I'm sorry but this is just too damn good

Bughouse Bedlam
by James Wolcott

The Terri Schiavo soap opera, with Senator Frist guest-starring in the role of Dr. Bob and unveiling the uncanny ability to make a long-distance telepathic diagnosis without using his mind, shows yet again how sentimentality and brutality are the Doublemint twins of American culture, ripe for exploitation. The crocodile tears over Terri Schiavo from veteran crocodiles in the Congress (and professional sob-sisters like Peggy Noonan) flood the airwaves while Judge Greer in Florida receives death threats, the hospice is condemned as a concentration camp, and Michael Schiavo is demonized.

I don't want to hear any cultural virtucrat ever again work up a lot of flatulent thunder about 50 Cent or The Game or gangsta rap when the biggest thug around is a middle-aged white man who swaggers through the House as majority leader, making his own rules, punishing his enemies, and using his power and position to lash out against a private citizen with a sneering bullying not seen since Roy Cohn rotted away. I speak of course of the Bugman Thugman. A man who uses an insecticide inhaler to psych himself up to trash his opponents and defile the rules that don't apply to an ubermensch with slush funds pouring out of his enema bag. A man who would wheel Terry Schiavo to home plate for the Washington Nationals home opener if he thought there was any political upside to it.

So dynamic, so forceful, of Bush to interrupt his weekend off to sign this phony bill the Congress rammed through. On Sept 11, he didn't pry himself from his schoolroom chair as thousands died in the WTC because he didn't want to perturb the kiddies, but for this he bolts into action with lightning hooves. I realize it's unpatriotic, perhaps even unmasculine, to concern oneself with what the rest of the world thinks (since we won WWII and all), but just imagine how hilarious Europe, Russia, Asia, the Mideast, and the penguins find this latest American spaz-out, and how horrified they must be at how the beacon of freedom and democracy has become a lashing loony bin.

As China quietly outmaneuvers us everywhere.