Aside from Bush press secretary Scott McClellan, who got pied like a high-society dame in a Three Stooges short, the only other Cheney sympathizer we saw much of for a few days after the blast was Alan Simpson. The retired jackal who used to represent Wyoming in the US Senate explained to us that Cheney was done in by his own extraordinary skills as a hunter. Absent Simpson’s candor, who’d have ever known?

The vice-president finally materialized to face a tough pre-recorded, carefully scripted grilling in an infomercial hosted by Fox News Styrofoam anchor Brit Hume. Cheney didn’t apologize, but upon his release from the hospital, the properly chastened Whittington did.

Cheney’s cold-bloodedness deepened the February freeze, but cruelty was everywhere all winter. In South Dakota heartless legislators even made birth in that godforsaken state mandatory.

Invaders at the gates
One can only estimate how much worse Bush’s poll numbers would be if so many people didn’t figure that their remarks to strangers on the telephone were being overheard by the NSA. Fortunately, there are still plenty of brave souls who will phone their coordinates directly into the White House to lodge complaints. This line of communication should soon be cut when Bush uses his powers as the first unitary executive of the United States to un-list the White House phone number. But for now, 202.456.1414 is still ringing, and it’s still receiving comments about everything from coal mining to data mining. Unfortunately, the president has shown himself to be much more concerned with the safety of the latter.

So the calls keep coming about Supremacist Court nominees, administration scandals that range from treason to shoplifting, and even some questions from Republicans wondering why they are now supposed to chant “UAE! UAE! UAE!” at rallies. The on-again/off-again deal to sell several US ports to foreign business concerns really confused the xenophobic lemmings who make up the largest portion of Bush’s ever-diminishing base. First, Bush asked these poor dopes to form a lynch mob for Arabs, and when they showed up with rope, the president lectured them on tolerance.

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But why should we consider American ports sovereign territory? They’re hardly used to ship American products anymore. Denser than Cheney’s bunker when it comes to things like trade deficits, Bush recently bragged that the United States exports a whopping 20 percent of what it manufactures! And that’s not even counting war.

Speaking of boundary issues, everyone seems to have decided this is the exact moment the problem of illegal immigration across the Mexican border must be solved. The topic has caused a schism in the Republican Party (can’t exactly use the term intellectual dispute, now can I?) between the wetback-hating bigots and the cheap-labor-exploiting corporatists. I’d give the edge to the corporatists, although a late bid by Congressman Dana Rohrabacher (Reptilian-CA) to replace cheap immigrant labor with slave prison labor may be just the compromise the GOP is looking for.

If there is a crisis that deserves immediate consideration, perhaps it isn’t migrating Mexicans from the South but migrating icebergs from the North. Considering the climactic shifts that now seem inevitable, that wall that crackpots want erected on the Mexican border may well end up serving as the one levee Bush ever built that protects brown people from flooding. I’m no gambler, but if the wall goes up, I’m putting everything I have on the Mexican pole-vaulting team in the next Summer Olympics.

When you make a gumbo out of the incredible and immoral waste of American resources in Iraq, global warming, and predictions of the worst hurricane season ever in 2006, Bush’s choice to re-line his cronies’ pockets rather than rebuild working people’s homes and communities on the Gulf Coast and in New Orleans is doubly barf-inducing. This is particularly true since March came in like a liar when footage of Bush on a closed-circuit TV hookup during the first days of Katrina … um, surfaced. The video showed the littlest president, who had told us again and again that no one could expect the levees to breach, watching (and presumably hearing) a hurricane expert suggest that, whaddya know? The levees might breach!

Just Bush’s luck: the one time he could have used swift boats, and he left them in the port. And talk about being slow on the draw: the tape proves that Bush could have read the entire My Pet Goat series while he was waiting to help the people of New Orleans.

That video had a very Stanley Kubrick feel to it: 2005 — A Displaced Odyssey. Bush, wearing a suit on vacation at his own home, was at the end of a long table sitting next to a couple of lackeys, watching the weather on two-way video. The place was lit with all the warmth of an auto-repair waiting room. You could almost smell the burnt coffee. Gosh, what do I want to read? “A Tire Rotation Guide” or this greasy copy of Modern Maturity?