Savoir-faire

The Trumpian ticket is savoir-faire, with some je ne sais quoi rooted in his status as an ubermensch. It's hard to capture the guy in normal parlance and lingo, literalism being inadequate to describe the personality stream. The man is a human tweet cascade, a waterfall of incoherent nothingness.

What Does It Mean...

when the crazy people start saying that something is crazy? It means big trouble, I bet. Suddenly, Republicans are discovering crazy, the ones that aren't crazy.

But they were crazy, before, the ones who are saying it's crazy now. How do we know they, the supposed ex-crazies, aren't still crazy? I need a break from this. 

And we all need a break, from Republicans. It's time for their time in the wilderness. Let them be gone. Think of how good it could be, like with the secession of Texas.

It's the stuff that dreams are made of.

Their Kampf

Republicans have such a struggle. They have to make America great again. They have to take back the country. They have to save America from the horror of Obamacare and so on.

It's a struggle to see who gets to own the struggle, who is aggrieved. The Koch boys and their allies, it would seem, are aggrieved. They are plagued by wealth and immense power. 

Koch daddy was insane and a sadist but that's how you get to be a patriot, sucking off the surrogate daddy/state to even it up somehow. And they have to endure the idiot Democrats.

Then they have to struggle against the horrible, poor slobs trying to make it off the nanny-state, not that those people have a grievance, such as being screwed sideways.

The rich and their allies have got the kampf between their teeth and they run with it. They need it. They have to have enemies and, so, worst case, they make them up. 

How handy it is to be able to make stuff up, whenever you want.

No Worries, Muchachos

The North Carolina Tea-Party legislature is bringing Mexican economics to America. Historically, in Mexico, relatively few families of mostly Spanish descent control everything.

Taxes on inheritance and capital gains are nothing or minimal and sales taxes are high, about 16%, so it's incredibly regressive. Tea Partiers, look it up: regressive. Sorry to use big words.

Of course, the position of the state's governing elite, who were bought on the cheap (at) by a discount chain called Rose's, is that it will somehow work out, as with all tax cuts.

Through a miracle and magical thinking cutting taxes on the rich benefits everyone and the overall economy and doesn't create deficits, a Republican perpetual motion machine.

And, if you believe in that...

Trump for Resident

I've decided it's okay if Donald Trump continues to live in the country. But that's as far as I can go. I think it's a fair compromise.

His Way

There are things about which reasonable people can't disagree because it challenges the whole notion that life is intelligible. Surely one of these is that the theme song for Donald Trump's inauguration, as president, must be My Way, with lyrics customized for the occasion. Sing it, Sir!

So what if it sucks 

I don't give a damn

I built it myself

It's all glitz and glam...

Apostle Posse

It puzzles me that Ted Cruz and people like him, whose identities are all tied up in Christianity, worry so much about the morality of other people and so little about their own.

They must feel certain about their salvation. Where they get that certainty and the role of moral enforcer from the Bible I don't know. Look at Judas, the great betrayer of Christ. 

There is no Apostle posse. No one judges Judas and chases him around. Cruz and his fellow Christians should worry a lot more about themselves and lot less about others. 

And they should cut it out with the self-righteousness, criticism and the moral enforcer stuff. Whatever was good enough for the Apostles should be good enough for them. 

Rebuke Cruz

I see that the National Rebuke has endorsed Ted Cruz. Hooray, I say, and good for them. In the Reagan days they could maintain they weren't crazy.

Ronnie was just a boy with a dream. And good hair. And a nice, slightly ruddy, complexion. Reagan had a dream. Really, a delusion. He lived in a dream.

But Ted Cruz is a nightmare. It will catch up with them, the National Rebuke crowd. They will be seen for what they are, our national nut-balls.

Conservatives, I Understand

Conservatives, I understand. You think that something is different now. You think that poor people are now poor because they are immoral and incompetent. 

You think that long ago, let's say, in Jesus's day, it was different because there was scarcity. There weren't enough resources to go around. Poverty was unavoidable.

But we're awash in resources now and only inferior people are poor. Why don't you just say so. It's okay to be mean. You can be smug, self-satisfied assholes. 

I say it's okay but don't pretend you're anything else. Then we can fight it out with you fairly. Which we will, I tell you, but stop lying. Embrace the contempt. 

It suits you.

