Velociworld

The Game is Never the Same

I envy the Democrats. I really do. Thier candidate ran on a bipartisan platform, moved to the center to capture the plump, succulent moderate voters, and now, one month into office, they are ramrodding their liberal agenda down the throats of the conservatives and moderates with arrogant amusement, and an occasional reminder that they won. Witness: a trilion dollar spending bill that rewards their supporters in spades, injects the federal bureaucracies with steroids, and raises taxes on the very voters who bought into the "tax cuts for 95% of Americans" spiel. The welfare state is being expanded exponentially, even as welfare reform is being aborted like a Down child. At least one serious gun control bill is winding its way through House committee, and voting rights/statehood for the District of Columbia is in the offing. Dissent is being silenced by resurrecting the Newspeak Fairness Doctrine. The War on Terror is being dismantled, and the administration is cozying up to totalitarian regimes, mullahcracies, and deceitful allies, while pointing at the previous administration and declaiming, in deplorable and unprecedented fashion, They did it!

Just as promised. Man, you have to love a politician, and a party, that just tosses you the red meat without even searing the sides. If I were a Democrat, I'd love these people. The bipartisan talk was merely talk, of course. Any sentient creature knows any politician for national office runs to the middle. It's a lie so hoary and beloved it should be encased in Lucite, and set upon a shelf of honor in the Capitol rotunda.

Now this Bush fellow? Ran as bipartisan, a fencemender, a reacher-across-aisles candidate, true to the form we all expect. Then he won, and the rest is history. Filthy, execrable history.

An education bill that is the epitome of union bureaucracy, enlarging and enriching the do-nothing tail-chasers at the cost of the actual education of children. Any classroom level educator will tell you that No Child Left Behind is such a baroque, bloated, mixed-signal, unattainable mess that one would think a senior Democrat Senator wrote it. Oh, wait. One did.

The prescription drug bill was the largest single entitlement in United States history, pandering to the least distressed cohort of citizens. A cohort, however, with incredibly powerful lobbying interests, and enough expendable cash even before the bill to make the most gluttonous of political fundraisers salivate.

The Chimpanzee-in-Chief also shepherded through his Congress a gargantuan farm bill so replete with subsidies and ameliorations for the disreputable Jeeter Lesters of the world that the ghost of Cesar Chavez disinterred the corpse of Montezuma and began decardiofying unlucky peasants with machetes.

The Bush administration's steel tariff was so protectionist it had our trading partners so enraged and affronted they accused the U.S. of stealing the European Union's playbook with satellite spy cameras, and stealing the Super Bowl with their ill-gotten gains.

Republicans (you know, those recalcitrant, ignorant, costive reactionaries with puritanical sexual hangups) actually reached across the aisle, engaged the loyal opposition, and enacted a string of Socialist Lite laws. For a while there I thought Al Gore had been elected. (Oh, wait! He really was! I saw Recount!) I assumed that as honorable people the Democrats would do likewise, and enact some Conservative Lite proposals. But of course I jest.

Yes, I do envy the Democrats. They play smash mouth, no-holds politics, while the Republicans operate like they are engaged in a Victorian game of whist, wherein it is presumed that as gentlemen they will let the fragile little ladies win a few hands, lest the men be obliged to produce the smelling salts.

The worst part of it? That's what Bush did. Now imagine what McCain would have done. Oftentimes I wonder if there is ever any fun playing for the perpetually losing team.