Mr. Ratfucker Has Two Peeves

Mr. Ratfucker cannot understand Ratbang Diary’s policy of not responding to readers’ comments. In fact, Mr. Ratfucker believes responding is a blogger’s duty. And in that regard, he feels he must respond to a reader’s recent self-absorbed, egocentric diatribe. The reader took exception to Ratbang’s claim that Dick Cheney was in a wheelchair at the inauguration not because he had wrenched his back but because he “is a sick, enfeebled, old man...a sick, mean, nasty, vitriolic, embittered old man." Ms Reader said, “I use wheels--is it because I am a sick, mean, nasty, vitriolic, embittered young woman? Is this really what you think of wheelchair users, that we're evil? If you take out prejudice, what's wrong with using a wheelchair? Cheney is these things anyway. Let's not harm people with disabilities by perpetuating highly negative stereotypes. What if someone did the same with race?” Mr. Ratfucker feels it would be a grave injustice to take Ms Reader’s silly, illogical, self-aggrandizing and narrow position and apply it to anything. He believes it would be particularly specious to say that if any person thinks Justice Clarence Thomas is an ignorant, bigoted and perverse black man, it would follow that the person believes all blacks are ignorant, bigoted and perverse. That is a perfect example of a false, unsound, and misleading argument, just as Ms Reader’s assumptions are false, unsound and misleading. Trust me, Ms Reader; if the Ratbang Diary had wanted to say all wheelchair users are evil, Ratbang Diary would have said exactly that. But that was not said and it was not implied. What was said is that one man, Dick Cheney, is in a wheelchair because he is old, sick, enfeebled and bitter, among other things. He was not characterized as “evil”. Ms Reader concluded that all wheelchair users are evil. Mr. Ratfucker believes the disabled should be given every consideration and assistance society can offer. But allowing the disabled to spew nonsense and twisted logic just because they are disabled cannot be supported. As to Mr. Ratfucker’s second peeve: He finds the use of kindergarteners and pre-adolescent children to hawk everything from pharmaceuticals to hospitals and life insurance, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera on television is nauseating and manipulative and he would like to see it outlawed. A recent stomach-turning ad had a little girl simpering, “When my daddy had his heart attack....” Mr. Ratfucker would like to know what these children offer to the viewer that a cogent adult giving real information could not do, and to better advantage? Before a benighted, nauseating and manipulative mother posts a comment Mr. Ratfucker would like to state he does not believe all children and mothers are benighted, nauseating and manipulative. Although he will admit there is a better case for this assumption than that all wheelchair users are evil.

The Day We Waited Eight Years For

As Maureen Dowd noted this morning in her New York Times Op/ed piece, it was a Greek chorus moment yesterday when four million eyes watched a machine of the gods lift George W. Bush out of our lives and carry him off to oblivion. “Everyone, it seemed,” Dowd said, “was waving goodbye, with one or two hands, a wave that moved westward down the Mall toward the Lincoln Memorial, and keeping their eyes fixed unwaveringly on that green bird...they wanted to make absolutely, positively certain that W. was gone.” Gone! Oh happy happy day!! In recapping Obama’s oath of office and inauguration speech, however, Dowd gave the former president too much credit when she said, “With W. looking on, and probably gradually realizing with irritation who Mr. Obama’s target was ...the newly minted president let him have it.” I doubt that GWB ever realized he was Obama’s target when Obama said, "As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals...those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience's sake...false promises...and childish things." As a matter of fact, I doubt GWB understood Obama’s speech at all, since it was eloquent and composed of words of three or more syllables. And can we get one thing straight? Dick Cheney was not in a wheelchair because he had strained his back lifting heavy boxes the day before. Cheney hires people to do his heavy lifting--both the metaphorical kind and the real kind. Dick Cheney was in a wheelchair because that is the way he has to get around. Cheney was in a wheelchair because he is a sick, enfeebled, old man...a sick, mean, nasty, vitriolic, embittered old man. And his wheelchair was pushed to the sidelines with the greatest speed so that he didn’t have a chance to thumb his nose or flip the bird to his successor Joe Biden and the new Commander-in-Chief. That great day—1-20-09, Bush’s Last Day—has come and gone and the parties are over. And a new day of hope for the future has come. Now, as Mahatma Gandhi once said, it is up to us to be the change we want to see in the world.

GWB FINALLY SAYS GOODBYE!