Personnel Problems

Everyone knows how the bad stuff usually gets done. The people at the top, who order it or set it in motion, are insulated by their distance from the implementation. Their hands seem clean.

The implementers don't feel responsible because they're following orders or falling in line with the intent of the higher-ups. This way horrible things can happen and no one feels responsible.

The Night They Drove Old D.C. Down

It would seem that the Southerners finally have their revenge. They have taken over America and made it more like the Confederacy, that distorted state, than anyone would have thought possible. 

Privilege and property are everything now. The blue-bloods, the old Republican elites, are at last wondering what they got into bed with but it's too late. The racist, bigot-crazies have taken over.

Bonfire of the Vanities

Involuntarily I sometimes have an image of myself as having appeared, dream-like, at a huge bonfire not only apparently commemorating but resignedly celebrating the end of our American culture, whatever it was in the first place.

I wonder if it ever really existed. I can't reconcile what we are now with what I thought we were previously. There's plenty of beer at the bonfire and it's so big it doesn't present as an event, where the crowd has some cohesion, but as a spectacle.

Someone throws a chair on the fire. It seems to represent the sadness and futility of trying to make something decent out of life. If we Americans can fail the way we have it means humanity's problems aren't circumstantial, at root, but inherent in us, our kind.

That's sad but it's a pure, species corollary to the sadness any normal person feels about their own mortality and the utter weirdness of contrasting the importance of your existence to yourself with the incomprehensible extent of our actual inconsequence.

I've always found that awkward awareness lightening and liberating. All the irritating, everyday crap becomes nothing. It all seems like nothing. So now I'm trying to feel that way about our country and species, that it was destined to end and that it's not a big deal.

Live and Let Die

Here we have the conservative and, especially, Trumpian vision for America: they live and they let everyone else die. They'll help the dying along, in fact.

EMERGENCY!

I recall telling one of my neighbors, who is a chemical-phobe, that she needed to make a decision about the Bermuda Grass increasingly infiltrating her vegetable garden.

It would be all or nothing. She needed to attack it or it would take over the garden and destroy it, turning it into a useless monoculture. She eventually used an herbicide. 

It's an emergency, I had to say, to try to get her to understand. It isn't going away and it will mean the end of the garden. Complacency won't cut it. Cooperation is capitulation. Compromise is concession.

Now, THIS IS OUR EMERGENCY MOMENT.

The sirens are going off. The bombs rain down. The enemy is upon us. We need Neo-con d-Con. Roundup for Republicans. Roach motels for Rubios. Agent Orange for O'Reilly. 

We need to crush Rush. I tell you, people, this is it. It is our defining time. We will be remembered for our inaction and incompetence, as it stands. Doing nothing is not acceptable, blundering inexcusable.

It is complicity. It's unpleasant, I know, to take up the fight. Nobody wants to do it but the problem is not going away and it won't fix itself. The conservative menace must be stopped.

Graham, Negative

Lindsey Graham, at last, has come out against Donald Trump and Ted Cruz. He's shocked, he says, shocked to learn that there's gaming going on in the place. Your winnings, sir. 

Add him to the list. Right, yes, it's only been going on, flagrantly, for forty years or more. You live by the crazy, you die by the crazy. Republicans have fanned the crazy flames for decades.

Using leaf blowers, or something. Where were you, Lindsey, when all the insanity went on? What did you do to stop it? George W. Bush! Ring a bell? Who's sorry now. It's too damn late, for us all.

Terabithia? Is That Anywhere Near Terre Haute?

It's way too tempting to think that imaginary worlds are neatly walled off from reality. Everyone's world is to some extent imagined. It can be imagined in a healthy and optimistic way, with some grounding in reality, or be a playground for vanity and insecurity and fear.

The cool thing about accepting the creative aspect of one's outlook is that it can then be managed. If it's creative and subjective and chosen it might as well be productive and pleasant. The way things are seen, in other words, isn't about establishing objective truth. 

There is no objective truth. Not at our level of discernment. It's all muddled. So the way things are viewed is more a matter of belief and expectation. Seeing nastiness has little to do with discerning it but a lot to do with its creation, helping to will it into existence. 

Ronald Reagan's imagined world was pleasant. But it was exclusive. It was pleasant only for his clan of insiders. It was contemptuous of everyone else. That's the world Republicans have been creating by believing it already existed: judgmental, segregated and polarized. 

It's an unpleasant place and we're stuck in it. It's a sham world created by power-hungry people.

