Snow and Jon on Bush, Blair and lapdogs
Hi. It’s been snowing all day here at Owl farm and it’s still coming down. I’m finishing up the selected interviews book, and sending the Woody Creeker out to print next week. Yep, it’s a beautiful day up here at Hunter’s den in the Rockies.
Good news –we have two new Owl Farm bloggers. In addition to my wonderful brother Peter, who will be posting periodically, also quoting Hunter will post from America’s great city of Omaha. Peter, even from a distance, has had no choice but to learn the bizzarities that go on at Owl Farm and is smart as hell. Starting today, i’m happy to announce, Jon Kenneth Williams, my former teacher, will be posting on Politics. He sends me some of the funniest political emails ever, so I asked him if he’d just go ahead and post some for you. He took a gulp of his rum, and kindly agreed.
He did his undergraduate degree (in English) at The George Washington University. And although his training is as a literary scholar and a medievalist, where he teaches and writes at Columbia University, he is weird enough for us. Promise.
Until next time, your friend,
Anita Thompson
So…….
Heeeers Jon:
George Bush’s Many Lapdogs
Discriminating readers may remember Jimmy Carter’s radio screed against Tony Blair earlier this year, in which our favorite peanut farmer verbally eviscerated Tony Blair and the British government’s uncritical support of the Iraq misadventure. In essence, Carter repeated and sharpened what is by now received wisdom, that Blair is George Bush’s lapdog and that his acquiescence to American belligerence in Iraq is morally unjustifiable.
But you have to hand it to the neo-cons and their friends: they’re masters of transmuting moral bankruptcy into comedy gold. Paul Krugman argued this in an excellent New York Times op-ed piece some months ago; he’s right, I think, that the misfortunes of the middle class, not to mention their foreign policy boondoggles, are, to conservatives, titter-worthy.
Thus it comes as no surprise to me that Tony Blair agreed to appear in this year’s Barneycam film, the White House’s Christmas video, which features George W. Bush’s actual lapdogs. Blair appears near the end of the seven-minute film, taking second billing to a country-and-western singer named Alan Jackson, whom I’d never heard of until now. One can sense in TB’s vacuous smile the sense that something went terribly, terribly wrong for the man who led the Labour Party out of the political wilderness and back into government after eighteen long years as Mrs Thatcher’s whipping boys.
And, of course, something did go terribly, terribly wrong for poor Mr Blair: he whored himself out to George Bush so thoroughly that we should be surprised to find him walking erect, much less doing anything else.
Anyway, all this talk about whoring has put me in mind of one of the good doctor’s essays from Kingdom of Fear, “Jesus Hated Bald Pussy.” Wondering who the fuck votes for these people, the doctor, typically, hit the nail on the head:
–Hunter S. Thompson, Kingdom of FearWe have become a Nazi monster in the eyes of the whole world—a nation of bullies and bastards who would rather kill than live peacefully. We are not just Whore for power and oil, but killer whores with hate and fear in our hearts. We are human scum, and that is how history will judge us….No redeeming social value. Just whores. Get out of our way, or we’ll kill you.
Well, shit on that dumbness. George W. Bush does not speak for me or my son or my mother or my friends or the people I respect in this world. We didn’t vote for these cheap, greedy little killers who speak for America today—and we will not vote for them again in 2002. Or 2004. Or ever.
Who does vote for these dishonest shitheads? Who among us can be happy and proud of having all this innocent blood on our hands? Who are these swine? These flag-sucking half-wits who get fleeced and fooled by stupid little rich kids like George Bush?
Who indeed? Plenty of people, as it turned out, hence the extension of the second Bush regime into 2009. I’ll post something about the Iowa caucuses in the next week, from Owl Farm.
Cheers,
Jon