Of all the endless farewell tours by performers that we have witnessed over the years, President George W. Bush took the longest time, or at least it seemed the longest time, to get gone. GWB’s final 15 minutes in the spotlight last night was eloquent and well written by his speechwriters and well rehearsed and delivered by the President. But it was almost entirely self-congratulatory delusional bullshit. “Above all,” the Prez said, “I thank the American people for the trust you have given me.” The cowed press may have given GWB leeway and latitude but the one thing the majority of Americans never gave the president was trust. “Tonight, I am filled with gratitude to Vice President Cheney and members of the administration,” he said. Certainly, that gratitude was well placed. Without Dick Cheney as the shadow president and the Bush administration to fill in for the monumentally mentally out-to-lunch and physically absent president, the United States would have had no commander-in-chief. “Afghanistan has gone from a nation where the Taliban harbored Al Qaeda and stoned women in the streets to a young democracy that is fighting terror and encouraging girls to go to school,” Bush said. He added, “Iraq has gone from a brutal dictatorship and a sworn enemy of America to an Arab democracy at the heart of the Middle East and a friend of the United States.” Total wishful thinking. The US failed in Afghanistan and after George W. Bush followed the lead of his war-mongering minders and invaded Iraq for no good reason, our military, six years later, has failed in Iraq. “For eight years, we have also strived to expand opportunity and hope here at home,” Bush said. “Across our country, students are rising to meet higher standards in public schools. A new Medicare prescription drug benefit is bringing peace of mind to seniors and the disabled.” After eight years of George W. Bush in the White House, hope was nearly extinguished here at home. Public schools are faltering. Many schools have no books for students to buy rent or read. And senior citizens and the disabled are having to choose between buying necessary drugs and buying food. Amazingly, last night the president had the balls to say, “Funding for our veterans has nearly doubled.” Bush actually vetoed a bill to give veterans aid. He also had the balls to say, “America's air, water and lands are measurably cleaner.” The exact opposite is true because GWB and his born-again, troglodyte caveman philosophy doesn’t believe in global warming. “And,” Bush said, “the federal bench includes wise new members, like Justice Sam Alito and Chief Justice John Roberts.” It is true, they are new members, but they are far from wise as far as delivering true justice to all Americans is concerned. They are handpicked, conservative, elitist Republican jurists who value religious zealots and those who have money over the poor and minorities. “These are very tough times for hardworking families, but the toll would be far worse if we had not acted,” the president said. Acted how? Acted when? Dear George, you caused the current financial crisis this country is going through. You never once acted to avoid any of the problems we are currently undergoing. “I have always acted with the best interests of our country in mind. I have followed my conscience and done what I thought was right. You may not agree with some tough decisions I have made, but I hope you can agree that I was willing to make the tough decisions,” Bush said. No, George, whenever you acted, it was from your center of delusion and madness. Your actions were always to aid a narcissistic self-absorbed fantasy. But in the main, you did not make tough decisions. All decisions were made for you and you rubber-stamped them if it seemed they would in some way ennoble your self-aggrandizing image. Finally, last night the President said, “With the courage of our people and confidence in our ideals, this great nation will never tire, never falter, and never fail.” Actually, it is only because George W. Bush and the Bush administration are now leaving the political arena that this great nation has a prayer of not failing. Had they stayed in office longer, the United States of America would have crumpled under the weight of their dubious leadership and crimes and misdemeanors, and the USA would have become just a failed experiment called democracy.

QUOTE OF THE DAY!

I don’t see how I can get back home in Texas and look in the mirror and be proud of what I see, if I allowed the loud voices, the loud critics to prevent me from doing what I thought was necessary to protect this country—George W. Bush Even the New York Times opted for the above as its quote of the day. It’s true, George, you couldn’t go home to Texas, look in the mirror and be proud of what you see if you had listened to anyone ever during the last eight years. In fact, it would be impossible for any sane person to be proud of anything the entire Bush administration has done during the last eight years. Which begs the question, is Condoleezza Rice as crazy as George Bush? Yesterday, Rice—who is the worst and most sycophantic Secretary of State ever to have had that cabinet post in the history of the United States—said during an exit interview with the Washington Post that she defended every decision she made as George Bush’s SOS and that if Iraq eventually emerges as a democratic, multiethnic state that has friendly ties with the United States, ‘that will be more important than what anybody thought in 2002 or 2003.’” IF Iraq emerges as a multiethnic state? And if this big IF occurs, we’re looking at what year, and after what measures have been taken by whom to mend the catastrophe the Bush administration visited on the world by invading Iraq? WaPo further reported that Rice slapped the table for emphasis and claimed, “What is more important than current controversies is how the decisions will look 25 or 30 years from now, if you get very focused on whether someone thinks your policies are popular, you won't do the right thing.” Bush and Rice didn’t give a damn about whether they and their policies were popular or not and they still did absolutely the wrong thing at every juncture. Rice added: "That's not to say that it didn't come at great cost. I myself will be haunted by the lives that were lost. I will always think about the people I visited at Walter Reed or at Bethesda and wonder what their lives are like. I also know that nothing of value is won without sacrifice." So Rice feels that all of the Bush administration’s wrongheaded, stupid, self-serving, grandiose, despotic and arrogant decisions were valuable and worth the “great cost” and “sacrifice” made by the entire world. But she will be haunted. Well I would certainly hope so. Of one thing GWB and Condi may be sure, their monumentally egomanical exit interviews will be quoted in history books for the foreseeable future and the world will marvel that they did not go to jail for war crimes and misdemeanors, along with VP Dick Cheney, evil genius Karl Rove, Scooter Libby and the rest of the George W. Bush administration.