What a Boner!

What a boner Donald Trump must have at this point. And Hillary, too. It's all about them, their egos and ambitions. What about us?

Bernie really cares about us, more so than anyone in a long time. That's what I think. No boner there. It's actually a job, the presidency.

It's not an audition to be an icon. It's not supposed to be. No hard-on, maybe, but Bernie's got a bigger dick than those others.

Bernie's a man.

People's Strengths and Weaknesses...

are different aspects of the same attributes.

Ad Maiorem Mei Gloriam

One problem when someone identifies with God is that their interests become indistinct from God's. As a group evangelicals excel at this. 

But Antonin Scalia did it as well. The result is moral blindness. Such a person can do all kinds of harm and never look back. That is Scalia's legacy. 

He promoted himself and no one else. 

A Paler Shade of White

The Republican Party is the pale-faced party and getting paler all the time, ensuring the inevitability of their own demise.

But what will be left? Not much, probably. They are too envious to care. They would rather leave nothing than lose control.

Tarzan-sans

Get ready for the loin-cloths. Trump's, of course, will be shiny-gold and snazzy as hell and encrusted with jewels and have his name on it, front and back. These white guys were parachuted in among the heathen as infants and, of course, their genetic excellence and superiority are now manifest and they are swinging through the trees while the rest of us dance around a fire chanting gibberish and living in the sub-prime squalor we deserve.

Thank God for those white men, in the forest canopy above, giving us a glimpse of their goodness as we see them from the depths of our inferiority, looking up into their furry... Oh, shit! TM-something! And, you know, I've got a bunch of earthy friends down here, in the forest-slums and, well.... You can't help but notice. No wonder Trump and his team are greasing the trees. The last thing they want is to have to compete with us.

Welcome to Hell

The "prosperity gospel" movement, apart from the heresy, is an unbelievable insult to common sense and decency. Its proponents believe that God showers good things on the faithful.

And they have found their man, their shot at legitimacy and the big time. It's Donald Trump. You see, the way to be sure of God's favor is when someone is rich and it can't possibly be by merit.

Then it must be by God. That's the simple reasoning. Enter Donald. He isn't good. He isn't competent. He isn't anything. He's an utterly worthless person. He must have been favored by God. 

The Nice Nazi

Hearing anybody eulogize Antonin Scalia makes me ill. He was a Nazi. He was a person for whom ideas took precedence over people.

He believed in authority. He believed in strength. He believed in himself. In that last he was a fascist in a non-fascist role, a purveyor of personality.

He believed in a national personality conveyed in the Constitution and known to him to the point of identification, so he was yet another racist.

His sense of rightness came from a quality rooted in his being, that is, not from thinking rightly. He was a prophet interpreting a religious text.

He was smart as hell but it was used only to serve his masters, the lords of the flat-earth, who reckon that what you see is what there is. 

So he was a literalist, the Constitution's equivalent of Biblical fundamentalists, destroyers of meaning. He was all law and no spirit. 

He was a fucking monster. 

Booger Nights

If we are doomed to a Trump presidency I at least want to make some money on it. It's what he would do. It's what Republicans have been doing for years. 

I'll make a movie about the man. It will be a mash-up of Boogie Nights and Saturday Night Fever, what with the swagger and the hair. No doubt Trump will play himself.

Disco Donald--there you have it, a fool for dancing and he's well financially endowed. He's in slick clothes with moves to match. Always the center of attention, our little Donnie. 

Another Brick in the Wall

Cruz. Rubio. Trump. 

What does it matter.

They're all bricks in a wall.

Restoring Our Strength

My theme song for Bernie Sanders is Let's Work Together. Here's a version:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?list=RDwGGW4IezbC4&params=OAI%253D&v=wGGW4IezbC4

La Scalia

For some symbolic reason I always pictured Antonin Scalia in a frumpy, older wool sweater with some pilling and with his hair somewhat unkempt and staticky and with a little crustiness at the corners of his mouth, and with floating dust and smoke visible around him in soft, streaming light--a vision of fuzz and scuzz in dicey resolution contrasting with the sharpness of his mind. That latter is acknowledged by everyone. Now in the vision he is dead on a wooden floor. Everything else is the same.

