Cackles From the Balcony

The President hopes to shave social security of security and thereby to “save” society from the kind of government that solves problems, since, after all, like any good neo-conman he’s agin’ gu’ment (even if, as Eric notes, his only successes in a distended career of personal and business disasters have involved his efforts to run governments, if only thereafter to run them into the ground).

All the while, perplexed liberals and others with brains sigh that market fundamentalists falsely flutter about an impending crisis by spewing economic projections so dire they would provoke an economic collapse sufficiently sweeping to nudge even a rosily reformed social security into catastrophe along with everything else, meanwhile promising easy money to them as gets with the reform program all on the basis of breathtakingly optimistic projections of happy returns on their privatized “contributions.” Perhaps the curious co-existence of these sad and ecstatic economic futures amounts for certain well-placed conservatives to the simple difference between a world in which they imagine themselves the beneficiaries of epic theft as opposed to one in which they are not.

That none of this makes much sense as a policy prescription is scarcely an abiding hurdle, however, so long as the conservative media releases the usual plague of toads to “convince” via the same interminable repetition that "elected" Bush for his support of the Kyoto Protocol he disdains, his support of the troops he recklessly kills, his concern for security he ignores to line the pockets of his billionaire friends, because of the WMD in Iraq that don’t exist, and the Saddam/Osama connection that doesn’t exist either that there is a crisis a-brewing for which only the genius of the market (read: corporate welfare for me, market discipline for thee) can “resolve.”

As they contemplate the pointless consequent ruin of their lives Bush’s benighted supporters can always blame gay marriage and political correctness for their lot.

Meanwhile, our Cardiologist in Chief, to swipe Bull Moose’s felicitous phrasing, assures us that like sinister smug Vladimir Putin, homespun horrorshow Donald Rumsfeld has, in fact, “a good heart.” One wonders what Dear Leader has to say on this score about his Vice President.

While I am too distracted by the thought that in a hooded terrycloth robe our Secretary of Defense would be literally indistinguishable from Emperor Palpatine in Return of the Jedi to accurately assess the extent of goodness or not incarnated in Rumsfeld’s heart, one has to wonder if even the swamp-dwelling fundamentalists (of both the market and Christological varieties) who constitute his base may wonder if Bush’s heart-detection apparatus may be somewhat on the fritz at this point, or if, indeed, his own heart is quite where it should be.

Possibly the ongoing liberal secular onslaught against Christmas that has so exercised the mainstream imagination of loofah-loving Bill O’Reilly has likewise shriveled Dear Leader’s own ticker, rather like the Grinch’s was before he heard that swelling defibrillating chorus of penitent Whos.

As Eric recently pointed out to me, the happiness of the happy holidays is more or less the happiness of capitalism buzzing like a baby from Thanksgiving through to New Year’s Day, a scared up saga of ongoing relentless consumption and self-loathing invented by Coke, Hallmark, and Macy’s more than any sinister cabal of liberals demanding decent respect (the horror! the horror!) for Jews and atheists and other undesirable Hollywood types from the infinitely put-upon gun-toting wife-beating middlebrow Whites of America’s Bible-Belt this season or any other.

Nevertheless, the War Against Christmas (which can only be won by smothering the world in Christmas, utterly) captures perfectly the flavor of hysterical victimhood of Bush voters who despite literally controlling every branch of government and every public institution except for the annual MLA Convention (and who after all listens to what people in English Departments have to say?) still feel endlessly belittled and embattled and embittered.

I cannot for the life of me imagine where all this is going. But, you know, happy holidays to you and your’n.