The Last Vestiges of Decency:

The Rude Pundit would like to imagine the last days of Dick Cheney, in horrible, awful pain, seizing up every once in a while from the stilted beating of his twisting heart. There's Cheney, sweaty-faced, lying in his hospital bed, hoping for the sweet kiss of death to end this goddamn feeling of being knifed over and over and over. But even more than the physical pain, there's the fever visions, the constant parade of corpses that haunt him, from Iraq, from Panama, from Somalia, from Palestine, from America. Cheney can't breathe for the stench of the charred flesh, the open wounds, the rot and decay. And worst of all is the knowledge that this is what he has wrought, this Dick, this Cheney. The hate he has fomented in the name of profit, the war, the violence, returned to him thousands of times over in the staring eyes of all the corpses in that room. He just wants to die, get it over with, move on to his just reward or darkness, either of which would be preferrable to this constant nightmare, this pain, this hell that passes for life. And when he finally is slipping his mortal coil, when the monitor flatlines, the Rude Pundit wants to be there, with the defibrillator paddles, to electrocute his heart back to beating, over and over, so that Cheney has to go on living with the visions and the stink and the agony.



Last night was Karl Rove's wet dream. One could imagine Bush's top "advisor," who looks disturbingly like Peter Lorre's child killer in M. Yeah, man, there was Rove, on Fox "News" last night, smirkin' like he was jackin' off below the camera's view.



What a load of hate last night was. What a load of lies. Zell Miller, the Jed Clampett of anger, screeched like a backwoods rapist fucking Ned Beatty in his condemnation of John Kerry and his own party. But Miller, who should be dismissed as the hollow scarecrow of a man he is, couldn't bring himself down, ranting like a crazed homeless guy beggin' fer nickels on the streets of Statesboro with Chris Matthews on MSNBC. It was all just a warm-up for Cheney.



If you've ever read "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" by the Puritan preacher Jonathan Edwards, you probably had a ringing fundamentalist voice in your head speaking the words. But the thing about Edwards is that he actually spoke very calmly about the fires of Hell burning you to a crisp. It's even more frightening when the preacher sounds rational and reasonable. That's what Cheney offered last night: a vision of doom and violence masked with the rotting face of rationality, like these things are self-evident. Standing on the stage, smirking like he was drinking the blood of an oil-stained Iraqi child, Cheney basked in the glow of the crowd, choreographed to chant "Flip-flop" when John Kerry's record was attacked. Cheney, the calm Grand Poobah of cynical exploitation of government, one of the great liars ever to hold high office, stood and hated with Zen-like stillness. And the crowd went wild, booing and hooting. The demonstrable proof of a world where God either doesn't exist or stays out of human efforts is that the center of Madison Square Garden didn't open up and Dick Cheney was not sucked down into screaming hell.



Fuck it. The Rude Pundit is tired of this bullshit and bile in his throat. We should have rioted on Sunday. We should have broke through the barricades and set shit on fire. Because the awful true face of the Republican party was revealed last night. And it's time to release the hounds.



Tonight, on his Bridge to Babylon set, Bush will speak. We've had the bad cop. Get ready for the good cop.