Sorry for the bloglessness, but MySpace has been lousy with spyware-and-trojan-downloading ads, totally screwing with my machine to the point where I have to spend an hour cleaning it off after being on MySpace for five minutes. If this keeps up my blog and the Metric Cheese Head and the Ptarmigan music pages will all be taken off and put on another Web site, 'cuz MySpace is absolutely fucking useless at the moment. (It's taken me almost two hours just to post this.)
Anyway, here's a letter I sent in to the increasingly conservative Providence Journal (motto should be "bringing Red State foolishness up North") about the perfect metaphor for the Bush Dysministration that Dick Cheney served up with a faceful of birdshot.
Far from being "tabloid-style" news, the Cheney shooting is a metaphor for the current administration's behavior.
Ignoring standard protocol (don't swing around, then shoot low!). Withholding information (who else could shoot somebody and get away with saying nothing for hours?). Feeling as if the rules everyone else must follow don't apply (ditto). Insisting on a lie, but later changing the story ("There was no beer! None! OK, we might have had some beer…"). Blaming the victim ("It's Harry's fault, the fool!"). What a disgusting display of weasel-like behavior we were treated to!
Accidents happen. In the scheme of things, the Cheney shooting isn't very serious. But, the accident per se is emphatically not the issue. The issue is that the lying, the incompetence, the stonewalling, the finger pointing—unacceptable in a citizen, triply so in a public official—makes for just another unremarkable day at 1600 Pennsylvania.
Imagine I told Mom I was going to the movies with friends, but instead went off into the woods to drink beer, and that she found out. Don't think for a second that I would have gotten away with saying: 1) I was actually at the movies; 2) there was no beer; 3) your sources are wrong; 4) she misheard me actually telling her I was going to the woods; 5) or that once I was in the woods, I thought it better to stay the course than cut and run.
I know my mother, a wise woman, would never have accepted such poor excuses from me when caught misbehaving as a child. So why on Earth do people accept it from this administration?
It's absolutely frightening that America has reached a point where the bleating of extremist partisans has so deranged the public's common sense that universal concepts like "lying is wrong" now need to be pointed out and explained.
Call it the Mom Test. If your Mom wouldn't buy that BS from you, then don't put it out in the public arena if you want respect from anyone besides partisan extremist freaks and gullible idiots. Since the Bush Dysministration has been painfully and obviously failing the Mom Test for years now, one can easily be led to think that public education is truly in crisis, and/or that lots of my fellow Americans simply weren't raised right.