Adam's blogbox: waiting for the Barbarians to leave Washington

What will Washington be like when the Barbarians leave town next year?

Will this hapless burg -- home of flagrant hypocrites and BS ejaculators, stuffed from snout to stern with an indigestible lumpen elite of corrupt souls, moral myopics, and wannabe-messiahs -- feel the relief of an epic enema?

We know what Washington has become since the Barbarians took over in 2000. Who back then, when Bush was campaigning as a “compassionate conservative,” could have foreseen what his Cheney presidency would bring us?

1. The deaths of tens of thousands of innocent Arab men, women and children, and nearly four thousand Americans -- not counting the thousands of severed limbs dropped on Iraqi soil.

2. The hatred and contempt of the world.

3. The turning of our proud Army and CIA into low-life torturers.

4. The creation of thousands of fresh, motivated, diehard Al Qaeda terrorists and hundreds of suicide bombers.

5. The staggering amount of $5 to $9 billion poured every month into a cesspool called the Iraq War (so far, more than $440,000,000,000 of our taxes).

6. The tactic of the big lie to con us into war (it worked for Hitler, it worked for Bush).

7. The selling out of America to China (we’ve given them the power to dump us into a depression whenever they fancy).

8. A headlong plunge from a comfortable surplus into a tsunami of debt, making us the #1 debtor nation on earth.

9. The absurd incompetence of FEMA after Katrina.

10. The rampant arrogance of cronyism. (You’re against abortion? Great, that qualifies you to be an administrator in the Green Zone.)

11. The suspension of habeas corpus. (Why have we locked you up without a trial for the past five years? Hey, it’s just the way things work in a democracy like ours, dude.)

12. The rebuilding of Al Qaeda in Pakistan. (Pakistan is on our side, isn’t it?)

13. The trashing of our Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

14. The trashing of international agreements and laws, such as the Geneva Conventions.

15. The breaching of the separation of Church and State (that would be an evangelical church – Jews and Muslims need not apply for our faith-based funding).

16. The breaking of laws by the President. (I’m above the law because I’m your Commander-in-Chief.)

17. The doctrine of “pre-emptive” war. (Didn’t you know? We had to stop the Iraqi Army from crossing the Atlantic en masse to come and bomb us with their scary nukes.)

18. The handing over of our Middle East policy to Israel.

19. The trashing of our environment.

20. The trashing of the middleclass and the poor.

21. Letting a member of Congress get away with chasing interns whose parents thought their kids would be safe in Washington.

22. Helping lobbyists to con Indian nations and others.

23. The enrichment of the already rich, to the point that beneficiaries like Warren Buffett and Bill Clinton are apologizing for it.

24. The use of US attorneys to accuse Democratic Party candidates of whatever it takes to turn the vote.

25. The employment of mercenaries – hired goons -- by the thousands.

26. No-bid contracts for Cheney’s old firm Halliburton.

27. The creation of a Supreme Court that now openly espouses racism and the exploitation of workers by their companies.

28. The refusal to implement laws passed by Congress by the extravagant use of presidential “signing statements.”

29. A foreign policy that has strengthened our arch-enemy Iran to become the #1 player in the Middle East.

30. The wholesale bungling of the occupation of a foreign country.

31. The fostering of a civil war in Iraq.

32. The wholesale spying on American citizens.

33. The wholesale outsourcing of American jobs overseas.

Truly, we’ve had six years of government by the Barbarians. No administration in US history has racked up a more odious record of incompetence, stupidity and venality. It’s like the sacking of Rome from the inside. The cons are running the prison. Darth Vader rules the galaxy. Child molesters oversee the nursery.

During Watergate, pundits proudly stated that the system worked. Well, in the case of the Barbarians, the system worked all right, but it was not the system we call democracy. It was something new in America – dictatorship lite.

Our so-called democracy, this supposedly robust system established by our founding fathers, of a separation of powers, of checks and balances, of an actual written Constitution, of equality before the law, was hijacked by no more than twelve men with a wacky agenda – Dick Cheney, George Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Lewis Libby, Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Elliott Abrams, Zalmay Khalilzad, John Bolton, Philip Zelikow, and Attorney General Gonzales.

The shame of it is that they were ably supported by not only the usual suspects -- the Weekly Standard, National Review, Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, the “scholars” of the American Enterprise Institute, the batty "Rapture” Evangelicals and creationists, the rightwing radio windbags, the flag-waving “uberpatriot” imbeciles, the greedy military-industrial complex slurping up our tax dollars -- the whole pea-brained troglodyte spastic chorus of hate-speech-spouting Bible-thumping crooked free-market monopoly capitalism liberal-decrying family-values war-on-terror gay-baiting women-suppressing stem-cell-fearing enemies-under-our-beds science-ignorant paranoid fetus-pitying SUV-driving beer-bellied gun-toting bash-the-poor hysterical racist ideologues who’ve made America the laughing stock of the civilized world, given noble conservatism a bad name, and caused Barry Goldwater to puke on the worms in his grave.

These twelve Barbarians -- who in any other country would be marginalized on the far-right loony fringe -- were also enthusiastically cheered on by the self-proclaimed stalwarts of our “democracy” like the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, CBS, NBC and ABC. These highly intelligent and liberal media fell for the most obvious lies, and became the useful idiots of the Barbarians.

