I suppose looks are deceiving. My grandmother seemed harmless, but she used to lock my sisters in the basement if they screwed up their Acts of Contrition. And that was when she was in her bridge club and support hose years. Lord only knows what she was capable of  in her Joan Crawford/Aileen Wuornos prime. It’s a wonder my happy-go-lucky grandfather lived long enough to bury her.

I had to remember that last week when I watched Matt Lauer interview the adorable Sara Jane Moore. It’s become a cliché that the 1970s were “a very different time.” Indeed. I was in grade school, but I had two police citations and a few dozen drunks under my belt by the time I was nine, some recreational drug usage by eleven, my teenage sister dated her high school English teacher, and my best friend’s sister got pregnant at 13 by her 27-year-old cousin. Granted, there wasn’t a lot of gunplay at school, but on balance, it really was a very different time.

Still, even by the standards of an age where smoking was allowed in hospital rooms and a sandwich was something that occasionally accompanied one’s business lunch martinis, the thought of a matronly 45-year-old accountant and mother packing a .38 revolver and attempting a kill shot on the President Of The United States was fairly remarkable.

As a country, we weren’t used to our ladies being such public lunatics back then. It just wasn’t proper. The Sara Jane Moore-President Ford Assassination Attempt was one of the more extreme manifestations of this bizarre trend called “feminism,” to which Old School America was struggling to acclimate.

If this strange new breed of woman insisted on not being like our wives and mothers and sisters of yore–all gin and benzodiazepine during the day, and gin and tranquilizers at night when the husband and kids were home, and pliable and obedient all the time–then hopefully they’d limit this “Women’s Lib” thing to reading Cosmo and watching Maude on the black-and-white in their sewing rooms. We had certain expectations of our women of a certain age. It was hard enough listening to Bella Abzug or that mouthy Betty Friedan, but at least they looked like middle-aged women.

A traditionally masculine society wasn’t used to fearing its women. Men were still coming to grips with the surreal horrors of the next generation of the femme fatale–the Homicidal Sex Kitten. With the Patty Hearsts and Manson Girls of America, men were learning, if not to be utterly terrified of any woman under 25 who wasn’t Karen Carpenter, at least to recognize the warning signs that could save their lives. X carved in forehead = Stranger Danger. Beret and sub-machine gun? Sexy but smells like trouble, maybe.

In 1975, it was because of this perceptional evolution that none of us were all that surprised when waifish, crazy-eyed redhead Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme–herself a Manson Family alum–was arrested for dressing like a nun and drawing a Colt .45 on President Gerald Ford in a park in Sacramento.

But when a woman Time magazine described as “dumpy, determined” drew down on the President in San Francisco just a few weeks later (it was a rough September for Ford) it was a wake-up call that we really weren’t safe anywhere, from anyone. If a plump, middle-aged clone of your Aunt Lavelle could brazenly go after a President, then no man could be sure he was safe from any member of the fairer sex. Agnes from the checkout counter at the Piggly-Wiggly? Kindly Mrs. Farquar from your daughter’s Sunday School class? The widow Carnacky who sold handmade wind chimes for charity and read to the blind Wednesday afternoons at the VA hospital? Bets off. Suddenly, it was conceivable that any one of them was capable of planting a machete in your skull when you weren’t looking.

It’s not a widely-lauded event in the canon of women’s studies, but Ms. Moore’s attempt on the President’s life was a defining moment in female empowerment no less significant than Billie Jean King-Bobby Riggs “Battle Of The Sexes.” That a member of society who only a little over a half-century before wouldn’t have been allowed to vote for a President could now attempt to kill one is an achievement that gets short shrift in the pantheon of feminist accomplishment. Women had fought long and hard to earn the respect of a male-dominated world. To be capable of inspiring fear as well was something that their mothers and grandmothers could only dream of.

Released from prison in late 2007, a little over a year after the passing of Gerald Ford, Ms. Moore says she’s glad that she didn’t kill the President and concedes that attempting to murder the leader of the largest country in the free world was probably “wrong,” and attributes her action to “the tenor of the times.” (It’s a puzzle to imagine that it could be anything else. An accidental President and generally lovable bumbler, Gerald Ford was not a man who inspired any extreme degree of emotion, much less blood hatred, and two assassination attempts in a single month. To plan to stalk and slay this affable, soft-spoken President would be like setting out to murder Tom Bosley.)

Still, Ms. Moore says she has no regrets; that if it hadn’t been her, it would have been someone else. White haired and bespectacled, she is as pleasant and benign as one would expect from a woman entering her ninth decade. She accepts her notoriety, and save for an ill-fated escape attempt in 1979 (”If I’d known I was going to be caught so fast I would have stopped somewhere for a burger and a beer”), she served her sentence without complaint.

As a society, though, we tend to frown on things like attempted murder, especially the kind that get the Secret Service involved. So while Ms. Moore has earned her paragraph in the history books, that shout-out from Helen Reddy might not come in her lifetime. If they took a poll, though, she’d probably be America’s favorite female would-be Presidential assassin.

FUN FACT: Had Ms. Moore succeeded in murdering the President, she would have been responsible for a milestone in Vice Presidential history—Nelson Rockefeller would have have been the third consecutive President who had a stint as VP on his resume.

As much of an empathetic posture he managed to present, no one really expected him to spend his retirement building houses with Jimmy Carter, but after the bypass it was hard to see him chasing poon again. Elective office was probably out of the question, Hillary lost the nomination, and the only cooter he was going to get from now on would have to be under heavy medical supervision and promise a greater-than-average chance of a state funeral and decades-long rumors of a 25-year-old secretary with no secretarial skills getting a lifetime stipend from the Clinton Estate.

