Strongly Held Views
Lately, at the behest of Brad deLong (one of my daily blog reads), I have been frequenting the Shrill Blog, which daily offers up some of the most strident criticisms of the Bush gang from various points in the mainstream media. Their special favorites are moderates who have been driven around the bend by the ceaseless mendacity and incompetence of the Bush gang. Of course, as we all know, this kind of criticism of the Administration is driven only by irrational “Bush hatred” and partisanship, the impotent ravings of weak-kneed appeasers still trapped in their pathetic world of “reality,” hidden from the light that shines upon the faith-based true-believers. Luckily, Leader tells us we don’t have to take these sorts of disturbing things seriously (“those people are pessimists!”) and we believe Him. All is well in heaven and earth, amen.
While the Shrill Blog serves the useful function of highlighting the radicalization of the middle in opposition to Bush, there is, thankfully, still room on the spectrum for the Truly Shrill. For this level of glass-shattering screech, we perforce must commence with the Rude Pundit, who today offers a charming vignette wherein Vice President Cheney goes to visit his old friend, Chief Justice William Rehnquist, in the hospital where he is being treated for thyroid cancer. As the old jurist muses about retiring early, perhaps before he and his cronies are called upon once again to settle the election, Cheney becomes displeased and the following scene spews forth from the fevered mind of the Rude One:
So when Rehnquist tries to say he's thinking retirement now, too late for an appointment before the election, and with the potential loss of the Senate even if he wins, Cheney snaps. He pulls the tube out of Rehnquist's neck and whips out his cock. Rehnquist, wide-eyed, now wishing he had chosen death over the horror that is about to happen, gasps for air. "Gonna have to fuck your neck-hole, Bill," Cheney says, slapping his cock around, trying to get an erection, thinking about Mary and her partner 69ing, thinking about dismembered Iraqi children, all the things that usually make him hard. Rehnquist shakes his head. But he doesn't have to worry. Cheney can't get an erection. Sure, he makes a half-hearted attempt to fuck Rehnquist's trachea, but he finally gives up and re-inserts the tube.
Um, OK, moving right along… It’s hard, though not impossible, to top that (we’ll save that one for last), so in continuing our tour of the nether precincts, we will elevate the discourse a tad and point to Paul Waldman’s fantastic take-down of the whole “red America = real America” slander that’s been assimilated into the national discourse like an intestinal parasite. Here is his brilliant lead:
Fantasyland, October 25, 2004 – Today John Kerry opened up a new line of attack on President Bush, charging that his policies and positions are a product of Texas, a state whose political culture lies far outside the American mainstream. "The former governor of Texas has governed like, well, like a former governor of Texas," said Kerry to the laughs and hoots of the crowd. "He's so far out on the right wing, he fell off the plane."
Kerry also brought up Tom DeLay, the ultra-conservative congressman from the Lone Star state. "George Bush makes Tom DeLay look like a Texas moderate!"
The new line of attack came as an independent liberal group began airing a new ad in which an elderly couple says, "George Bush should take his NASCAR-loving, tobacco-chewing, trailer-park-living, redneck freak show back to Texas, where it belongs."
Of course, we've never seen a story like this one – like all Democrats, John Kerry knows that if he criticized one state or one region of the country, the press and the Republicans would come down on him like a ton of bricks, charging him with being a Northeastern elitist who doesn't want to be the president of all Americans.
“NASCAR-loving, tobacco-chewing, trailer-park-living redneck freakshow.” Man, that’s shrill. I mean, why couldn’t he have stayed within the bounds of civilized discourse and said something moderate like, oh, I dunno, “"Howard Dean should take his tax-hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading, body-piercing, Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak show back to Vermont, where it belongs."
And speaking of freak shows, we come now to the longest-running act in the Shrillverse, the Dean of the Shrill, the incomparable master of the acid- (and Acid-) dipped pen, the Doctor himself, Hunter S. Thompson, who this week chimes in with the following:
Did you see Bush on TV, trying to debate? Jesus, he talked like a donkey with no brains at all. The tide turned early, in Coral Gables, when Bush went belly up less than halfway through his first bout with Kerry, who hammered poor George into jelly. It was pitiful. . . . I almost felt sorry for him, until I heard someone call him "Mister President," and then I felt ashamed…
…Immediately after the first debate ended I called Muhammad Ali at his home in Michigan, but whoever answered said the champ was laughing so hard that he couldn't come to the phone. "The debate really cracked him up," he chuckled. "The champ loves a good ass-whuppin'. He says Bush looked so scared to fight, he finally just quit and laid down."
But the Doctor is only getting warmed up. Those familiar with his work know that Thompson, a perpetually pissed-off and vicious writer, was stirred to the rarest and most glistening heights of invective by Richard Nixon. So imagine the rage that could possibly have wrung the following lines from Thompson’s typewriter:
If Nixon were running for president today, he would be seen as a "liberal" candidate, and he would probably win. He was a crook and a bungler, but what the hell? Nixon was a barrel of laughs compared to this gang of thugs from the Halliburton petroleum organization who are running the White House today -- and who will be running it this time next year, if we (the once-proud, once-loved and widely respected "American people") don't rise up like wounded warriors and whack those lying petroleum pimps out of the White House on November 2nd.
Nixon hated running for president during football season, but he did it anyway. Nixon was a professional politician, and I despised everything he stood for -- but if he were running for president this year against the evil Bush-Cheney gang, I would happily vote for him.
You bet. Richard Nixon would be my Man.
Thompson. Admitting in print. That he would vote. For Nixon.
Step back in horror, lest your mind become unhinged by gazing upon sights too terrible and things too unthinkable for sanity to bear! As they say on the Shrill Blog, Aaaiii! Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Hunter S. Thompson! R'lyeh wagn'nagl fhtagn! Aaaiii!!!
If there is one thing you can say about the Bush era, it’s that the full-frontal assault on truth, civility and American values by the power-mad pack in the White House has elicited a Renaissance in the art of invective. I’m sure we will see more of the same hurled at President Kerry, probably beginning on the morning of November 3, but I doubt he will give his critics quite as wide a field of play to work with. Besides, most Republicans (with the exception of P.J. O’Rourke) can’t hold a candle to the prose stylings of the Truly Shrill.
9:10:44 AM 
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