Mark Morford Speaks of Doormats

We Are All Dubya's Doormat
News flash for ordinary Repubs and born-agains: Bush doesn't care about you, either
- By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Wednesday, November 10, 2004

This just in: millions of moderate Republicans and gay-terrified evangelical Christians and intellectually numbed conservative parents who thought they were doing some sort of good by blindly voting for Dubya and hence protecting their wee ones from swarthy Islamic evildoers who want to steal their kids' Kraft Lunchables and nuke Disneyland all should be emerging from a deep fog of savage denial any minute now.

Wake, they will, to the increasingly obvious fact that their beloved smirkin' president, the one who seemed to care about them so deeply just a couple weeks ago and who reached out to them and promised them the gun-happy gay-unfriendly moon in exchange for full access to their civil rights and a blank check to do whatever the hell he likes, he apparently doesn't give a damn about them. Not anymore.

The truth will soon be hitting much of the conservative nation like a redneck smacks a dog: now that the fear-saturated Right has handed this failed oilman four more unrestrained years to do his dirtiest deeds and a deeply contaminated, well-greased Congress to do it with, he no longer needs their support and he couldn't care less about their "moral values" or their positions on Social Security reform or the war in Iraq or just what the hell he meant about spending the "political capital" he claims he's earned by winning the election (by the slimmest margin of any incumbent president in history).

Oh, sure, Bush reached out, didn't he, Mrs. Moderate Republican? He made you a believer. He promised more intolerance for gays and more Bible classes in the White House and more laughably irresponsible tax breaks you don't really need and more dumbed-down, black-and-white, good-versus-evil perspectives that take all the pressure off of having to, you know, think.

And because he unconditionally refused to acknowledge any sort of mistake, any sort of massive error in judgment or policy related the appalling Vietnam-grade quagmire that is Iraq, because he stayed "on message" and never fired Rumsfeld for gross incompetence and because he let the lower-rank military plebes take the fall for Abu Ghraib and never once wavered in the most disgusting of lies about why we needed to invade Iraq and kill over 100,000 of their people in the first place, why, he "earned" your vote.

It's so true, isn't it? Despite proof after proof and report after report and dead U.S. soldier after dead U.S. soldier, you thought Bush would do better than Kerry in "defeating" terrorism. No matter that Bush's very actions, his ugly little war, his very poisonous foreign policy that has so violently destabilized the Middle East, no matter that this is what has, in fact, amplified the terror threat a hundredfold and made the U.S. more detested than ever. Ahh, irony. It's what's for dinner.

And now, your reward. You get to be as misrepresented, as tossed aside, as openly ignored as the rest of us. Isn't politics fun?

We are all suckers, all losers in this election. Are you a Democrat? Republican? Doesn't matter. The line is no longer liberal/conservative. It is no longer tax 'n' spend versus cut 'n' deficit, Toyota Prius versus Ford Expedition, happy godless heathen sodomite versus Mel Gibson.

It is now ultrawealthy, power-hungry Bushite CEO versus, well, the rest. Do you see? News flash to conservatives: Bush just pretended to care about you, because he had to, because Karl Rove told him to, because he needed your fear and your blind faith to win another term. You matter about as much as a U.S. soldier in Fallujah, now.


Oh how you will be disappointed from here on out. Oh how you will gnash your teeth and sigh your sighs and wonder what the hell happened to your fearful leader, why you feel so abandoned as your schools implode and your health-care costs explode and your air quality suffers and your jobs vanish and your women get smacked back to 1953 and your kids die miserable and forgotten in Iraq.

Because now you get to sit by with the "liberal elite" as we watch in bitter satisfaction as Bush will now have to wallow in his own nasty, vicious mess, lie in his own snide and war-torn and economically gutted bed for four more years, as much of the country sits deeply ashamed and the international community sits stunned and horrified at our sheer ignorance and gall.

But wait, there's more. See, we know that Bush has never been so beautifully set up than now for a cataclysmic, Nixon-like fall. This most secretive and corruption-filled and Rove-stained administration in history, with its 9/11 cover-ups and well-documented stack of fumbles and flubs and murderous misprisions leading up to the Iraq mess, it is positively bursting at the seams with potential impeachment-level calamity. You think the Nixon tapes were ruinous? Just wait for the Bush mumbles.

Every sign points to the fact that history will look back on Dubya Dubya II as one of the worst-run, least accountable and most abusive, warmongering, homophobic, environmentally unfriendly presidencies in American history. Which means either one of two things: there is a very slight chance that Dubya will now try to ease off some of his party's more heartless and voracious of policies, if just to try to create a more appetizing and appealing "legacy."

But don't bet on it. If Rove's recent spittle-filled announcement that Shrub will again seek a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage is any indication, Bush might very well go the other direction entirely, making history the cold-blooded, autocratic way: through policies so hollow and self-righteous and smirking, history can't help but be impressed. After all, neofascism makes great textbook fodder.

What else? Well, now BushCo has no one to blame but themselves. The neocons own the White House and Congress. All fingers of blame for most impending disasters and war ills and social meltdowns point straight back to the GOP. Furthermore, the U.S. has already crashed through the $7.3 trillion debt limit, thanks to Bush. Unless Congress raises the debt ceiling ASAP, as BushCo so desperately demands they do, the U.S. government will run out of cash. We are, in NASCAR parlance, running on fumes.

This, then, is the sour truth for the Repubs and the born-agains, and the sliver of bittersweet solace for the liberals. Will it not be laughable, in a soul-deadening, kill-me-now sort of way, to watch BushCo try to pin the imminent economic implosions and cultural backlashes and catastrophic social-service breakdowns this nation now faces on, say, Bill Clinton? Will it not be horribly amusing to watch this administration sink into its own self-made quicksand?

Will it not be, in short, just all sorts of tragic fun to watch the cancer eat itself?


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