Fat Karl

finishes the job.

These are surely the times that try men’s souls…

…unless of course you are a Republican, in which case your soul will stonewall and shred documents until it is hauled away by the FBI, at which point Bush’ll pardon it out of federal custody. Which is why in his Soul, a Conservative can lounge and giggle and pray to his Deathgod while every good thing about his country bursts into flames all around him.

Because, in the end, this is what they REALLY wanted. I mean, they must want to live in a nation that is divided and weak, broken and despised. A place with an alcoholic buffoon for a leader and liars. Traitors and thieves as his Praetorian Guard.

Think about it.

I live in a city that remade itself after a gotham-killing fire into something much greater and grander than it had ever been before. A city that reversed the flow of a major river before the invention of the internal combustion engine because if it wanted to grow (and not have raw waste backing up into the drinking water), it had to.

Sure, after a year it needed some tweaking…

We have landed American citizens on the Moon, and it seems like we lob a new set of tinkertoys at the outer planets every other week.

Those are endeavors that took genuine, sustained effort.

The price of D-Day was real blood and real tears, and island hopping in the Pacific wasn’t for the timid and the weak. As Edward R. Murrow famously said, “We are not descended from fearful men.”

Except the Republican Senate.

They are sickening cowards, one and all.

Because right now, our nation is trapped in a dreadful and unnecessary and ruinous war, visited on us by bad men with depraved motives. Those are the bare-bones of it: the only theory of the crime that even remotely fits the facts.

But hey, I might be wrong!

There might be some completely benign explanation as to why George Bush has been catastrophically wrong about every single fucking detail about this war. And as to why everyone who tried to warn him got horse-headed. Why everyone complicit in this historic meta-uber-clusterfuck has been awarded medals and pensioned off. And why every fuckup breaks in the direction of making Dick Cheney’s gang of looters vastly richer than the dreams of Croesus.

Maybe there’s some OTHER explanation for why they outed a spy and then smashed the equipment necessary to find out why they outed the spy.

Maybe it’s all just a merry mixup. Maybe Ricky will finally let Lucy join the band and we’ll all finally live lives of perfect harmony.

Maybe, maybe, maybe…but why isn’t it at least worth checking into?

Treason? Plunder? Negligent homicide in an illegal war? Secret prisons? Torture?

What we need to remember is the obvious – what Harry Reid reminded us of, and what many Dems have been militating for even though the cameras refuse to point in their direction. The question of, “Why isn’t this important to the GOP Senate? Why doesn’t John McCain care about torture? Why doesn’t Lincoln Chafee care about blowing a spy’s cover? Why doesn’t Arlen Specter care about treason?”

What is not clear is the exact depth and breadth of the crimes against humanity and the Constitution that the Bush WH has committed. What is beyond dispute is something has gone horribly wrong in this country, and the GOP are bending every oar and spending every nickel not on finding and fixing the problem, but by denying, denigrating and distracting.

What is also beyond dispute is the level of effort that would be required to get the ball rolling. The GOP Senate would not have to reverse a mighty river, or rebuild a major city, or split the atom.

Six of them – one tenth of them – mere have to stand up and insist that these are serious matters that need immediate investigation.

That’s all. Stand up on principle and firmly demand that events of this magnitude certainly rise to the same level of gravity as Clinton peccadilloes? Of steroids in baseball?

They choose not to act because they are cowards, and by their cowardice they tell the world that the GOP senate says Yes! to torture and lies, to treason and theft.

There is no “good” angle or cross-eyed 3-D, pixel puzzle from which to this Administration can any longer be viewed as anything but a disaster. No special loge or balcony or Indiana Jones map room in which, on a certain day, from a specific line-of-sight, the tragedy which the Bush White House inflicts on our country every single day suddenly jumps into a wholly new perspective that makes their treason and criminality make any kind of sense.

It no longer matters which end of the telescope you look down. Close-up, the GOP is a virus – a Constitutional Wasting Disease -- that gets stronger and happier the more it hobbles and weakens or Nation. From far away, they are a headless thing blaring and rampaging across the moral landscape, stomping compassion and integrity and intelligence to shards and splinters in the name of God.

But the day will come in a year or two or five when this will all be hauled out into the open air, because the simple atmospheric pressure of Reality itself will not abide it being kept buried beneath the bodies of dead soldiers forever.

And on that day, the GOP Senate will be called to answer for why it conspicuously abdicated its most basic, Constitutional duty. Why a mere six of them didn’t have to balls to stand up for the Truth. Why they let Liberty be taken into the alley by the Bush gang to be beaten and raped while in the next room they debated athletes shooting themselves in their asses with chemical cocktails that help them hit a little ball 30 feet further.

Act now, and maybe save yourself and your GOP. Act now, because you and you alone have the power to act. The sworn duty to act.

Refuse, and you tell the world that this it the nation you really want. Refuse, and you actively choose to keep us a nation that is divided and weak, broken and despised. A place with an alcoholic buffoon for a leader and liars. Traitors and thieves as his Praetorian Guard.

Refuse, and be branded forever what half of us already know you to be: party of crave, wormy, bitches. Moral Pygmies who clawed and cheated and sucked a lot of Klansman and Christopath dick for 40 years to cobble together a majority, and once they got it, categorically refused to even look into the most catastrophic disaster in modern American history.

Refuse, and in five years, the question candidates are going to be dodging like Bush avoiding military service will be this:

“Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Republican Party?”