I can't see him differently. The guy had a problem. The mental acuity was not counterbalanced but made possible by moral and scholarly frumpiness--an imperative to see things as they weren't--because his kind of consistency and exactitude can only exist in an abstract and imaginary world. He had to believe in certainty where it wasn't, in clarity where it isn't and in definitive answers where they aren't. I guess it was out of fear and a Manichean mindset, that it's authority or chaos. 

It's a bit right-brain and creative and more traditionally feminine, in the way that Catholicism is all of these, and less strictly scientific and analytical. His analyses were Jesuitical and Socratic. He could defend anything, and did, because his reason was in the service of the greater glory of something else and not independent and accountable. This is all well enough but it's un-American. It's rationalization. It's validity depends wholly on the initial insight. It depends on the man himself.

And he was wrong.

Nothingness. Oblivion. Ah, Hope.

Donald Trump. Ted Cruz. Ah, Bernie Sanders.

Streams of Conservative Consciousness

There are identifiable elements in the new conservativism. The money and privilege faction is one. Another is comprised of evangelical Christians and their allies. A third is authoritarian.

The money crowd thinks they were born better, the evangelicals that they were pre-chosen, and the authoritarians that the world embodies justice--that power is goodness.

What they have in common is racism. 

Texas. It's a Mess.

Please, please, please. Secede!

If Ever I Should Leave You

The most terrifying thing about the leading three candidates for the presidential nomination, on the Republican side, is that Donald Trump is the least terrifying. 

If there was ever a time to leave the United States this is it. 

The Munchurian Candidate

Ted Cruz is back on top, a brainwashed psychopath intent on the realization of his vision of the United States as a proto-communist dictatorship. How so? For Cruz the class struggle is subsumed to the Darwinian struggle for survival, the class struggle being but one, corporate aspect of the brutal, state-of-nature situation into which God has plunged humanity for His inscrutable reasons. 

It's inscrutable because of the inconsistency of the position that life is a punishment and a test with a known outcome. Cruz and his cabal of conservative, neo-confederate followers and other adherents to Calvinist precepts are believers in predestination, a disavowal of free will. And, yet, they soldier-on as though it matters, as though there are indeterminate outcomes in a determinate world, and as though God's omnipotence somehow falls short in the endowing of free will.

Cruz was brainwashed at a young age and is unaware of the goals of his programmers, the overthrow of the U. S. government in favor of a totalitarian, religious state. His unconscious mind, abetted by conscious elements, rebels on his behalf in trying to assert free will with a cry for attention by fabricating national ailments, made-up self-diagnoses, such as homosexual gangrene, health insurance leprosy and debt dementia. It's all proxy and projection, an indirect and encoded message.

The moral decay imputed to society is his, but his megalomania and ambition have resulted in misdiagnosis on a national scale. In fact, this behavior is a disorder in itself, a syndrome, and is creating other maladies through its strength and its virulence, the neurosis having infected an entire political party and overwhelmed several Southern states, including Texas, his home. His family is deeply implicated in the delusion and its compulsion and will surely never recover. 

The fear of censure and retribution will ensure it even if there should be some glimpse of reality, the family members having witnessed, more so than anyone, the father's determination and violent, persecutory fantasy life, as seen in his interest in the death penalty, deportation and other punitive measures. He is determined that we become his national family--he the papa figure, the president, and we the national hostage-children. What a fate in a democracy!

The American Way

You can feel it coming. Maybe you can see it now. These huge corporations--Google, Facebook, Amazon and the like--are going to start shoving stuff down our throats.

Once they are unassailable, or think they are, they will begin to take pieces out of us every minute. They aren't risk-takers. They are averse to risk. They want to print money. 

It's the American Way.

Don't Do the Math

I am an acolyte. I'm a follower. When I was 16 or so, a callow dude, I discovered E. F. Schumacher. Small is Beautiful, a quietly humane manifesto, made sense to me.

After six or so educationally catastrophic years I studied Classics and Economics in college, then on to graduate school in Econ. It was all about math and "efficiency."

What the fuck is efficiency? It's something economists could claim made their field less of a soft science, is all. They wanted more mojo, a bigger academic dick.

I switched back to the study of Classics. There was an amorphous standard there, rigorously applied: honesty. They wanted to be scholarly. They aspired to be Einsteins.

They aspired to be Einsteins of the humanities, to have a clear and inclusive vision, to encounter everything on its own terms and without prejudice. It was humane.

It made it impossible to take people out of the equation, to turn them into objects and abstractions and have them fall through the cracks, to deprive them of their humanity.

