The shadow of Big Bird is long, but it leans towards justice...
The King of the Bunker… A Crackpot Hurricane…
It is a long bloody march from Patton to Petraeus this month, but only the short arc of a thrown chair from McCarthy to McCain.
There is a bitter silence under heaven now. The bat@!$%# smokers are already deep in their gun-bunkers. Their exiled kings are left to scratch racial epithets into the oak tables of the thousand-dollar-a-scotch men’s clubs on K Street. (Don't worry about the Koch brothers though - they will land on their feet, somehow.) There is a palpable gap of national shame between Willard Romney’s back and the entire Republican Party since 1979.
It is a fool’s errand to guess who will emerge to drive the new Tea Wagon of the Apocalypse. The only clear truth is that the visage of the rage-addicted Senior Senator from Arizona, John Sidney McCain, leading every news clip in America with his misogynist assault on a very well respected Black Female, is a crazy-on-fire holiday gift for Hillary Clinton’s sleeping army.
The strange and violent seizures that Senator McCain is having will be the last memorable drumbeat associated with Karl Rove’s “Thousand Year Campaign”. It is like watching some kind of satanic unchildbirthing on 1970s film stock. Maybe he is having flashbacks – to the time he absently flew his Sky Raider jet straight down into the sea near Florida on a clear day. Or maybe it is other Florida days he has had. It does not matter kids. What does matter is that his freak show of old man-nerisms is a gift that will keep on giving. He will make every Republican afraid of the television for the first time ever. His delirium tremors will be the last image you see of a wealthy white male in American politics for a long, long time. Actually, it will be exactly three years eleven months and three days. That is when Bill Clinton will show up on the New Oprah Healthcare Show, handing out free giant cigars of legal weed and wearing a shocking yellow ABC-Sports style jacket proudly emblazoned with the words “First Gentleman, U.S.A.”.
Until then, there will be no joy in Mudville. In fact, there is not even any mud in Mudville and hasn’t been for years. The New Weather drives a hot arid wind across the heartland, much like the Republican Establishment did from October of 1980 until 23 days ago. A lot of people bought the ticket. But in the end, “Conservative Thought Leader” turned out to have been just a code phrase for anyone with three million dollars in borrowed cash, a hooker for a wife and some cheap plastic fitness toy running in long form ads on late night cable. The Reagan boys just sold their last Lucky Strike cigarette and the smoke is already coming out of Senator McCain’s ears.
The GOP slowly traded their big bloodstained tent for a scattered network of lonely concrete survival bunkers. It will take many long years before the joyless heart of Nugentopia can accept the burning fact that they bought land on the wrong side of history’s moral borderlands. It was a close contest, or at least that is what they will say. The truth is that when the big axe fell it was no contest at all. In the teeth of the greatest political hurricane since their same red states fought to defend slavery, a failed lynch mob of Reagan licking Foxwatchers just rode into the sea on George Bush’s bicycle. Meanwhile something like 150 million Grey State Americans are already back to the daily grind after they quietly took a week off to restore America’s actual economy in the wake of something your kids will call “The Most Giant @!$%#ing Storm in Human History. Dude”.
Indeed, there are plenty of lessons to be studied this month. The first one is, learn to swim, because it turns out that the deepest bunkers flood first. The second is, if you hurry, you can be the second poor bastard in middle America who supported McCain against Bush in 2000 and endorses Hillary Clinton against all comers in 2016. There will be more to learn from all of this, sure sure, but only in private conversations and only after the rains come again.
Until then I’ll be waiting at the No Name Saloon, with a glass of hot whiskey and a clean kerchief to dry your little tears.
Ride for the High Country