Buoy oh buoy

Heh. Apparently il chimp's partisans, in an effort to put a positive spin on the meltdown that was his debate performance, are describing him as 'buoyed' by the results of the last debate (note the Gulf Daily News story, which apparently gets the joke, and puts it in quotes)... this in the same day that they concede that yeah, okay, Kerry kicked his ugly little butt (this being my paraphrase) in all three encounters, pretty much...

But then again, maybe it's not spin. Maybe he actually is cheered by failure, for some twisted reason...

Would explain why he's smiling all the time, anyway... Hell, anyone who gets off on fucking up big time would probably go off like they were doing Prozac, coke, and meth all at once just walking downwind of the oval office these days...

(breathless)Wow! What was that heavenly reek of failure? Again! Let's go roll around the West lawn again!

Returning to reality ('buoyed'... heh... wow... same planet, different worlds) I do notice something entirely welcome after the debates...

Courage.

That is, in the media. My perception is, having been reminded again that the man currently propped up behind the desk in the Oval office is, actually, a clueless buffoon, and far, far from a particularly impressive figure, all those papers that had been so circumspect about calling the lying little twerp on his howlers are finding their spines again. Witness, as exhibit one, this bit of candour in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. Or better, let me quote:

In the whopper of the night, Bush said most of his tax cuts "went to low- and middle-income Americans." That is a baldfaced lie. In taxes paid for 2004, the top 1 percent of taxpayers get about one-quarter of the cumulative benefit from Bush's cuts, according to the Urban Institute-Brookings Tax Policy Center. The top 20 percent get almost two-thirds, leaving only one-third for 80 percent of taxpayers. Statistics can be used to do lots of things, but they can't make Bush's tax cuts friendly to Americans with modest incomes.

To the point. Dammit, that's what the media's supposed to do. And about damned time. To the rest of you in the media, listen, I've said it before: this guy tells his lies with your help, because you don't call him on it. Not nearly enough, anyway. He and his lying buds' idiot drumbeat of 'We must attack Iraq' and 'Iraq and al Qaeda' shoulda got them laughed off the stage, a year ago. You shoulda just shut the buggers down. Just tell your readers: 'Listen, sorry we stopped reporting what the idiot White House press secretary has to say, but since these lying bastards can't possibly level with you, and their noses grow every time we turn on our mics, we just turned them off... They aren't credible sources, and it just wouldn't be responsible to quote them... This concludes their access... Now, we bring you tap dancing...'

Oh, and as to that debate 'performance'... um, guys, I got a look at some more of it this morning (had to rely on transcripts and excerpts until now; the ladies in my life fell asleep entirely too close to both available televisions the other night)... and I really gotta wonder how anyone even thought this was close. I think the only sense in which that could possibly be the interpretation is through the lense of drastically lowered expectations.

As in: by now we know Bush ain't much for thinking on his feet. But hey, the trained monkey didn't actually pee on the stage. So B+, we guess...

Whatever, guys. You go with that. But someday, far in the future, archaeologists are going to find the MPEGs of the debate, look them over, and assume it was all some kind of bizarre satire...

(archaeologist, indignant) “Oh come now, Higgins! You can't be serious! Preposterous! The very idea that this was genuinely a head of state! Why, it simply must have been some sort of low entertainment for the masses... My god, man... is he drooling?”

Yep. This is our world.