you get the leaders you deserve

Winston Churchill, he of the immortal blood and tears speeches, left behind a legacy of wonderful quotes, one of them about Democracy being the least of all evils. I humbly usurp, and by no means without pleasure that ”In democracy you get the leaders you deserve”. Since I currently reside in the USA this is for at least one more year a juicy subject. One might say it is the reason for writing this piece. Mostly because I am sick and tired of everyone and their dog jumping on the Bush-hating bandwagon. In reality you are not getting on the wagon, you fell off a different one. You loved the little gunslinger and his paroles of letting those evil-doers hear from us very soon. You loved him so much so that even when you had the choice of correcting your error a couple of years later you abstained. You wanted more and no, you did not suffer from Stockholm Syndrom. For that to happen you would have to be taken hostage first and I do not subscribe to that arrogant left paradigm of the people being hoodwinked by the spectacles of propaganda. There was no hostage-taking of public opinion; there was no hoodwinking of the unsuspecting masses. Not even a little bit. You ask how I know this? In 2004 only 55.3 % of all eligible voters participated in their Oh, so cherished democratic duty. That’s a hot 4 % more than in 2000, when supposedly you just didn’t care and no pressing international agenda was on your mind. Of that grand half of all voters 51 % threw in their lot with Mr. “Put food on your family”. The supposed leader of the free world, a man who can’t form a sentence that makes sense for the life of him, was elected by 25 % of the eligible voters, or 62 Million Voters.

Instead of this apathy in the face of what is becoming a crisis of extinction level event proportions you should have either resoundingly kicked is ungainly behind in the gutter to be swept onto the trash heap of history, or at least provided him with a real mandate. Something like 80 % of the population for example. Of course The Brain did not care that 25 % is not a real mandate and sent his heralds out into the land to proclaim the advent of a new age of republican dominion.

Possibly the first time around - you like to blame voter fraught in Miami Dade (or Vice) county - you can be excused to pick a scion of an emerging dynasty, who very obviously was not fit for the job, over a hapless and prideful inheritor of a supposed political genius. But the second time around? You said to this cretin and to the rest of the world that you liked the state of affairs. That you were happy with setting fire to the Middle Eastern fuse and in the process providing a windfall of profits for all of his financiers. Now, when it becomes all too obvious that he and his laughably arrogant neo cons fell flat on their faces, and he remains the last one standing (wobbling may be a better choice of words here). Now, that the baby hawks all left the nest. Now, you think nothing of getting the hell out of Dodge as well. Excuse me, but I am not going to let you get away with it.

In awe, you were of the genius of The Brain. The dudes in the little fast boats you ate up with patriotic gusto. And the other guy was married to a really rich woman – goodness, she might turn the tax code to her advantage. Possibly, he even spoke French! He should have just said that he speaks Freedom, than he would have been more in line with your dumb patriotism and the 50 % of congress without a valid passport. Yes, you vote for people who are not allowed to travel to Canada! Those poor schmucks can’t even go up there on one of their investigative junkets to smoke a joint, which would quite possibly increase the average IQ of our national leaders – yes, they would have to inhale.

You think medical care for everyone is un-American. You think that putting 500 Billion Dollar into the Offense Budget is just fine and dandy. You are stupidly surprised when you get a letter from your cell phone company that refunds 50 Bucks to you because they overtaxed you for the SPANISH-AMERICAN WAR!!! Just in case you suffer from the illusion that we freed the Philippines from the centuries-old yoke of the Spanish Crown, keep in mind that we killed 200,000 of them when they did not want to be folded into our own burgeoning empire after we kicked the Spaniards to the curb. You are as fine with that as you are with today’s adventures in oil. Forgive me if I sound a little ticked off now that you are all wearing the mantle of innocence. That you think you can just wait for the next gal, and tell the world and yourself that you didn’t know because you were deceived. You were not deceived, not even a little bit.

So instead of riding into the sunset with the baby hawks please stick around and help this bumbling fool out. Help him not to save any face. Help him be even more incompetent now that he is making feeble attempts at reconciliation with the world and its climate. Help him not to fix his syntax errors so that we may at least be entertained a little longer. Anything else would make you dishonest in addition to being stupid. And who wants to be dishonest, right? That would make you a politician and I would have to take your passport and pot away.

Instead live in disgrace for a while. Enjoy the rotten fruit of your labor. You deserve it. You can not blame the merciless despot at the top, because there is none. You may not blame the media, because in the paraphrased words of a certain comedian “you don’t turn around to look over your shoulder to look for the media when you take money out from the ATM late at night”. I will not even let you excuse yourself by saying that you are too busy making that monthly payment on your second car. Take the bus, and while you are at it vote for a politician who will make that bus drive on alternative fuels. You don’t know what alternative fuel means? Let me give you a hint, it’s not the flex fuel sticker on the back of your Hemi-powered Dodge truck that lets you drive in the car pool lane while filling up on 92 octane. Oh right, you say that flex fuel thing will not work either because the evil oil lobby with their billions of dollars bought all the evil passport-less politicos and now you and your poor little children will have to suffer from the nasty West-Nile Virus because it is getting hot. You, my dears, deserve it all because you voted for it all.

Maybe, just maybe if you would have picked the guy who got you seatbelts forty years ago you could now drive in a clean car, take your child to a dentist without paying a cent, not worry about the Chinese polluting the globe because we just plain gave them our cleanest coal power-generating technologies, still call French Fries that, get the oil that you need for your penicillin cheaper, install solar panels on every house in the Southwest and power the entire USA, make peace break out in the Middle East because nobody buys their oil anymore, and earn the love of the world because you are finally the good guys that you think you are. And when all of that happens, I will grant you your pride in your accomplishments. I will applaud you as the enlightened savior of humanity. I may even joyously intone “God Bless America”. Because you will finally and for the first time in a while deserve it.