Twelve Barbarians hijacked the country, and the country was only too willing to be hijacked. Hey, we may be against gay marriage, but that doesn’t stop us from bending over when our elite waves a big dick our way.

So much for our so-called democracy. Turns out it can be easily busted by a few determined wingnuts.

Even an election win by the Democratic Party has made little difference. Our kids are still being killed for no good reason in Iraq. The Barbarians, bloodied but unbowed, still rule. Nobody has thought to impeach the most impeachable President and Vice-President in history.

Our system of “democracy” has failed us. The truth is, the system never works. It’s people who make the system work, and we’ve elected the wrong people to make our system work. Nancy Pelosi doesn’t want to impeach, and that’s that. The electorate never gets a proper alternative to the dictatorial powers-that-be.

It doesn’t really matter which party is in power. The credit-card companies will still get to write the bankruptcy laws. Big Pharma will still be writing drug laws. HMOs will be writing healthcare laws. Big Oil will make sure they’re subsidized by our taxes. The American people will still find themselves eternally ass-up-in-the-air, steadily buggered by their Barbarian elite.

The Barbarians are in charge because a nation of Barbarians put them there, and it took our nation of ignoramus hicks all of six years to find out exactly how Barbarian their chosen Barbarians are. At last Bush’s approval rate sleeps with the fishes, and most Americans want the end of a war most of them now think was a mistake to begin with, but wouldn’t you know? Bush is still on TV, refusing to get his butt out of Iraq.

Now that we know how easy it is to turn our “democracy” into a dictatorship (in the current jargon, a “unitary executive”), what can we expect future administrations to get up to?

Don’t think you can trust an administration run by Democrats to be more “democratic” than the Barbarians. The template has been set. It’s just too easy to hijack our “democracy.” Our media are simply too compliant. Our citizens are simply too ignorant (how many of them realize they make no more money than they did in 1970, even though they’re way more productive and work much harder?). And our business leaders simply buy too many profit opportunities under the Barbarians. Heck, they love the war; they’re making a killing in Iraq.

That shrewd old Nazi, Hermann Goering, explained the whole thing at Nuremberg: "Naturally the common people don’t want war. But after all, it is the leaders of a country who determine the policy, and it’s always a simple matter to drag people along whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. This is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and for exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country."

It sure worked here. The Barbarians took over, planning a war on Iraq long before 9/11 for their Barbarian dream of yet another puppet regime in the Middle East. Now they’ve afforded future administrations a shining example of just what a few determined men can do when they want war, or tax cuts for the rich, or the right for corporations to foul up our air, or however they want to screw the average American. The spiders spin, and we sit trapped in their web, being sucked dry, while those who should be warning us are basking in access to power instead of speaking truth to it.

Will anything happen to our Barbarians? Let’s take just one example: pundit William Kristol, the editor of Rupert Murdoch’s conservative vanity publication The Weekly Standard. He told NPR when the Iraq War started: "There's been a certain amount of pop sociology in America, that the Shia can't get along with the Sunni … There's been almost no evidence of that at all.” What happened to this massive fool, whose brain has been squatting in his bowels for his entire life? Time Magazine made him one of their columnists. The stupider you are, the bigger the forum you’re given to be stupid in. The more you screw up, the likelier you are to get a Medal of Freedom pinned on your incompetent backside by our Barbarian-In-Chief.

Even now, our nation of Barbarians have no idea how truly Barbarian their Barbarian rulers are. Three of our GOP presidential candidates don’t believe in evolution. All of them are for torture. How can this happen in an educated society of rational grownups? We’re talking about idiocy on a massive scale here, a kind of dark age of the human spirit. Our leaders may be jokes, but what they do is not funny at all, since it usually entails thousands being ripped off or killed. (Last week’s joke from the NY Times: “Former Surgeon General Richard H. Carmona told a Congressional panel ... that he was ordered to mention President Bush three times on every page of his speeches.” America, never forget you voted for this pustule on a warthog’s butt.)

The American experiment with democracy is over. We need a new De Tocqueville to write not “Democracy in America,” but “Kleptocracy in America.” Here’s the definition of kleptocracy: a government that extends the personal wealth and political power of government officials and the ruling class at the expense of the population. Rings a bell, doesn’t it? Especially when we see our pols, after they lose elections, automatically become lobbyists to cash in big-time. And you thought they were there to work for you.

We can now look forward to Barbarian rule in perpetuity. Sometimes it will be Barbarian Heavy, like today, and sometimes it will be Barbarian Lite, like it will be under Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. Hillary or Obama might make a cosmetic difference, but Paris Hilton will become a nun in the Congo before any administration actually SOLVES our problems of education, healthcare, energy, the environment, campaign funding and income inequality, as opposed to Congress paving them over with a thin coat of superficial law-making. Until public schools are funded equally and not by property taxes, until there's a single-payer healthcare system, until big business is forced to clean up after themselves, until corporate welfare for big oil and other businesses stop, until the rich pay their fair share of taxes, until we stop exporting our jobs overseas, until CEOs stop making more in one day than their workers make in a year, things will go on as before.

The Barbarians have won. Under Bush/Cheney, government of the people by the people for the people has perished from the earth. Sorry, Abe. Our Constitution never stood a chance against our 21st century elite. You thought you birthed a democracy, founding fathers. Tsk, tsk. Long live government of the Barbarians by the Barbarians for the Barbarians.