This is Schumacher. He applied this moral imperative to Economics. Okay, the math is okay, but the context is everything. Without a humane context the math is meaningless.

Outed, and at the End of a Rope

I have to out myself. I may want D. T. for president. I may want him instead of H. R. C. Give me B. S. but he doesn't have a chance. I want B. S. with 'roid rage.

D. T., as president, might do anything, even some good. He does what he wants. When has he not? We know the R.'s will wreck-on and the D.'s do nothing.

So, instead of predictable crap, why not a case of the D. T.'s?

Hate-a-thon

The Evangelical love of hatred came through to me again reading an article about Ted Cruz and the "will to power," which someone said had replaced persuasion as the evangelicals' means.

They are simply determined to have their way and so now democracy takes a fall and freedom falters. It's like ISIS and the Taliban, religious extremists intent on running everything no matter what.

Life, the mess we're stuck in, is despised. Life is contemptible in relation to the afterlife and God's perfection. That's their standard. Evangelicals reject the doctrine of the incarnation, the love of creation. 

Hate is their inspiration and their motivation. They choose death and destruction and they reject God in rejecting God's creation. They want annihilation and despise the physical world for its imperfection.

Unresponsive

For non-rich Americans their experience in life is more often of pushing buttons and having nothing happen, buttons on things they are supposed to own.

The government is unresponsive. The workplace is unresponsive. Educational systems are unresponsive. Their healthcare is increasingly unresponsive.

Again, we say, thank you, Republican assholes.

Alternazon

We need an alternative to Amazon without the evil and world-domination. And Facebook. And, now, Google. We need Costcos to their Walmarts, better options.

And that's to say nothing of our government, where we also need an un-evil option with an anti-domination stipulation. Does big have to be evil, I wonder?

The Face of Republicanism

I can't do it here, but I envision a "Hall of Hate-Fame" or "Greatest Shits" or some biographical compendium of the people who have destroyed America. 

There would be categories and honors and lists of notable achievements, including bankruptings, killings, squandered inheritances and personal gain-for-pain.

The inheritances are not all tangible. The pain is always someone else's. The efficiency of the destruction is the most important criterion. It was a big boat to sink.

"College Republicans" is my favorite category. Never have so many owed so much to so few, but in a bad way: Lee Atwater, Karl Rove, Grover Norquist and Jack Abramoff.

Phil and Wendy Gramm have their own "lifetime of failure" nook, where the stunning persistence of obviously failed economic doctrines is detailed. What an accomplishment!

Fox News funds a museum. There, the face of Republicanism is Roger Ailes--fat, pasty-white, rich and hideous to behold--and not the hench-persons he has out front.

Cheap Shot, Inc.

Of all the loathsome characters on the right James O'Keefe is special. He's a professional asshole, an incredible prick and Joe McCarthy in knee pants. He makes you wish that the God he claims to serve would come down and judge him.

Guilty! 

The Cold War Turned Inwards

I have a new friend and I've been trying to understand her. It was so easy as kids, to understand your friends, I suppose because we all wore our characters like clothes. 

It was right there to see. It sure isn't later on. There's layers and evolution and the changing of someone's personality in relation to circumstances and experiences. 

And there's concealment, depth and the reserve that comes with time. Growing up as I did, with kids whose parents grew up with my parents, the context helped. 

There is still a little leap of faith needed, more so as you get older. What I mean is that, as adults, you have to let go of the desire to contain people and to resort to simple characterizations. You have to just believe in them at some point and hope for the best.

It's not only presumptuous to try to comprehend someone but it's impossible. If you don't let that desire go you get distortion, as with the Republicans.

Their need for security and certainty means they make stuff up. They fill the gaps with a leap of non-faith. They default to suspicion, as they did with the commies. 

And now the suspicion is turned on us. They don't think that Democrats are really Americans. They think we're the enemy. They want us gone.

What's Your Shtick?

My brain works on analogy. It's my own uncertainty principle in operation. I understand things, to the extent that I do, through semblence and through stories. 

I kind of think that life is a shtick, that real authenticity is always below the surface, and that it isn't just that the invented part matters but that invention is all there is.

All-Air Band

Air drums. I play air drums. Pretty damn well, if I do say so. I'm looking for mates for my all-air band.

Check It at the Door

Enjoy the Republican debates. And check your conscience at the door.

I Want You To Want It So Badly You Don't Care About Anything Else

There's a story there. I'll tell it to you sometime.

