Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos,

Lay the smack down.

And ace Hubris Reporter LowerManhattanite is there to bring it to us Live!

OK, I’d been noodling around with a Three Fates essay for a bit.

Then I went over to Steve Gilliard’s house where commenter LowerManhattanite had dropped the following into the comment section of this post.

Then I gathered every scrap of evidence that I had ever been working on anything remotely similar, took it into the alley, burned it and toasted yummy-yummy mashmallows on the embers.

Made 'smores, I did, and destroyed the evidence, because what LM did with it can’t be touched.

Here is what he wrote…

Not to get too swept up in the religion the day after Christmas, but...well...

"The Lord moves in mysterious ways"

There is an "orange-just-picked-from-a-rain-washed-tree" delicious irony in what has flipped the Drunken Monkey's fortunes so drastically in the last year. People make much of the "Rovian" strategy of turning your opponent's strength into a weakness, and one of Bush's alleged strengths (as his people like to put out there) is his surrounding himself with supposedly strong women, thus creating a "nanny shield" of protection around himself. From "Quaker Oats Guy" Mama, to dewy-eyed Condi, to Fraü Blucher Hughes, the Bush machine loves to trumpet his confidence in/dependence on these retrograde wet nurses.

This, they declare is one of his strengths.

So...God looks down, and in his infinite wisdom, sense of irony, and penchant for kicking the lead's *ss in the third act, says, "Wouldn't it be funny (apologies to the late Allen Funt) if I were to take this idiot's purported 'strength' and make it the thing which ultimately busts him in his grille? Yeah...that would be funny!"

And with a twitch of a celestial pinky, there appeared three female apparitions...

Terri Schiavo and Cindy Sheehan and Katrina.

Schiavo to me was the blow to the solar plexus that caused Bush to double over, wind rushing from his body, gut clenched and eyes blinking back white spirals of pain.

"Sweet Jesus! What the f*ck was that!", he must have thought after the blow. "Could my craven flight back from Crawford to sign off on this publicly reviled bill to interfere in a private family matter via the lumpy, hairy hand of government have f*cked me up this much?"

Yeah. It did. It was the first public (mainstream media) acknowledgment of how beholden to the crazy fundie belief system he actually was. The various right-wing nut cases who rallied 'round Schiavo's essentialy soulless body embarrassed themselves and by dint of party and familial linkage exposed Bush as a dancer to the looney tunes they played. The polling on Schiavo was some of the first that showed a dramatic break between presidential iniatives and the public's opinion. There had been issues the American people had been iffy on, maybe split somewhat evenly, but the wide spread between approval for what the GOP was backing and what the public saw as how "l'affaire Schiavo" should go was staggering.

It wounded Bush badly and he covered up, held on and tried to dance out of the corner he was getting hammered by left hooks in. Winded, he managed to get out of the corner to steal a breath into his heaving chest. "Just two more minutes in the round! if I can just stay out of the way of the punches, I can-"

KA-POWWWWW!

In boxing, they say "The punch you see can stun you--but the punch you don't see is the one that'll really f*ck you up."

He never saw the uppercut named Cindy Sheehan shoot from his belly button, whistle through his pawing defense and crack him under his chin, snapping his head back so hard that the back of his noggin kissed the back of his neck--hard.

Sheehan was that random blow, a haymaker after a fusillade of jabs from the anti-war left that landed here and there, but mostly glanced off a vaselined brow and jaw. Sheehan was a single, brutal blow. A short, direct, point-a-to-point-b rocket to the chin--lifting him for a half-second and dropping him back on unsteady feet. Her directness, brazenness and solitary sense of purpose in confronting Bush totally confounded him. She "came inside" on him, daring to challenge him in his comfort zone--his tough-guy movie set of Crawford and dared him to step "off the set" and duke it out--minus stunt doubles and someone yelling "Cut!".

And guess what? The little p*ssy stayed in his trailer and wouldn't come out. Which embarassed him further. People started asking "Why does this seem to have his people in such a tizzy?" "Why doesn't he end this by just saying something to her?"

"Is he "gulp!", afraid of direct confrontation?"

When they ask that about a so-called "tough guy", guess what? His "tough guy" veneer has been worn the f*ck away--and he don't look so tough no more.

Uh-oh.

