Sunday, May 15, 2005

The president as towel-snapper

There's a brilliant piece today over at the Santa Cruz Sentinel on the rise of "bully culture" in politics, entertainment, sports, and business. The snarling John Bolton. The swaggering Donald Trump. The sneering Darth Dick Cheney. Reality TV, American Idol, and Survivor. The screaming End Timers. The Republican Party as "spiritual home of the bully, where merry thugs like Tom Delay and Rick Santorum thrive like cockroaches in a junkie's kitchen."

And W?

As for the president, he’s always struck me as a particular sub-species of the bully you might call a "towel snapper." You know the type, the guy who puts his arms around your shoulders for a good-natured, insincere apology after pulling a nuclear wedgie on you in front of the whole school at assembly.

The author thinks bullies always get their comeuppance; let us fervently pray he is right and work to make it so.
UPDATE: For a truly hair-raising account of W's early crimes and misdemeanors - animal torturing, coke dealing, drunk driving, abortion procuring, etc., etc. - check out this piece of muckraking over at Counterpunch. (Can't say it's fully sourced, but it will certainly get you thinking.)
UPDATE II: And while we're on the subject of misanthropic frat boys, Garrison Keillor had a few choice words. Here's a taste:

The party of Lincoln and Liberty was transmogrified into the party of hairy-backed swamp developers and corporate shills, faith-based economists, fundamentalist bullies with Bibles, Christians of convenience, freelance racists, misanthropic frat boys, shrieking midgets of AM radio, tax cheats, nihilists in golf pants, brownshirts in pinstripes, sweatshop tycoons, hacks, fakirs, aggressive dorks, Lamborghini libertarians, people who believe Neil Armstrong’s moonwalk was filmed in Roswell, New Mexico, little honkers out to diminish the rest of us, Newt’s evil spawn and their Etch-A-Sketch president, a dull and rigid man suspicious of the free flow of information and of secular institutions, whose philosophy is a jumble of badly sutured body parts trying to walk. Republicans: The No.1 reason the rest of the world thinks we’re deaf, dumb and dangerous.

UPDATE II: This passage really calls to me. I wonder how many of those epithets I can work into a conversation or post over the next 30 days?
UPDATE III: I'll put them in bold whenever I score....

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

God, I love Santa Cruz.

The trouble is bullies are really cowards acting out their own terror and the only way to stop them is to bully them back. Of course, they don't actually stop, they just change targets.

My latest mantra vacillates between, "Might Makes Right," and "We Need Enemies to Learn Patience and Humility."

BTW, might you post Susan Collins' phone numbers front and center? Looks like Snowe is sewn up, but Collins needs a few thousand phone calls today, tomorrow and until this vote happens. Maine residents can make a difference here.

Alna Dem said...

Thanks! will do.

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