Ark?

We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Ark!

Because according the GOP Meteorological Department, it will never, ever, ever rain again.

File this under: Lonely are the Depraved.

I’d like to be a pure, good man and not mock at the misfortunes of others, but I’m just not built that well.

So I’ll cop to the ignoble sentiments, and then the sermon.

First, it is simply tragic in the oldest, Greekest sense of that word that it took back-to-back catastrophes of genuinely Biblical Proportions to begin to sandblast away the Magic Teflon Underoos that have so ably protected President Cuckoobananas from anything remotely resembling scrutiny by anyone in his own party or in the press. That it took a wrecking war and a crippling storm to take a final, round-housing two-by-four to the skulls of the transcendentally stupid Red State Fucknuts to get them to even begin notice that the Nice Jesus-Luvin’ Man they gave the keys to was driving their double-wide’s right off the fucking cliff.

Damn. If only they had had some kind of warning that this might happen.

Some hint.

Just some inkling...

So now we find ourselves hemorrhaging blood into the deserts of Iraq while our treasure is looted by the hacks and liars and criminals that put us there, all via what is now very clearly a tissue of lies invented for the express purpose of pimping our righteous grief and walking us – tear-blind and still-stunned – into a slaughterhouse we were promised would be a cakewalk.

And as if the lies that dropped us into Hell were not enough of an insult to our nation, it turns out the men who were leading us who were not outright liars, were inept to the point of criminality.

So we stand like the Roman Army stranded in at the foot of Masada, screaming at the enemy to come down and fight the only kind of war we know how to win, enraged that they just lob shit on our heads and laugh at us, and acutely aware that what was touted as the “dead ender” denouement to this clusterfuck is obviously the main event – an event for which we were disastrously unprepared. And that we are losing. Badly. And our real enemies are taking copious notes.

Every day, the Bush War manufactures a hundred new terrorists and metastasizes them, and every day the Bush Presidency scares the countries that used to be our friends. Showing them that, yes, we actually are stupid enough to let a dry-drunk halfwit helm the last remaining superpower through dark and dangerous waters.

That is, when he’s not on vacation.

And once he has proven his incompetence beyond any reasonably doubt, having run the Ship of State up onto one reef after another, we absolutely show our sticky ass to the world by re-electing him, 51/49.

And then came The Flood.

And the fools and cowards and racists who mocked the Ark of Government – called it Evil and wasteful, Liberal and bleeding-hearted -- and demanded that it be pulled down, sold off and the profits divvied up into beer and pin money had the fucking nerve to turn right around and demand to know where the ship was that would float them off to safety when the rains fell.

And it is cold comfort, but I believe it is time to say it – again and again and again – until the furry, little ears of the chittering, inbred Red State fuckers bleed.

We. Told. You. So.

Holy FUCK did we ever tell you so.

The arrival of Halley’s Comet is less predictable than were the serial disasters that the Bush Presidency has inflicted on us. And we still have three years left on this Ship of Fools.

Way to go, dickheads!

We. Told. You. So.

You don’t put boobs in charge of Great Enterprises.

We. Told. You. So.

You don’t put chucklehead in charge of Big Shit.

We. Told. You. So.

Go to any corporation in American, pull any working man or woman out from their cubicle or off the shop floor and ask them this question: “You put a spoiled, half-bright trustmonkey in the corner office and give him live ammo, and what do you think is going to happen?”

They know exactly what'll happen, because most people who actually work for a living have lived through that scenario at least once.

The answer will always, always be the same.

He will no-doubt-about-it fuck things up.

It's not even a question, and the pattern of his pathology never varies.

He’ll drive out the smart people who might question his ludicrous schemes and make him look stupid. He’ll pack high-paying management jobs with cronies and his fellow circle-jerking buds from back at dear old Chugga Case-a Stoli. He’ll bleed the place white, and occasionally feed an underling to the wolves to cover up his crimes.

And once he and his carrion-bird cronies have picked the place clean and busted the business completely out, they’ll grab their Platinum Parachutes, hit the silk, and leave the poor fucks who haven’t been fired yet holding a fistful of I.O.U.’s.

