Current Comedy, 2/16/09: And Featuring John McCain as Count Olaf

Dear Reader,
If you enjoy stories with happy endings then you are better off reading some other comedy column. It is my sad duty to document this woeful tale and inform you of an extremely unfortunate event. Once upon a time, a newly-minted president found himself thinking he would bring together all Americans from sea to briny sea to sail into a new American future; and instead he found himself tasked with explaining to the American people about the ugly episodes of their past.
Much to mainstream American media’s surprise, though they claimed to have fairly and objectively reported on the man’s every move for eight long years, it turns out that the previous president, a two headed mobster, oh excuse me I meant monster, named "Busheney" (a word which here means, according to the esteemed political writer Daniel Handler, "an evil man with no concern whatsoever for other people,") had not only killed over a million people in a far away foreign country in a war based on lies, he had imprisoned and tortured free speech and poisoned the air here at home, all in typical mad villain fashion.
But not only that, he also had enabled his friends, first in energy, then in military industrial complex, and finally in the banking and credit industries to rape the country so badly the entire world was near collapse from the damage. Then in suave Grover Cleveland style, Bush-Cheney waltzed out of office and into the rose-colored land of right-wing revisionist history, leaving the follow-up Obama administration to take the fall Benjamin Harrison style.
Not easily daunted, our heroic helmsman, Obama quickly enough came up with a stimulus package to save the day. For some. Various industries shared their “woe is me” stories. Even the porn industry at one point came groping and when a country’s porn industry needs a stimulus, it’s a sure sign somebody’s suffering from electile dysfunction.
And, speaking of boobs and pricks, Congress in particular got stimluted. Democrats launched all their tiny sailboats at once into the great big waters of the emergency spending tidal wave to save those flagging under the crippled and contracting economy. In the typical hastily hacked-together pork basket fashion that passes for legislation these days, hundreds of billions of dollars of proposed government spending were designed to intricately and elaborately defy understanding.
Since rushed legislation is notorious for being very long, very dull, and very difficult to read, in the end when the conference committee version had swelled to over 1100 pages and nearly 800 billion dollars, our legistators did the most reasonable thing and passed it without reading it; in much the same way the similarly long, and in the end equally expensive, Patriot Act had once been passed for a GOP president when the GOP was the party in power in Congress.
Never ones to tolerate tits for tats, or saucy geese for saucy ganders, Republicans donned their Kabuki makeup and pretended to care about the American people. Generational theft, they cried, insisting that spending money to educate our children was somehow worse than cutting taxes on wages they will be too ignorant to earn when we refuse to fund their schools.
To hear the Republicans tell it, the horrors poor Americans will encounter under Obama are too numerous to list, and you wouldn't even want me to describe the worst of it. In fact, as soon as the dust had settled and America had a stimulus on the way, the GOP took to the talk shows and called the final passage of the bill “a bad beginning.”
Lamenting Obama’s success at pushing legislation through Congress, while the opposing minority party sits on the sidelines and gripes about lack of bipartisanship even as they reject each overture to conciliation just doesn’t have much ring of sincerity from a party that had just enjoyed just such a power trip for the last 8 years while mismanaging their own jobs program, AKA Operation Iraqi Freedom.
The difference is, while in office, the GOP waged wars against the truth, against fiscal restraint, against science, against the environment, against Moslems world over, and all Americans who didn’t support them. Obama on the other hand will simply have both his hands full just waging war on the messes they left behind for him to clean up.
Still Republicans keep claiming to frame their arguments in such a way as to make them not sound like a continuation of the party of Bush, though they refused to change any rhetoric. They claim they are just trying to protect us from a hideously misguided Obama administration which will be little more than an unfortunate series of events. But they’ve got another think coming if they expect the American public to orphan Obama.
And so, for that very reason, I, your humble narrator, beg to differ as to whose misfortunes shall be documented over the next four years. Gauging from America’s still unwavering support for Obama and fresh pile of mud the GOP just kicked on their own steadily curdling brand name, if they think this first power struggle was a “bad beginning,” they’re going to hate the way this story ends.
--mikel weisser writes from the left coadst of AZ.