I have been accused by more than one of my readers of hating Our Sainted President. Let me just state for the record that I do NOT hate Shrub. Frankly, he's not worth expending that much emotional capital on. You want hate? Check this out:
I hate Dubya. This morning, as I was driving to work, I was listening to a story on NPR about the whole "yellowcake uranium" fiasco, and as they played a clip of him making the State of the Union speech, and I found myself shouting at the radio "You lying motherfucking sack of shit!" at the top of my lungs.
Now, Brian is a pretty level-headed sort. His political rants are really rather few and far between, but this is representative of what I am seeing and hearing more and more of out there. Die-hard Republicans may be loath to admit this (yes, denial really IS more than a river in Egypt), but Shrub has exposed himself as a liar, a manipulator, and a rather ham-handed conventional politician. Normally, I wouldn't be so upset by this sort of thing, except that Shrub has defined his political persona by wrapping himself in faith, piety, and rectitude. I can handle a lot of things, but hypocrisy of this sort makes me sick.
I'm not about to postulate that a Democratic President would never have done these things. Lying is a universally recognized political trait. That doesn't make it right, but it's the nature of the beast. Yes, Bill Clinton lied, but no one died because of his prevarications.
There is a lot of anger out there over this issue. Republicans will no doubt attempt to gloss it over as much ado about nothing. However, if Shrub can't manage to address his lack of honesty with more dexterity than he has managed thus far, November 2004 may not turn out to be the slam dunk it appeared to be just a few short months ago.
This could become very interesting very quickly....