Well check, check and fucking check: so far the Bicycle Chief is dead on schedule.

And the thing is...

We. Told. You. So.

It is almost enough to temp to the Dark Side. Honestly, after the all the pictures and all the stories coming our of the Gulf Coast has washed over me for a good ten days, an evil, little voice piped up in my head and said, “Let them rot.”

Not by any stretch of the imagination do I mean the residents of NOLA. Not the drowning or the dying or the abandoned.

Not them.

Instead I could not help but notice how hurricane after hurricane rolls over Red States, from Texas to Florida.

I couldn’t help but remember that it is already the tax dollars confiscated from the hard-working men and women of the Blue States and Socialistically redistributed to the Loser Red States that props up their backwards economies, illiterate WalMart Confederate populations and their hateful Fundy Cults. That without Welfare from the Hated Yankee States, the States Formerly Known as Slaveholding would collapse into the Third World dictatorships and pestholes that they always wanted to be.

If ever a swath of states absolutely BEGGED to be written off as a bad debt, it’s the Confederate South. The roots of so much that is cancerously wrong with this country come straight out of the poisonous legacy of Dixie, and if I thought that pulling the plug on the mutant children of Jefferson Davis in the name of State’s Rights, Secession or just finally-kicking-these-fuckers-to-the-curb common sense would solve our problems, I’d drop my alias and petition for it coast-to-coast tomorrow.

But life isn’t that easy.

We’re too intermingled, and the poorest and the weakest would suffer the most, and Paulo Freire reminds us, “Washing one’s hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral.”

And since the foundational pillar of the Modern GOP is Fuck Everyone But Me, the care of the least of these – our fellow men/our fellow citizens – falls to us Liberals, wherever they may live.

Iraq and Katrina have shown the true degenerate face of the Republican Party, and the only ones who can still defend it are the retarded, the Fundamentalist, the hirelings and the depraved, so of necessity rather that by design, the age of Compassionate Progressivism must begin.

And in this fight, no one gets to be neutral any more. This time everybody needs to be out on the field, or have a note from their Mommy explaining why they can’t suit up.

If you are one of the millions and millions of Americans who has declined to get involved in the business of governing your own country – who rocks back and forth on the thumb you keep permanently jammed up your ass and disdain the political arena because it’s all so unpleasant and no one’s a Saint...fuck you.

Pick up a newspaper; the price tag for your lazy, self-indulgent, self-rationalizing apathy is featured on the front page every day.

If you are one of the literally dozens of Greens or LaRouchies, Libertarians or Naderites who pooh-pooh a major party because they aren’t sufficiently Utopian, or they don’t hew with sufficient vigor to your One Issue, Play Time Is Over.

The Majors are calling and it’s time to step up or take up a different sport.

(Unless you are Ralph “Not a dime’s worth of difference between the Democrats and Republicans” Nader himself, in which I invite you to do the honorable thing and seppuku yourself with the gear shift of a Chevy* Corvair.)

Don’t get me wrong: I love movement and grassroots politics. Most political theory – with the exception of theocracy or fascism – has at least the germ of an idea that I believe merits consideration. Socialists are right in that, left unchecked, Capitalism will inevitably destroy the Earth for the short term gain of a select few. Capitalists are right in that individual initiative and creativity creates wealth, and a government that actively punishes wealth-creation is stupid and ultimately slides towards tyrannical.

I get it.

The problem is, the ideologically pure ingots stamped out of these Idea Factories are not practical building blocks for governing huge, complex and interdependent nations in a vast, dangerous and interdependent world. So pack up your ideas, leave the bullshit at the door and come help take over a Party that might actually be able to win something.

And as to the Republicans, if you still will not look the consequences of your own “success” in the eye and call the horror your party has visited on us all by its true name, your soul is lost and you, at long last, stand for nothing, and stand as nothing but an enemy of the nation you claim to love.

It’s time to pick a side, America.

And the bleachers are closed.

*(Corrected due to alert readers catching my error. Because sometimes being a fast-typing autodidact means you have to be an auto-redact too.)