Coretta Scott King's funeral was a moving tribute to a great American. However, it was marred by the inappropriate and disgraceful intrusion of partisan politics. It was particularly irresponsible and graceless that a former President exploited the occasion to attack a sitting President.
President Carter has performed laudable humanitarian work in his post White House years. However, this was not one of his finest moments. It was a mean, petty performance unworthy of the office he once held. President Carter spoke as if he were an embittered diarist on a well-known left wing blog site.
Nonsense. Carter deftly drew a parallel between the COINTELPRO domestic spying that Martin Luther King dealt with the entire time he confronted the moral monsters of the South, and the more contemporaneous version run by the current gang of corrupt idiots. Bullwinkle has no problem with the wiretapping, see, because he just swallows the Rovian line that only al Qaeda are being spied upon.
Uh-huh. Pull the other one. What, exactly, has this administration been honest, forthright, or even correct about? Huh? Hmmm? One thing, besides the rather obvious "Muslim fanatics want to kill us". I mean, we'll give 'em that one, because frankly, the feeling's mutual. I wanted to kill the Taliban well before 9/11, but that's me.
But, you know, aside from that, what have the Bushies been right about, or trustworthy about? They've lied about everything, most of the time quite openly and defiantly.
What is deeply distressing is that the King funeral should have been a rare demonstration of national reconciliation and healing. It was a moment for a nation to mourn a patriot's passing and to celebrate the great contribution that she and her husband made to this nation. Instead, it will be remembered, in part, as just another episode in the increased political polarization in America.
Yeah well, the first volley was fired by Rev. Joseph Lowery, a contemporary of Dr. and Mrs. King. Take it up with him, Bullwinkle. Jimmy Carter just continued what Rev. Lowery started, quite correctly. If just one (1) member of the King family (aside from the whackjob niece from the Just Us Sunday club) wants to step forward and call foul, fine. Otherwise, everyone just have a nice tall glass of shut the fuck up.
It is hard to believe that Americans are not tiring of the cheap shots and political gamesmanship. If even a former President of the United States cannot restrain himself from misbehaving at a funeral in order to satisfy a partisan urge, what can we expect of the rest of our political class?
Democrats, in particular, must find a way to come to grips with their unrestrained Bush rage. A few years ago Republicans were similarly consumed by Clinton rage. A decent modicum of respect for the Office and the moment is in order. And a funeral is not a place to make partisan political points.
Sometimes, just sometimes, partisanship should be avoided and shunned.
At first blush, this appears to be an eminently sensible call for reason and decorum. But that's precisely what actually makes it the most deceptive, pernicious part of the piece -- and indeed, many of Bullwinkle's impassioned missives to the so-called lefty fever swamp. Bush, Cheney, and particularly Rove have deliberately cultivated the current conditions of political discourse. 9/11 paradoxically magnified and obscured this for a while, but it had already been going on for quite some time.
The Rovian political strategy has overtly cultivated the inherently fascist notion of conflating the imaginary persona of one "man" (Commander Codpiece, obviously) with the persistent myth of American exceptionalism. It is now to the point that no matter what Dear Leader and his henchmen do -- whether it's lying about spying on Americans, to lying about causes for war, to lying about budgetary matters, to having a shredding party of the Bush/Abramoff photos -- the faithful will look past it, either by somehow justifying, or habitually declaring it an invention of the librul media.
Moreover, this is the first time in quite some time that the poor boy-king has had to listen to any of his subjects extemporaneously. Too bad for him that Coretta Scott King's funeral wasn't pre-screened like some bullshit "town hall". This too is a dynamic that Rove and Bush chose to cultivate. They have specifically and deliberately taken great pains to minimize any and all public debate, or show of even the slightest disapproval of any of the manifold failed policy measures. It is not a coincidence that Mrs. King's funeral is indeed the only public occasion where Bush would have had to listen to any criticism at all, in a very long time.
Several months ago, I characterized this abject, pathetic, delusional relationship between Bush and his base as that of an abused wife enabling and excusing her husband's violent rages and outbursts. That was a rather inapt analogy; it's really more like how a lovestruck teenager sees her first Great Love. Like a ninth-grade girl pathetically mooning over the quarterback or some such, endlessly practicing how to write her name with his last name appended, fitting his name into every conversation, no matter how forced, etc. Such situations are almost always one-sided, almost always delusional, and almost always doomed to fail. The girl eventually matures and grows out of her infatuation -- or worse, the infatuation is actually a manifestation of a deeper psychological problem, and just gets transferred to the next hapless victim.
Which may be exactly where the Republican party and the conservative philosophy are headed. Clearly there is not even a shred of any intellectual integrity left -- they couldn't even successfully rig their own internal election for Bugman Replacement the other day, and it turns out that Rove is strongarming (read: blackmailing) his own party for loyalty on the wiretapping issue. True movement conservatives must be beside themselves, because these people are nothing but shameless hacks and thugs, pure and simple. The new acolytes of the unitary executive theory will be singing a much different hymn when a Democrat finally gains office, despite the best efforts of Diebold.
At any rate, once again this is what Bullwinkle continues to ignore -- this is a situation that Rove and his minions wanted. Well, they got it. As I've said many times before, I used to be a true ticket-splitter, voting for person and principle over party. No more. I want every single Rovian/Delayican out, right down to the media-flack ratfucks who help them peddle their bullshit. And until that happens, I simply will not vote for any Republican. I expect every Democrat to realize that they have been engaged in an all-out political war, that the Republicans declared no quarter long ago, and thus none should be given back to them.
The time for compromise and amicable patching-up is done. It has been made clear that there is simply no upside to reaching across the aisle. As long as a traitor is allowed to keep his security clearance and continue to run White House policy; as long as the nation's top law-enforcement person continues to support the edict of one little man over the law; as long as these chumps continue to pour blood and money down their rathole, I want every cheap shot that every Democrat can muster, at every opportunity. It's what they've been doing all along, and it's worked quite well for them.
No mercy. Fuck these people. Payback's a bitch, innit?
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