Any Inhuman Heart

I know someone who was in a position to rub elbows with Dick Cheney before he ran the world. They once argued about some issue at an otherwise abandoned table after a dinner in Georgetown. Cheney had the consistency that comes from mania, there on display. 

Reality would be brought to heel, in Cheney's hands, and made to conform to his disposition and predisposition. For a militarist like Cheney there was something missing, though, the reality-check of facing the consequences of your actions and opinions, life in the field. 

It isn't fair. In the latter World War projectiles like Patton, MacArthur and LeMay found their places at a level lower than strategy, though their insane fantasies were later publicly known. Thank God there were people who understood enough to rein them in and use them.

With Cheney it wasn't so. There can still be a reckoning on his catastrophic effects and, not just to pick on Dick, there are others like him waiting in line, politicians, policy and financial people. Crazies have their place. It's essential to see that they stay there.

Vic(ar)ious(ness)

What means Donald Trump? What means the meanness?

Again, I say, I don't like discontinuities. Nothing comes from nothing. How is it that the most fortunate people ever, we Americans, can be seduced by meanness? How can we be so resentful?

Our lives feel inauthentic and unrooted, no doubt, and that is the undercurrent expressing itself through attachment to oversize embodiments of the fear created by the feelings of vulnerability.

The vulnerability is imaginary, a hallucination. It's the result of a lack of self-knowledge, the fear of ourselves, so we're out there seeking ourselves in all the wrong places, through identification with iconic characters.

Donald Trump, for example, represents our worst suspicions about our subliminal selves and our inadequacy. Through him we vicariously live out our anger, fear and resentment. We are trying to encounter ourselves.

And we do. It's pathetic and unseemly, a country-club culture trying to redefine privilege as a right, betraying the legacy of the relatively responsible people who preceded us and who knew about work and adversity.

Shitcatchers

Did you see the movie Songcatcher, with Janet McTeer and Aidan Quinn? It's true, that they found the most primitive, original and unspoiled versions of Scots-Irish songs anywhere in the isolated American mountains.

It applies to other things. We think that we're better than Europe--and better than everybody. We think that we avoided all the baggage of the conflicts culminating there in the horror of mechanized warfare and genocide. 

We didn't. We're just behind. The baggage, a nightmare of unreason and religious fanaticism and Calvinist extremism, has overtaken us. We're late bloomers. Witness the racists crawling out of their hiding places.

If anyone cares they can find the most primitive versions of Puritanism and doctrinal absolutism and sectarian resentment right here, transplanted and growing vigorously in the hills and hollers and everywhere else.

Trapped

Oh, Lord. Enjoying an escape from reality only works when you live in reality. But when you live in a dream world--a nightmare, really--it's no fun having the same stuff thrown at you in your leisure.

That's how I felt watching a new installment this evening of Sherlock. Reality: Moriarty walks up and shoots Sherlock dead. Really, dead. How about that for a story line? It's a little low on suspense. 

Reality: Republicans destroy the economy, create inconceivable deficits and debt and make the middle class go away. But the story line, the plot, is all the opposite: they are sane and fiscally responsible.

They are patriots. They create jobs. They love "America." What the hell is "America"? There's not a viable Republican representing real American ideals, traditions and Constitutional practices. 

And yet they go on and on about the Constitution, as though they own the franchise, the fuckers. Their heroes live like Sherlock, with the inevitability of a good outcome, by dint of innate excellence.

We've seen their excellence. Excellence at incompetence. Excellence at lying, cheating and stealing. Excellence at a complete lack of virtue. Write it up, Dr. Watson, into a good story. Reality sucks.

House, but On Fire

I've been watching the hospital drama House on Netflix. Here we have another, cranky, heroic white man saving lives left and right. Someone will build a statue some day, blah, blah, blah. 

Typically, though, the way of the white boys is that of George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, honkey screw-ups with a sure sense of their own competence and self-worth.

They deserve incarceration and censure but it would at least be good to see a national, global or cosmic consensus on their collective, unparalleled failure. Man, did they kill a lot of people.

Bold white boys need to be more circumspect. There's no need for more heroic, fictional characters reassuring them of their superiority. It results in a kind of bottomless moral blindness.

The House of Bush still thinks it will be proved right. History already proves them wrong but "instant forgetting" is their friend. That, and the conservative rewrite of history, protect them.