The Motherfuckering of America, Part 1: Keep Your Mothers Away From Dick Cheney:
That new Rufus Wainwright song, "Going to a Town," has the refrain "I'm so tired of America," which, if you can ignore Wainwright's usual nasal whine, bespeaks a general exhaustion permeating this land. But it's not so much being tired of America as much as it's utterly soul-sapping to meet people from other countries and feel as if you have to apologize for your country for being such motherfuckers. On every path, on every issue, on every turn of events or crisis, the government (and fuck dividing it here between "the Bush administration" and "Congress" - we're only half a year distant from the previous four years of Republican hegemony) has jumped in the motherfucker truck and dragged us all with it.

When the Rude Pundit was in Canada in January, even though it was pretty clear that he was not one of the idiot Americans, 41% of whom still fucking think that Saddam Hussein told those Saudis to fly into those buildings on 9/11, even though there was some hope in the just-inaugurated shiny new Congress, he felt as if he had to personally apologize on behalf of all like-minded Americans, something like, "Hey, I'm really sorry we're such motherfuckers right now. But, you know, gee, things can change. Now let's get a LaBatt's and watch us some hockey."

We have been motherfuckered, forced through association to be considered motherfuckers, motherfuckered over again and again. Over the next few days, or until he gets bored with the idea, the Rude Pundit's gonna look at this motherfuckering of the US, beginning with the chiefest motherfuckerer of them all.

Our grandchildren are going to visit us at our shit-bestrewn nursing homes decades from now and ask us how, back in Aught-Seven, after everything we knew and were still discovering, why we didn't do anything about Dick Cheney. And all we'll be able to do is shake our heads in disgrace, beg them for more morphine, hoping the sweet kiss of death will finally end our pain and rage at our impotence in the face of Cheney (with the occasional muttering of "Lieberman, it was all Lieberman," as if that excuses it, but all it does is make the grandkids think that we've gone anti-Semite in our senility).

After reading the first two parts of the Washington Post's series this week on just how many mothers Dick Cheney has fucked, the Rude Pundit wonders how anyone who deigns to call him or herself human can stand to be near Dick Cheney, or anyone in his office. (And let's put aside that bean fart of a man, Alberto Gonzales, for the time being.) What the fuck? In his spare time, does he feed stray kittens from his milky nipples? Is that how anyone can stand near him without feeling the need to vomit or fake a stroke to get away from him?

Read the whole articles, read long excerpts on other blogs, but know that the series begins with Colin Powell and Condi Rice getting fucked like particularly supple house niggers back in the old days and with Cheney smirking evilly to a stupefied Dan Quayle. And know that David Addington, Cheney's butt boy, is one of the most vicious, sinister shits ever to be allowed to walk unimpeded into the Oval Office. And know that John Yoo, the sick fuck who gave the torture policies the shiny stamp of legalistic approval, teaches students how to become sick fucks just like him.

What we get so far is that Cheney's whole modus operandi is the accretion of power for the executive branch, not, ultimately, for the good of anything but of himself and, by default, President Bush. And the seeming reasoning behind this expansion of presidential power is just because he can. Seriously. Read about the way that Cheney's office orchestrated the complete degradation of American moral authority: "Cheney and his allies, according to more than two dozen current and former officials, pioneered a novel distinction between forbidden 'torture' and permitted use of 'cruel, inhuman or degrading' methods of questioning." It's chilling and telling that the Post article never says why exactly these methods were needed, only leaving it to the vague "different kind of war" reason, as if there was ever a time when wars were simply a homogeneous bunch of actions. For shits and giggles, do a Lexis-Nexis search of "Vietnam war" and "different kind of war." It was a constant refrain throughout that nightmare.

The truly hilarious part of this whole debate on how much cruelty is legal is how weaselly it all is - how to find the one space in the cave to wriggle through to the caverns of depravity. Christ, at least Saddam Hussein just fuckin' ripped people to shreds and then said they were "enemies" after tossing their pieces to dogs. Cheney and his crew actually spent time figuring out how much savagery they could inflict before someone might say, "Whoa, whoa, one more broken finger and we may have to stop."

Finally, the use of the war powers of the Commander-in-Chief as legal approval for anything the Chief Executive (with Cheney's hand in his sphincter) wants to do, any law he wants to ignore, is a frightening masterstroke. If you feel that war gives you the right to unconstrained power, then what motivation do you have for ending a war? Or perhaps you create a war paradigm that allows it to never end, like a war on a concept or vaguely aligned group of individuals instead of a nation.

Motherfuckers should be in jail for motherfuckering us so badly.