“Jesus, W and Dale Earnhardt walk onto a cloud…”

Stop me if you’ve heard this one…

Regrettably, parental responsibilities caused me to miss Dumbleyou’s impromptu-ish press conference yesterday morning, and from the clips I’ve seen, it was a good one. From the old-school swagger ascending the podium to the loaded, pre-cooked “last question/no follow-ups” from an administration stooge at the end, this was vintage pre-Katrina W at his most finest.

When the stooge asked him what he thought about a political ad that had run in the New York Times a couple days before, the president expressed outrage at the idea of besmirching the honor of a courageous American military leader (in spite of his having benefited at the ballot box from a similar politically-motivated smearing of be-medaled Vietnam officer John Kerry in the last election) then added, “‘I felt like the ad was an attack, not only on General Petraeus but on the U.S. military.’” It was his classic “If the table is barking, then it must mean the elephants in the trees are blue” line of hooey, but the punditry ate it right up anyhow.

Of course Bush sounded stupid saying it, but he looked back in campaign mode – confident, cocky, condescending, speaking off the cuff with the gutsy bravado of General McArthur and the intellectual clarity of Lewis Carroll on crack. The impression that came across is of a man who no longer gives a shit. This is a guy who’s given up on the rest of this term and is actively looking ahead to knocking back brewskis with Jesus, Elvis and Dale Earnhardt on a cloud 50 years from now looking down on the mortal idiots who are only just then beginning to figure out what an awesome president he had been.

Boy, everybody but him sure is dumb.

Still, in terms of style, at least I didn’t feel bad for him. Still ashamed that this barely-literate rodeo clown is still our Chief Executive Officer, but not embarrassed for him the way I have been recently; floundering in flop sweat, his voice squeaking… is it wrong for me to have felt bad for Bush on a strictly human level, when he has done nothing that I can think of that would ever earn him such compassion? ... Well anyway, I didn’t feel embarrassed for him yesterday.

Yesterday, I felt embarrassed for the fucking Democratic Senators who wasted their whole day voting to officially condemn free speech.

Apparently, it wasn’t only the punditry who ate up Bush’s line about how criticizing a military man who has allowed himself to become the mouthpiece of a dishonest, secretive, incompetent administration is tantamount to lack of ‘support for the troops’ in the field. Apparently, so did 20+ Democratic United States senators, including Jim Webb, who ran for his Senate seat and won as a former military guy who had a son serving in Iraq.

Yesterday in Congress, our elected officials didn’t manage to get to a scheduled vote on a bill aiming to restore basic human rights and constitutional protections to hundreds of foreigners who are in perpetual detention without charges or trial, or another one relating to setting timelines for troop withdrawal from Iraq (which bill, predictably, just went down in flames as I type this).

No, yesterday, by a 72 to 25 vote, our elected reprehensibles – sorry, representatives – in the United States Senate only managed to pinch out one stinky little loaf, a meaningless piece of official puffery “to express the sense of the Senate that General David H. Petraeus, Commanding General, Multi-National Force-Iraq, deserves the full support of the Senate and strongly condemn personal attacks on the honor and integrity of General Petraeus.”

The fact that Republicans went along with such foolishness is predictable. God, guns and guts, that’s what they run on, and run to. They would gladly trample each other in heart-felt zeal to vote for a proclamation that the military’s feces officially isn’t malodorous. That’s their gig and I’ve always felt they’re welcome to it. (We just need fewer of them in elected office. We need their voice in the dialogue, but not necessarily their vote.)

Once again, it’s the feckless fucks of the Democratic party that piss me off. I don’t care if your goddamn state is redder than Tommy Chong’s eyes at a Grateful Dead concert, you don’t waste the time of ‘the world’s most deliberative body’ or some such nonsense with slaps on the wrist to expressions of free speech. And this wasn’t even a protest that turned ugly or some act of hate-related violence they were condemning, it was a newspaper ad. Not even a very clever newspaper ad (I’d been thinking of the ‘betray-us’ joke for ages and I’m sure so has everyone else).

A newspaper ad! If this isn’t a free speech issue I’ll eat my hat. And yet the Senate let the president distract them into a meaningless vote that dominated the news cycle for one more day, pushed back the Senate agenda by one more day, prolonged our involvement in Iraq by one more day.

Did any American servicemen or women die in Iraq yesterday? If they did, it was for the Senate’s right to mince and moan about a goddamn newspaper ad.

I think Barack Obama is the only one who got it right, by declining to vote because (and I’m paraphrasing here) “Are you fucking people crazy or what?”

So kudos to the president. Yesterday went to him. Maybe he’s right and we are all just incredibly stupid. And he didn’t have to wait 50 years to have that theory validated, either.