If our next president isnt an FDR or a Lincoln

From The Lain Levison Experience:

As I write this, the US House of Representatives just passed the latest of Bush’s wiretapping laws. Despite a Democratic majority in the House, these guys are still passing the insane laws of an increasingly unhinged president. Today, August 5^th, 2007, is the day that government has just completely ceased to matter.

For six and a half years now, this country has been governed by a sadistic imbecile and his sociopathic sidekick. In 2000, no one could have foreseen the disaster that awaited us. My first thoughts of George W. Bush were that he was a harmless doofus with a vicious campaign manager, and we were better off without him, but when the Supreme Court took a case it had no legal right to take and appointed him President, my thought was, “fuck it, it will all be over in four years.”

But it didn’t end. It got worse and worse, and government became more and more contemptuous of the people. It has squandered trillions on pet projects, including a disastrous foreign policy, and ignored the US population almost continuously for the better part of a decade. In six and a half years, this government has done nothing….ABSOLUTELY NOTHING, for American citizens.

When they were writing the Constitution, the founders built America so tough that it could outlast eight years of a disastrous presidency, packing it with term limits and separation of powers and checks and balances aplenty. But after six and a half years, only term limits remain as protection, and with our choices for re-election being the sons and wives of previous emperors, our crawl away from Democracy toward oligarchy makes even that a joke.

How did this happen so fast? How could we have lost our entire country in less than seven years? The last two times America sank this low, in the 1850’s, during the run-up to the Civil War, and in the late 1920’s, during the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression, we were rescued by great leadership. Lincoln and FDR arrived on the scene to bring the country back to its feet again. This time, I just don’t see that leadership anywhere. There’s Hillary Clinton, a Wellesley graduate who once pushed for universal health care, telling reporters she “isn’t sure” if homosexuality is immoral, and Mitt Romney saying the complete opposite today of what he said the day before, depending on who he is talking to.

There are three Republican candidates for the presidency who don’t believe in evolution. We now have a prominent political party that thinks we are so despicably dumb that it can present candidates who think that a 2,000 year-old rambling fairy tale is a better logical guide than eighth grade science,. The Democrats, meanwhile, are so scared of seeming scared that they cower and bootlick to get votes from the other party, posing as aggressive warmongers who are the best to deal with whatever imaginary problems the Republicans have conjured up, completely ignoring their own loyalists in the process. Their lack of outrage is the most outrageous thing of all. We are ruled now by a parasite class, a worthless and despicable cabal of wealthy, selfish, well-dressed gutter-trash who do and say whatever is expedient for them today, whatever will enrich or empower them tomorrow.

Never before in government has there been such a void of leadership, such an utter vacuum of character and charisma and common sense. These stupid fucks debate terrorism as if it is really an issue, as if a bomb going off in a public square is worse for our country than the complete economic collapse which looms in the very near distance, a by-product of decades of Asian outsourcing. A plane going down in flames is now considered more pressing an issue than the complete disintegration of our environment. How stupid do they think we are? This stupid...when the bridge in Minnesota collapsed, reporters were quick to “calm us” with the news that there were no indications that it was terrorism, as if we actually lived in the irrational fear-driven world they had constructed for us, as if we had forgotten that even without Osama bin Laden, who has probably been dead for years, bad things occasionally happen.

The politicians know how bad they are, but they are just getting so rich they can’t stop themselves. In a recent television interview Dick Cheney told Larry King that his administration might be remembered like the administration of…Gerald Ford. Not Truman, like he used to hope, but Ford. A president for two and half years, Ford was our only president who was never on a winning presidential ticket, and his achievements consisted mostly of not embarrassing himself or his party. He was fondly remembered because he was a decent human being, which is certainly not true of anyone in power now. But most revealing was Cheney’s discussion of his legacy, an issue no one really gives a shit about but him, beautifully illustrating the megalomania of this current White House. Excuse us for thinking the presidency might be about the American people. We forgot, it’s all about you! You troll-like, sociopathic dickwad.

There are only two ways this country will be saved, and neither of them are likely to happen. One is for our next president to be a Lincoln or an FDR. The other is an armed insurrection. I might be pleasantly surprised, but I’m not seeing Barack Obama or Joe Biden being remembered along with those two. And the American people, having been drugged into a pleasant stupor with television and consumerism, are more likely to just keep sitting there, obese and ignorant and treasuring our possessions, while Rome burns to the ground.

We are fucked.