The Jolly Rancher:
The Rude Pundit said it a couple of days ago, and he'll continue to say it: This is all just getting embarassing. Around the nation, the majority of Americans now cringe with gut-churning fear and shame whenever they hear George W. Bush speak. Indeed, localities are appealling to the federal government for emergency funds to deal with sewage overflows from all the vomit and diarrhea that an angst-ridden population is puking and shitting when Bush appears on the news. Because when one is filled with undirected rage, impotence, and futility, it's gonna take itself out on one's stomach lining and colon. And it's gonna burn, motherfuckers, oh, how it's gonna burn.

See, when Bush speaks, it's like watching the President of another country talk. "God," we think, in ever-increasing, staggeringly large, impeachment supportable numbers, "what a happy nation that man lives in; god, how we wish we lived there; oh, fuck, he's talkin' about here; oh, fuck me, we're fucked." When Bush talked briefly to reporters yesterday in his Idaho vacation away from his vacation "ranch," it was all jovial shit about how super-duper wonderful Iraq is in its splendiferous shiny new pseudo-Constitution; how, despite every bit of evidence to the contrary, he could say, "The fact that Iraq will have a democratic constitution that honors women's rights, the rights of minorities, is going to be an important change in the broader Middle East." Despite news reports that very day saying how the Sunnis have been excluded from the process, despite the outcry of Iraqi women, it's all great, greater, bestest.

Hey, you know what document guaranteed the rights of minorities and women in Iraq? The fuckin' constitution they had before we invaded, written in 1970. Not to get all Juan Cole here, but, like with disbanding the military, we had to toss everything with the Saddam taint into the demolition dump, thinkin' that it was easier to dig a new foundation in the rock and rubble than to build on what was there. It could have been easy: one just had to maybe be a little better than Saddam Hussein and follow through with the Provisional Constitution's guarantees of free speech, free assembly, and more, including Kurdish autonomy. 'Course, that document was also socialistic, codifying universal health care and education for all. But, shit, it was secular (if Baathist-heavy), a damn step or two better than what we're about to get.

Shit, though, who the fuck cares what we anti-war extremists think anyway. We who think the Iraq War is a mistake along the lines of waking up in your bed, after a bad speedball/acid trip, right next to a decapitated corpse with blood on your lips and a head in your hands and no idea how you got there, are just seeking to "empower terrorists," as Trent Duffy told reporters this week. Perhaps not, but we are sure feeling that dread of the coming horror in our nauseated bellies and smelling the fear emanating from our befouled toilets.

And the happy, daisy-skippin' President? After talkin' to reporters, he "may go for a bike ride," he hadn't made up his mind about fishing, just "kind of hanging loose, as they say." While hangin' the rest of us out to dry.