The Tease of Things I Don't Need

Drunk?

(Now Enhanced With Power)

(Thanks to Tammy for the link today that brought me the pic I've added up top.)

It's nearly 4am and I'm back awake again for no reason of any earthly good, so I may as well post something here in this sliver of time that's not beholden to the workaday world.

When the Cheney/Whittington Texas shooting incident happened back the weekend before last I had as much fun with it as anyone in daily conversation - the first thing that came to mind was that Cheney getting to shoot someone may have been one of the few instances of sincere, human contact the man's had recently - but with all the blood on the hands of the Bush administration I couldn't get myself worked up over what was ultimately an accident.

When Tammy ran a very nicely-written and sane piece on the special breaks Cheney and others in positions of power get versus what we, normal schmucks have to face I mentally nodded throughout, but I'm simply too accustomed to seeing the benefits of wealth, celebrity and power to muster the outrage I probably should have had. Much of it's just a broader application of the breaks friends and relatives get everyday, it's just that if one's famous or in some other position of power there are a lot more people who want to be your friend. None of it's fair, simply eminently human, and it's largely just a matter of scale. The incident almost immediately became a peripheral event for me, especially - as I said up top - when one considers with how it pales beside the Bush administration record and what they've been able to get away with time and again.

However, now I see that even while the details are being shoved into shredders and an X-File somewhere, there appears to be more to the incident - and what was covered up - than there seemed at first.

It seems to me that if a barely closeted philanderer lying in the face of no-one-else's-business questions about a consentual affair could bring about an impeachment, then a drunken vice president and a weapons discharge being covered up should be worth something. Oh, I know, in this twisted culture sex is taboo while guns and alcohol are sexy in a wholesome way (provided one's not sporting too much melanin), but the abuse of power in covering up drunken gunplay both at the local and federal level - including using Secret Service personnel to gag people and remove documents - should be something to be upset about, right? Or has the mainstream press and much of the public been so thoroughly conditioned to immediately dismiss anything said against the Bush administration and much of the GOP as politically motivated? Any culture (however loosely the word's used) where seemingly millions of people will laugh repeatedly at a catch phrase such as "Git 'er done!" obviously isn't expending much time thinking, so what should I expect?

This week's White House antics with the pending sale of shipping operations to companies owned by the United Arab Emirates - longtime Bush friends (ie financial backers) whose heavy financial connections to 9/11 have been repeatedly dismissed by an administration that keeps pretending there was a connection between al Qaida and Saddam Hussein - with Bush adamantly defending the deal seemingly moments after first becoming aware of it have approached high comedy, though. Getting the public to stop gaping at the fireworks and revisit events on and around the Armstrong Ranch almost two weeks later -- much less after the victim apologized to Cheney and his family -- may be asking too much of an easily distracted public.