minute? You're…not…Dear Leader!?


I didn’t intend to conduct a non-scientific survey tonight: I just wanted a beer.

A friend of mine and I went out to talk work and history, women and politics and we ended up at a fairly (for Chicago) conservative-y sports bar; lotta fine young GOP cannibals in khaki and buzzcuts...and a lotta dirty looks when I might have used the words “Republican” and “douchebag” and “Cheney” and “lying cocksucker” kinda loudly.

Tempus fugited along rather faster than we expected, and 8:00 suddenly tolled, but with over 600,000 televisions, we could swing around and find The Big Speech on at least 20, and closed-captioned on five or six.

Had we been playing the Lying Republican Cocksucker drinking game – taking a shot every time 9/11 was invoked – we both would’ve been knee-walking hammered by the time the speech hit the eighth paragraph.

It was also fun and exciting to see how many words were blown in the type-along transcripts -- especially amazing given that the text of the speech was released in advance to the media and the internets, and GW isn’t exactly famous for his Churchillian riffing on the Big Speeches, 'cause he tends to "disassemble" quite a bit.

I mean, (if I remember correctly) the “softer Middle East” I can understand. And “Our messing in Iraq is clear” is OK, but what’s a “blexiter”?

We concluded that the speech was probably going fine, but closed-caption dingus was picking up what was actually going on inside Bush’s head.

A lot of people were watching. This was, after all, a Major Prime Time Address on a matter of Great National Importance, in a room that looked to me to be loosely packed with 1-A, draft-age Bushite males. So my pal and I, we were just starting to relax into the rhythm of it, such as it was, when the signal cut off.

Shit.

Not that this was anything other than Bush Campaign Stump Speech Number One, edited to take out all the “pause for incoherent, retard applause” stage direction, and reshod in slightly shinier 2005 shoes, but I had wanted to hear it (OK, perhaps for the same reason that W.C. Fields once said he read the Bible.)

Several of the teevees flickered, which was kind of weird and momentarily chilling, and then one of the barristas pulled down a HUGE white screen and fired up the projection box in the ceiling and I figured she was putting on the Major Prime Time Address of Great National Importance and I thought, “OK, well they may be kinda fascist-y here, but at least they take this seriously.”

Because it was, as I have said, a Major Prime Time blah blah blah.

Nah.

It was 8:15. And the NBA draft was on.

And every teevee, including the Very Big One, flickered a few more times, and all settled on it. And everyone just kept right on, and no one asked for any one of the 600,000 channels to be changed back to Bush and the Big Speech (And remember, this is Chicago, where we have no stake whatsoever in the NBA draft.)

We laughed, my friend and I, finished our beers, and left.

Iraq? War? Just another fucking rerun.

So I came home, not intending to be drawn in, but just had to know the score. Who was up and who was down, so I got on the internets and here’s where things stand:

First sentence, second paragraph: September 11 invoked.

Third Paragraph: September 11 invoked.

Fourth paragraph: “New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania” invoked.

Eighth paragraph: “Osama Bin Laden” invoked.

Twelfth paragraph: September 11 invoked.

37th paragraph: September 11 invoked.

First full sentence, second to last Paragraph: September 11 invoked.

How depressingly predictable.
How utterly damned this man is.
How completely he has failed us.

And stupid me, I foolishly decided to play the Lying Republican Cocksucker game while I read the speech at home, and as a Child of the Game, I felt honor-bound to strictly abide by the rules.

I am now completely blind.