THE RANT

Wandering through my den the other night
after smoking five bricks of hashish, shooting up a few hits of smack, taking a couple of tabs of purple microdot (acid, for those of you who didn’t attend Wooddale High School in the 1970s), drinking a liter or two of vodka, snorting 14 or 15 lines of crystal meth, and taking a few roofies to take the edge off it all, I saw the Bush Crime President on television and thought I heard him say something that sounded really strange. It sounded sort of like “I take responsibility,” but I figured it was just the haze I was in. I also lunged out of the room when I saw him on the screen, horrified as always by the site of his face, and figured that the action might have impaired my ability to hear clearly. Then, lo and behold, I ran across a column in The Commercial Appeal by the much-loved Wendi Thomas, and she confirmed what I thought I had heard. He said it. Perhaps for the first time in his presidency? He was talking about the botch job his cronies did on the Hurricane Katrina disaster rescue. And how could he not say it? Or, probably more accurately, how could his spin doctors not tell him to say it? With his approval ratings at an all-time low and no way out of this one, thanks — for once — to the mainstream media, he couldn’t very well go back to his “What didn’t go right?” attitude. And I’m sure a lot of people are praising his honesty at this point. Garbage. Baloney. Bunk. It was — as he always is — too little, too late. It was like the guy who fathers three or four children patting himself on the back for paying his child support. Like the thief on trial admitting to his crime. It’s not exactly heroic. But he did say something truly wonderful. When asked about his opinion on Roe v. Wade, he said, “I don’t care how those people get out of New Orleans!” Okay, okay. I just threw that one in for the two or three of you out there who haven’t already received that joke via the mass e-mail chain that constantly goes around the world. I don’t know who came up with it, but it’s one of those times where I slap myself on the head (I do that a lot), thinking why, oh why, could I not have come up with that? But then that would have made me a finger-pointer. A blame-gamer. Just like my disdain for the Iraq war debacle makes me unpatriotic, and by writing such an opinion, I am aiding the enemy and helping put United States soldiers in harm’s way more than they already are. I’ve really had about all I can take of that Pillsbury Dough Boy Scott McLellan mouthing his broken record and about not having time to play the blame game and getting on with the work that has to be done in New Orleans and other parts of the Gulf Coast. Do we think anyone in this administration is going to be spending any time rowing or wading through the flood in New Orleans to help out (like that fabulous, fabulous Anderson Cooper)? I guess I am just a mean old jaded person and not as nice as Fidel Castro, who wouldn’t comment on the U.S. government turning down his offer to send 1,100 doctors to New Orleans, not wanting to kick an administration while it’s down. I can sympathize with that. I guess that makes me a, uh, well, Castro sympathizer! But that Mr. Kook (real name) who wrote the letter to the Flyer accusing me of that a few weeks ago has already dropped that dime on me. And why did we not accept Castro’s offer for medical assistance? Would that not have been a toe in the water for establishing goodwill between the United States and Cuba? Or do we just not care about the people in Cuba? Or was it that we didn’t care that much about the people in New Orleans? Someone needs to take responsibility for that and tell us why. Maybe Anderson Cooper will look into it and let us know. I’m sure we’ll never find out otherwise.