Oil and war and shit

In his Renew America column, Vincent Fiore shows himself to be one of the truest of Republicans. He cannot bring himself to fault Bush for bungling the Katrina response, but he can readily blast Bush for perpetrating a host of Republican economic blasphemies.

Fiore's priorities are clear: financial costs first, human costs second.

Hurricane Katrina will probably go down in our nation's history as the greatest economic disaster to date and the country's worst natural catastrophe in decades. Surely, the number of dead that lie beneath the petroleum and fecal-contaminated waters that cover the city of New Orleans will be high in number.

Oil and shit -- a great Republican motto. No, wait. Oil and war and shit. That's perfect.

That has not stopped the liberal political and media class from dwelling upon their most dangerous enemy. Their enemy is more feared than any class 5 hurricane or earthquake, and certainly more hated than any terrorist this side of Osama Bin Laden. That enemy is George W. Bush.

A bit hyperbolic, but Fiore is on to something: More and more Americans are starting to think of Bush as a dangerous domestic enemy -- although they probably wouldn't phrase it that way.

More likely they just wonder, What is it about Dubya? Is he stupid? Cursed? Cursed and stupid?

No matter, something just ain't right with the boy. That guy gets into power and all of a sudden jets start crashing into buildings, wars start up over literally nothing, and the cavalry can't come to the rescue anymore.

I think Americans' growing twitchiness is just millions of years of evolution (or for the creationists among us, a suitably shorter time span minus the evolution) instinctively telling us, For fuck sake, this guy is no leader.

I am not in the habit of writing meaningful prose for the sole purpose of protecting Bush, or any Republican.

I can vouch for this. Fiore is in the habit of writing meaningless prose for the sole purpose of protecting Bush and Republicans.

Indeed, I have of problems with some of his decision-making and economic miscues. I write what I believe in.

Okay, let's see what Fiore believes in. Let's see what tops his list of concerns as the dead are still floating in "the petroleum and fecal-contaminated waters" of New Orleans.

__immigration reform and border control
__the Medicare prescription drug bill
__the McCain/Feingold Campaign Finance Reform Bill
__the Farm Bill
__the Highway Bill

That's pretty much it. Oh, there is one other item: Iraq has been insufficiently flattened and its neighbors inadequately threatened. And this irks him.

Even the way Bush has handled the war in Iraq has at times irked those who support him. If you were to ask me why, I would tell you that Bush has — at times — held back the military in Iraq for the sake of political concerns. What he should be doing is flattening dens of terrorism like Fallujah, and sending terrorist enablers like Syria a serious and time-sensitive ultimatum.

Lest you think that Fiore is totally without, um, compassion, he does cut Bush some slack.

Putting this aside, Bush has had a lot on his plate these last five years, and none of the problems he has had to deal with have been particularly easy. The recession, the war, bitter Democrats, the economy again, Democrats, natural disasters, Democrats, Democrats, Democrats...

Damn two-party system. Damn, damn, damn.

At this point, Fiore apparently realizes that he hasn't gotten to his assigned save-Bush's-ass talking points and so abruptly switches to --you knew it was coming, didn't you -- the litany.

The Left never seems to tire of being absurd.

This is true. Every day I wake up determined to be even more absurd than the day before.

The absurdity centers on my hope that elected officials actually get around to governing, doing things like strengthening levees and providing healthcare and guaranteeing living wages instead of passing special one-off legislation like the Please Don't Let Terri Schiavo Leave the Planet Bill.

I am proudly an absurdist extraordinaire.

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With Hurricane Katrina leaving — and what will most likely turn out to be thousands of dead in Louisiana and Mississippi and hundreds of thousands homeless — liberal soothsayers like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr, and former Clinton senior advisor Sidney Blumenthal decide its just politics as usual, never mind the dead.

"Never mind the dead"?! "Never mind the dead"?!

Perhaps Fiore should reread the sequence of expressed concerns in his own first paragraph. And then consider that he just spent several paragraphs reviewing Bush's questionable spending habits in a column ostensibly devoted to Hurricane Katrina.

Let's see who Fiore chooses to single out in addition to Kennedy and Blumenthal. We've got Germany's environmental minister (for those of you who missed that issue of Frankfurter Rundschau) and, of course, Cindy Sheehan. Somehow he misses Michael Moore and any number of Baldwin brothers, but he doesn't overlook Howard Dean.

Still, it's a rather cursory review since Fiore's eager to get to the now obligatory "the Democrats are kinkily gleeful relishers of defeatism" paragraph.

But the fact remains that the Democratic Party, or people long-associated with the party, have never missed an opportunity to politically grandstand atop the misery of others. The party of Howard Dean did this after 9/11. Democrats did this (and are still doing it) regarding the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. They did this during the recession of 2001. So no one should be surprised that Democrats, or liberals, or whatever they want to call themselves, do it now with eyes-wide-open as death and suffering are taking place in the Gulf area.

Let's just condense what's left of Fiore's excoriation of "Democrats, or liberals, or whatever they want to call themselves" into something of a prose poem that combines the worst of both Nostradamus and Yeats.

Shark drawn to blood/ won't wait till the dead decompose/ the vilest performance…most unhinged/ stoop stoop stoop/ wring the bodies of thousands of dead/ exorcise the wild-eyed leftist and sixties leftovers/ insane random acts.

And here's Fiore's final paragraph, with a few minor edits that I couldn't resist making.

As exhibited by their willingness to say anything lie -- no matter what the consequences -- the Democratic Republican Party as it now stands today is a danger to the overall well-being of the country.