President George W. Perseus

Workin’ the Base.

The tale of our modern Perseus – like the Greek myth -- began in tragedy, and then swaggered to life in an arrogant boast.

After 9/11, this is what we were promised:

“"We're smoking them out. They're running. And now we're going to bring them to justice. I also said we'll use whatever means necessary to achieve that objective -- and that's exactly what we're going to do."
- President George W. Bush, November, 2001

And a year later, the promise was renewed:

“We're going to hunt them down one at a time…it doesn't matter where they hide, as we work with our friends we will find them and bring them to justice.”
- President George W. Bush, November, 2002

Unfortunately the war that history demanded that Bush fight was not the war he desperately wanted to fight, and so the quest became a tricky one: how in the world could a war against a militant, medieval Islamic terrorist state be forged into a tool that would let him wage a preemptive war against an oil-rich, modern, secular Arab dictatorship that was in no way whatsoever involved in the attacks against the United States?

Well of course there would have to be a LOT of lying -- a task for which his Administration was uniquely well-equipped – but there had to be a plan. A strategery. An overarching vision-thing.

Which is when I believe Karl Rove must have dredged up the Myth of Perseus, dropped it into the Ratfuck Blender, and extracted the useful elements.

The parallels are striking.

First, dubious alliances were forged

with strangers working their own agendas.


Then off to Hades, where the nymphs

gave Perseus a Helmet of Invisibility so that his actions might go undetected.


And Hermes added a Sword of the purest Adamant

so Perseus could keep America cut up and divided.

Now according to myth, the original Perseus actually caught and killed the Gorgon, whose gaze was so badass that anyone who looked at her would be turned to stone. This was done by sneaking up on the beast while she slept, and using a mirrored shield on loan from Athena to avoid looking Medusa directly in the eye.

Of course our modern Perseus is both a liar and a coward, and give the utterly blind, prostrate obedience that his base shows him, there was no reason in the world why he ever needed to actually keep his promises to the American people.

Instead, Bush went the myth one better by staying 100% true to the pattern of his entire life -- flaking off and never actually accomplishing the job he promised he would do -- and yet still flashing the head of the Gorgon during every speech to kill every question and smother every hint of dissent.

In this case, the Medusa is far more valuable on the loose than dead and decapitated, and thanks to the miracle of Space Age Technology he can affix the image of the head of the Gorgon...




...to his Shield...



...and appropriate it’s terrible power...

...for his own, bestial purposes.


It worked like a charm.

Literally.

As advertised, the talisman turned an already pussy-whipped Press to Stone Phillips and the already-faltering Opposition to simpering jelly and, for a time, Bush bestrode the globe unmolested, brandishing this ultimate political weapon, annihilating even the slightest whisper of dissent.

His cronies were ecstatic.

The GOP are, after all, a degenerate and perverse lot. Hateful, narrow-minded bigots crowd one wing of the Party, and conscienceless, Mammon-slut, "Fuck Everyone But Me" corporatists pack the other, so they have always needed weird, Rube Goldbergish kinds of contraptions to keep their ghoulish natures hidden from view.

The base – none-to-bright to begin with – nonetheless needs to be kept scared-stupid at all times. Commies worked very well back in the day. Feminists. The ACLU. Queers. And negroes are the evergreen Electoral Cornucopia down in the Slave States; a bottomless ATM machine that always gives up the love as long as you can remember the right, racist-coded PIN number (Hint: s-t-a-t-e-s r-i-g-h-t-s or a-f-f-i-r-m-a-t-i-v-e a-c-t-i-o-n usually does the trick).

But it was always dodgy, and the domino mask of Jovial Reagan keeps slipping off to reveal the face of Sociopath DeLay and Deathgod Dobson.

Now, with Gorgon Shield to hide behind, they could ram through one fucknut crazy item on their Lifetime Wish List after another. From drilling in ANWR to cutting taxes for billionaires during a time of massive, structural national debt, the Magic Shield made it all possible.

Of course, the problem with Magical Fear is that, like the Peruvian Marching Powder that I’m quite sure the President doesn’t do by the ounce off of Condi’s perky ass, once you start needing it to cope with the day-to-day, the more you have to jam up your nose just get back to normal.