More Absurdities from The Plumber and Palin

The 21st century’s Everyman, Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher is, like almost every century’s common man icon, a bigot. The man that John McCain singled out as representing “us” is a religious zealot brand of bigot and he has been hired by the right-leaning US website Pajamas TV to go to Israel as a war correspondent and to report back to its conservative base. Wurzelbacher said he was going to let "Average Joes" share their stories. He said he would get the real story of what is happening. "Being a Christian I'm pretty well protected by God I believe,” Mr. Everyman said. He then stepped back from his exalted position at the right of God and said, ”That's not saying he's going to stop a mortar for me, but you gotta take the chance.” The real story, Sam, is that people on both sides of the Gaza strip are getting killed and horribly killed. The real story is that people in Israel and Palestine are just like you who also believe they’ve got the inside track on what God wants. The real story is that your being a Christian isn’t going to protect you from stupidity, bigotry or death any more than a Jew being a Jew or a Muslim being a Muslim will give him special powers and consideration and protect him from being a total and complete asshole. The real story is we know the real story. However, it would be good if God delivered the world from zealous Christians getting in the way in Israel and gumming up the works even more than the Jews and Muslims have done. Particularly zealous Christians like Sam Wurzelbacher who simply want to live in fame one minute longer while calling it “doing good”. And then we have Sarah Palin still out seeking celebrity and notoriety in the political spotlight. Now she’s making the rounds blaming everyone from Katie Couric to Caroline Kennedy for the fact that she was an ignorant embarrassment to the Republican Party during her unfortunate moment as a Vice President candidate. Palin said Katie Couric only asked her about what newspapers she read in order to make it seem as though she was ignorant. Although she still couldn’t name any papers she read. And Palin said Tina Fey made it sound as though her unmarried teenaged pregnant daughter and boyfriend were unmarried pregnant teenagers. She said the media had unfairly scrutinized her and had not done so with Caroline Kennedy because of her “class”. Well, I have to admit, Caroline Kennedy is classy in a way Palin would give an eye to be. But apparently, that’s not what Palin meant. Perhaps she doesn’t know what “scrutinize” means...because Kennedy has been scrutinized all her life like Sarah Palin can only dream of being scrutinized. That’s scrutinized, Sarah, not sanitized. Is there a chance Sam the Plumber and Sarah Palin could get married so as not to make two families irreparably arrogant, ignorant, socially inept, narrow minded and fanatic?

Notable Frank Rich Lines from Yesterday’s NYT

New York Times Op/Ed columnist Frank Rich said it all yesterday when he described George W. Bush as “smaller than life”. Noting that Americans like their failed presidents to be close to Shakespearean in their tragedy, Rich said, “Here, too, George W. Bush has let us down. Even the banality of evil is too grandiose a concept for 43. He is not a memorable villain so much as a sometimes affable second banana whom Josh Brolin and Will Ferrell can nail without breaking a sweat. He’s the reckless Yalie Tom Buchanan, not Gatsby. He is smaller than life.” Rich cites the White House Website and its effort to inflate Bush’s woeful terms as president with something like adequacy: ”A booklet recounting ‘highlights’ of the administration’s ‘accomplishments and results’ (has) big type, much white space, children’s-book-like trivia boxes titled ‘Did You Know?’ and lots of color photos of the Bushes posing with blacks and troops...this document is the literary correlative to ‘Mission Accomplished.’” Rich goes on to say, “But the brazenness of Bush’s alternative-reality history is itself revelatory. The audacity of its hype helps clear up the mystery of how someone so slight could inflict so much damage. So do his many print and television exit interviews. The man who emerges is a narcissist with no self-awareness whatsoever. It’s that arrogance that allowed him to tune out even the most calamitous of realities, freeing him to compound them without missing a step. The president who famously couldn’t name a single mistake of his presidency at a press conference in 2004 still can’t. The crowning personality tic revealed by Bush’s final propaganda push is his bottomless capacity for self-pity. ‘I was a wartime president, and war is very exhausting,’ he told C-Span.” And to heal himself, Bush goes to military hospitals. Once again, it’s all about George W. Bush. As Rich points out, “incredibly enough, it’s his own healing he is concerned about, not that of the grievously wounded men and women he sent to war on false pretenses. It’s ‘the comforter in chief’ who ‘gets comforted,’ he explained (to Charles Gibson) by ‘the character of the American people.’ The American people are surely relieved to hear it. With this level of self-regard, it’s no wonder that Bush could remain undeterred as he drove the country off a cliff,” Rich said. During the GWB tenure in the White House, we heard many times about the president’s belief in God, about how God guided him, about his faith. But as Frank Rich says, “This presidency was not about Him. Bush failed because in the end it was all about him.”