The Shank and the Beat Down: Two Approaches To Destroying George W. Bush:
Anyone who's spent time in a prison'll tell you: the best kind of shank is the one that's so sharp that you can get sliced by it and not know it until your intestines are bulging through the wound. Sure, sure, you can use a shank that punctures someone who's tryin' to punk you out, but it requires a helluva lot more force to do real damage. Nope, the razor-fine shank lets you cut some motherfucker just like you're walkin' by him. And then you are out of that area of the yard when said motherfucker feels a slight sting in his gut and looks down to see his guts.

When Bill Clinton went on This Week With George Stephanopoulos's Hair this past Sunday, the Big Dog used the razor shank like a blood artist on the Bush administration. One line in particular had a breathtaking undercurrent of viciousness and hatred, but stated in a way that seemed matter of fact, which, indeed, it was. When George Stephanopoulos's Hair asked Clinton about accusations of racism in the federal government's response to Hurricane Katrina, after listing his administration's accomplishments for black Americans, Clinton said, "[A]ll I can tell you is that what, when James Lee Witt ran FEMA, because he had been both a local official and a Federal official, he was always there early and we always thought about that, but we, both of us came out of environments with a disproportionate number of poor people."

Look at that fuckin' line. Look at how much is contained in that compact statement. Clinton says that he brought in experienced, highly-qualified people to do their jobs. And then he slices: it's about social class (or, as ever, "It's the economy, stupid"). See, Clinton and Witt knew that poor people would be affected mightily by disasters because they knew that poor people exist because, at some point in their lives, they were poor people. In other words, George W. Bush and his cronies are incompetent, elitist nitwits who understand fuck-all about the reality of poverty. It's fuckin' brilliant. As ever, the Rude Pundit says that he'd've blown Bill Clinton if the Big Dog had asked. And he'd've washed his spooge-encrusted clothes.

The rest of the interview is just as incisive about the failure of the Bush White House. On appointments to the Supreme Court, he calls the Republicans out for being the savage political Huns they are. When he was President, Clinton said, "Republicans knew that I wouldn't appoint somebody they wanted on the court. And they knew that I'd appointed judges that were not extreme left-wingers, that were more or less mainstream judges and were unquestionably qualified...The other thing is, there was no issue with my appointees of their refusal to release documents." Clinton asked Republicans to at least respect the institutions they didn't control, offering them respect in return. But, again, the Republican Party slipped into its Gingrich-driven miasma of hate and disemboweling of the body politic.

Fuck, just read the whole Clinton interview. Suck it down slowly like it's a bottle of vintage wine that you're drinking out of Riedel crystal glasses in front of a fireplace with John Legend or old Massive Attack on the iPod while your kindest lover is going down on you like a starving dog on a fresh bowl of Alpo. Imagine Clinton's good buddy George Bush the Less Dumb being told about the interview and going even more ashen and shaky as Barbara berates him for ever having soiled the Kennebunkport bed linens with such classless trailer trash. And then come, come, come, for such moments of pure pleasure are few and far between in this graceless world of ours.

Of course, some are far less subtle in their approach than Bill Clinton. Most of the Democratic Party is engaged in the beat down of the Bush administration. You know the beat down, where a whole posse of pissed off motherfuckers piles on, stompin' and punchin' and slammin' the shit out of someone when he's already on the ground. When you see a beat down under way, you can either walk away, aghast at the violence, jump in and get your own licks in, or, if you find out it's someone who deserves it, just smile and watch. Witness John Kerry's speech last night at Brown University.

Kerry's speech was the dull thump of the fist compared to Clinton's knife edge. It did its job, but it took far more effort to get the work done. To be sure, the speech, wordy in that priceless way that only John Kerry can be, was effective in laying out a case against the White House. Said Kerry: "[We're hearing] the steady clucking of Administration chickens coming home to roost. We wouldn't be hearing that sound if the people in Washington running our government had cared to listen in the past. They didn't listen to the Army Corps of Engineers when they insisted the levees be reinforced. They didn't listen to the countless experts who warned this exact disaster scenario would happen...They didn't listen to those of us who have long argued that our insane dependence on oil as our principle energy source, and our refusal to invest in more efficient engines, left us one big supply disruption away from skyrocketing gas prices that would ravage family pocketbooks, stall our economy, bankrupt airlines, and leave us even more dependent on foreign countries with deep pockets of petroleum." The laundry list of failed policies at the end of the speech is the gut punch, the stomp to the head, of Kerry's portion of the beat down.

Yep, the blows were landed, as they were in John Edwards' latest "No, Really, I'm Still Relevant" speech on poverty. But neither of them (nor Clinton) has been able to utter the word "lie" in any of its forms. Sure, they'll talk about failures, incompetence, and more, but that death blow of a term eludes their vocabularies.

Meanwhile, as the victim of a shanking or a beat down always does, all Bush can do is lie there, pissing himself, and say, "Oh, God, oh, God."