So now he's leaning on his opponent, suckin' wind, trying to tie up his pounding gloves, rabbit punching, head-butting and doing anything he can to last till the end of the round.

Sweat pours down his head, stinging his eyes. He blinks and the stinging continues. He raises a glove to wipe at his pained eyes, unsighted for a brief moment.

And then he hears a sound like a bomb falling from high above, a faint whistle in the wind and feels the puff of a cool breeze whip onto his face.

"What a strange feeling", he thinks for a second until he realizes it ain't a gentle breeze at all, but rather the preamble to an A-bomb of an overhand right--"in-f*cking-coming!"

Katrina.

He never "feels" the blow, pain-wise. He just hears a "whack" sound and the walls become the floor and ceiling, the floors and ceiling become the walls, little bells are ringing everywhere and a loud, two-ton, iron I-beam being bent sound fills his ears as the world flips the hell around.

He's on the canvas, rolling around because his feet can't seem to find the angle where the ground usually is.

"One--two--three--four..."

Katrina...that woman, was the ultimate instance of taking an opponent lightly. Bush thought he could waltz through simply not dealing with an almost Biblical calamity from which his taking some level of command or concern could have spared hundreds of thousands of American citizens serious physical and mental anguish. He never thought for so much as a second that turning an uncaring head to the least of us, could rile an unfathomable anger from the most of us. How do you know the overhand right that was Katrina knocked him on his *ss?

When Kanye West's knife-to-the-heart statement instead of provoking a boycott, screams for an apology, repudiation or the typical personal slam from the White House caused people to wonder if what he said had serious merit and prompted pundits to start asking the ugly questions about race and class in America. That's how you knew.

"Seven--eight--nine", he's up...wobbly...

Ding! End of the round. Saved by the bell. A groggy, head-whipped Bush stumbles into his corner and collapses on his stool as his "handlers" try to repair the damage.

"Sh*t! Where'd all these cuts come from? That Plame-shaped one over his eye--I can't stop it from bleeding!"

"His jaw is swelling. That Miers and Alito one-two f*cked him up. Gimme some topical to deaden this f*cker!"

"Uh-oh. Here comes the ref! Ohmigod! They're gonna see all that illegal NSA sh*t we stuffed in his gloves! We can't pull it out! We're f*cked! We're f*cked!"

So there he sits. On the stool between rounds, chest heaving, dead-armed and swollen-faced. Knees rubberized and feet unsure. Handlers working feverishly to get him ready to do--what in the next round? I dunno. Maybe they'll try to put some sh*t on his gloves to f*ck up the opponents vision--distract 'em. Gin up a terrorist attack or "foil" a bogus one? Who knows?

What we do know is that the bum has been staggered--"big time". He's been hurt badly. And how many fights have you seen where a pug who's been nearly KO'ed in the previous round fall like a termite-gobbled tree in the next round from one--perfectly--placed--bomb? Too many to mention. Too many. Bastard might not even make it off the stool in his corner. Stranger things have happened.

But in the end, it wasn't one woman who may have given him on that "one-way ticket to palooka-ville". It was in my mind, three.

How apt with the theatres filled with people sitting in awe at the rise, rampage and eventual fall from glory of a big, powerful monkey that the last line from the original film comes to mind. I paraphrase:

"Oh, no, it wasn't the dems. It was "Beauty" killed the Beast.

Funnier still, is how each of those fists-to-the-face Bush has taken from the three sisters of the whup-*ss convent came while the ignorant little sh*t was on vacation in Crawford.

Schiavo--he flies back to scawl a shaky, DT'ed "X" on legislation to suck up to the christofascists and winds up getting himself crucified.

Sheehan--he hides out in a hay-bale fort reading old copies of "Grit" to get his news while occasionally peering out and wincing at her still being outside there.

Katrina--hung out at Crawford an extra coupla days falling off Segways, leaving bits of skin on bike-trail rocks and clearing brush--copy and pasted from a computer at Pixar while a Great American city drowned.

Does bad sh*t just always happen while he's on vacation? Or is he on vacation so much that when bad sh*t happens, odds are he'll be on vacation?

God...your sense of irony is sooooooo delicious! Keep hammering the dumb bastard!

I would only like to add that I haven’t the slightest thing to add to this string of perfect pearls.