The more you depend on keeping people in a state Primal Dread to deliver even mundane, legislative victories, the more massive the doses need to be, and like the good old days of reckless bingeing and then charging the havoc off on Daddy’s AMEX card and Rolodex, Dubya has charged the entire tab for his reckless, failed Presidency on Fear.

Dubya is Terrorism's greatest beneficiary, and he has learned it’s lessons so well that I would argue that he is not a War President at all: that he is, by definition, our first Terrorist President.

A terrorist is one who uses the threat of random violence to stampede people to where they would not ordinarily go. One who governs by manipulating fear or by intimidation.

One who uses terror as a political weapon, for political ends.

One who, say, jacks up the Terrorist Threat Level every time his poll numbers started to tank. One who, oh, I don’t know...deploys his Vice President to warn the populace that if you vote the wrong way, your children might die.

What is that but generating and manipulating a pervasive, raw and mindless fear for partisan gain?

What is that but terrorism?

Unfortunately for our modern Perseus, the well is not bottomless, the line of credit is not endless, and people slowly start to get numb and catch on to the pattern; that this dry-drunk freak screams “9/11” every time he shits his pants in public.

And then came the Storm of the Century, blowing Bicycle-Chief’s Magic Shield right out of his hand and sweeping it into the Gulf of Mexico.

And what did we find squatting behind it, all pasty and maggoty and blinking in the unaccustomed daylight?

Cronies. Hacks. Racists. Incompetents. Whores. Incompetent whores. War profiteers. More racists. Christopaths. Monarchists. Quislings. Spinners.

In other words, the same old Confederated Enemies of the People the GOP has always been, now just grown vastly slower, dumber, fatter and more arrogant from glutting themselves like ticks to the point of bursting on the blood and treasure of the American people during their four-year holiday from scrutiny by the press and the leadership of Democratic Party.

Because Bush literally has no other qualification whatsoever to be President, and because there is nothing left in the Rove Bag of Tricks to cover up what a tawdry, embarrassing and unmitigated disaster this Administration has become, Bush gamely waded out into the filthy waters to retrieve his one-and-only weapon from the ruins of New Orleans. Then he hoisted it up once again – rancid and moldy, with a huge ‘gator bite chomped out of one side -- to tried to get the magic going one more time.

To halt and flash-petrify the tsunami of criticism of his bungling and fatal ineptitude mid-sentence, as it was in the glorious Days of Old when no one dared whisper that the Emperor was Naked.

And Stupid.

And Callous.

And possibly Nuts.

But the Magic cannot last, and Katrina blew the Gorgon Shield to splinters, so when the President limped to the podium in front of the Republican Jewish Coalition and actually had the nerve to say this ...

Wednesday, September 21, 2005
President George W. Bush's remarks to the Republican Jewish Coalition
...
You know, something we -- I've been thinking a lot about how America has responded, and it's clear to me that Americans value human life, and value every person as important. And that stands in stark contrast, by the way, to the terrorists we have to deal with. You see, we look at the destruction caused by Katrina, and our hearts break. They're the kind of people who look at Katrina and wish they had caused it. We're in a war against these people. It's a war on terror. These are evil men who target the suffering. They killed 3,000 people on September the 11th, 2001. And they've continued to kill. See, sometimes we forget about the evil deeds of these people. They've killed in Madrid, and Istanbul, and Baghdad, and Bali, and London, and Sharm el-Sheikh, and Jerusalem, and Tel Aviv. Around the world they continue to kill.

They have a strategy. They want to achieve certain objectives. They want to break our will. They want the United States of America and other freedom-loving nations to retreat from the world. Why? Because they want safe haven. They want to topple government. Just think Taliban in Afghanistan. That's their vision. And we can't let them do that. We have a solemn duty as a United States government to protect the American people from harm.

...
Iraq is the central battlefront in the war on terror.
...

...he didn’t sound confident or tough or strong.

He sounded so deeply detached from Reality that it actually scared me.

As Lawrence O’Donnell said in slightly kinder words, the Leader of the Free World sounded so obviously like a child desperately flailing for his only security blanket that it was chilling to watch.

In no way did our modern Perseus sound even slightly heroic or commanding.

Instead he sounded genuinely insane.


(Incidently, this also happens to be my 300th post. Strictly for my own peculiar reasons, I set myself a target several weeks ago of hitting the 300 mark by the time this blog was six months old, and have now beaten that by five days. So good for me.)