It’s an odd time for a bleeding heart to hit the blogging world, even one in a big hat.
I mean, so much has been accomplished in the last year–Tom Delay has been trundled off to his post-congressional hootenanny, where, one presumes, he’ll get to throw back a few with the lobbyists, glorying in past pork like a hog-farmer on his monthly bath night. Scooter Libby scooted off to the hoosegow. Bill "Cat Killer" Frist has left the building, one hopes to start a new video-doctoring practice, having done such a bang-up job diagnosing poor Terri Schiavo. We can only wish Denny Hastert had moved on to the dessert bar, but at least he doesn’t have a seat at the adult table anymore.
Much of worth has gone down. But there are some central facts which have not changed. Most glaring, of course, is that beady-eyed bubble boy inhabiting the West Wing. He’s got the most terrifying form of intelligence possible. I don’t buy that he’s smart, but rather that he possesses the low-grade dastardly cunning of the belligerently ignorant. I first became acquainted with that strain of thought when I was a teacher of Freshman English, a scarring time I can only look back upon with the aid of particularly rosy glasses, and even those merely keep it from overtly traumatizing my psyche. ("Many people throughout history have lived lives from their earliest days to their final resting places," they would write.)
I came to believe that my worst students (all except one or two a semester) were not dumb, but rather entirely and happily unencumbered by meaningful thought, sort of a-intelligent. They were on the one hand innocent as squirrels, but on the other hand maddeningly guilty of a dim belligerence. It was as if they exuded some kind of energy field in which the electrical impulses of thought were not physically able to jump the gap between neurons.
I hold that our boy king, he of the 30 percent approval (has this 30 been diagnosed by Frist yet?), possesses just that belligerence. He thinks he’s a great guy. That he’s not so great at the whole president gig, however, means a lot of death has been visited upon the world. And that sucks.
To blog now is not, one hopes, an exercise in futility. Those Democratic congressional oversight bulldogs John Conyers and Henry Waxman may be on the brink of becoming the best geeky but horribly effective duo since Hall and Oates. And they both have moustaches.
The Neanderthal ways (with apologies to any Neanderthals who may yet be extant, tapping, perhaps, upon a VIC-20 somewhere near Lascaux) of this administration must be watched, and must be countered. They did, after all, just use the effectiveness of the EPA’s lead standards to say, "Hey, we’re nearly lead-free! We can fill up the joint with lead, people! Deregulate!" More of such truck will follow.
I therefore wade in among the blogging hordes to add to the cacophony, if not perhaps the quality, of the debate. Strike up the bagpipes.