So what to do with a randy ex-President in his pasture years–too old for stud but still too young for the glue factory, and that last, glorious Preakness so far behind him that people recall it in the grainy Super-8 film of their memories? What is the passion, the life force that’s going to sustain him in the decades to come, where his posterity, his library, his grandchildren, and his national monuments await?

Anger, perhaps. Targeted, committed, methodic anger.

It’s a mood that once seemed ill suited to the notoriously smooth and seemingly imperturbable Clinton, from his days as baby-faced party wunderkind to 42nd President of the United States to much-beloved elder statesman. That unruffled countenance burst into flames mid-air about the time that the aftereffects of his heart surgery began and, presumably, the extra-marital blowjobs ended.

The new volatile Bill wasn’t widely noted at first. There was a nearly bottomless reservoir of goodwill the ex-President could draw on. When he pulled away from Washington, D.C. that bleak January day in 2001 was the last anyone could remember of peace and prosperity. His Republican successor was daily turning a once proud and generally well-liked country into an emotional, political, and diplomatic Superfund site. Two Democratic standard bearers would have been better with Marcia Clark and Chris Darden running their campaigns, turning two elections that should have been home run derbies into an embarrassing series of flaccid ground balls easily fielded by a small posse of angry pretend Christians with big bank accounts, an egomaniacal consumer advocate 30 years past his prime, and a nation taught to be terrified of a cave-dwelling diabetic its leaders were too disinterested to catch.

Clinton nostalgia was all the rage in 2004, and there was even wistful debate about whether John Kerry could appoint Clinton as his running mate. The fantasy baseball scenario was even more tantalizing to Bill Partisans with the added hypothetical of Kerry resigning on January 22, 2005 and handing the reins back to the Man from Hope. (Technically, it would probably have been Constitutional, but the Republicans would have been literally apoplectic, and a GOP body count of 1,000 Jonestowns might have given the Dems a numbers advantage in the mid-terms but would have started the kind of blood feud that has brought down entire civilizations).

As the 2008 elections drew near and the Bush Administration was running out of America to break, when it looked as if the Democrats couldn’t lose unless they nominated Marcia Clark and Chris Darden, the country seemed ready to stencil “The Clintons” back on the White House mail box. Of course, they couldn’t have Bill back, but with a term and change in the Senate under her belt, Hillary was newly beloved, and with Bill tagging along the country would be getting, again, “two for the price of one.”

But then that scrawny upstart from Chicago had to go and ruin everything. So recently adored, Bill Clinton was suddenly the favorite uncle letting the kids see him drunk for the first time. “Managing Bill” became a recurring, nearly daily theme on a mortally wounded Hillary campaign that for months refused to accept last rites. The once rock-solid President who endured years of battering at the hands of Rush Limbaugh, Richard Melon Scaife, Kenneth Starr, Tom DeLay, Newt Gingrich and a million fellow travelers with an ever wink and a smile, was suddenly lashing out at the slightest provocation–the media, Hillary’s staff, Barack Obama. Some say he even cost Hillary the VP nomination because the last thing Barack Obama wanted to find in his office the first thing every morning was a stack of hectoring, second-guessing emails and text messages from Bill.

With a confused Democratic electorate grasping for answers of why their beloved Babe Ruth had turned into Ty Cobb, Vanity Fair’s Todd Purdum issued a scathing prognosis in a 10,000 VF piece last year that Clinton’s 2004 bypass surgery changed him irreparably, manifesting itself first in a sort of “post-partum depression” common among bypass recipients, and exacerbated by the powerful repertoire of mood-altering medications that ruled the President’s days.

In an effort to refute Purdum’s thesis about the former President’s anger issues, Clinton offered an immediate rebuttal–a spitting, livid rebuttal.

For a nation of erstwhile fans desperate for answers that weren’t there, it was easy, albeit heartbreaking, to resign themselves to the reality of their once-revered President beset with ever-worsening fits of distemper, sure to devolve, into seething hatred, paroxysms of rage, and finally, madness and death.

What no one really considered, though, was that this might not be self-destruction, but reconstruction. Where many saw a downward spiral, few saw a man in flux, adjustment, learning to live with the New Him like any other man, woman, or child who has been confronted with a life-altering condition. The President was simply trying to find his new level.

To anyone really paying attention, it seems like his years of unmanaged fury are behind him. Don’t believe pie-eyed Pollyanna jobs like Peter Baker’s upcoming New York Times magazine profile on the former President, “The Mellowing of Bill Clinton.” Read between the lines and you’ll see that this isn’t a man mellowed, but a man recalibrated and rejuvenated. Bill Richardson has already been put on notice that his disloyalty in endorsing Barack Obama in last year’s primary will not be forgotten–ever. And Ted Kennedy? He’s going to have to do a lot better than a brain tumor to win any sympathy from the former President after the knife he planted between the Clinton shoulder blades with his own Obama endorsement.

To the uneducated, anger seems contra-indicated to living a long and healthy life after a very real episode of heart trauma, but there is a school of thought that says anger, properly managed, can be a force as restorative, enriching, and life-giving as tai chi, yoga, reiki, or any of the so-called “healing arts.”

Regardless of what the many psychologists and cardiologists say, it’s not a bad way to live, really. Buddy Rich carried a rage that caused miscarriages and ear-bleeding headaches within a four-county radius, and he practically achieved the male life expectancy of his day. Imagine if he’d learned how to tap that seething hatred and use it for good.

It’s not an easy haul, of course. It’s still a nascent science. Due to time constraints in posting this piece, I was unable to solicit the opinion of the former President or his staff on my own assessments of the President’s dispositive turnaround. I can only appreciate what I observe and what I know of the President’s hardscrabble political underpinnings.

Of course, it’s highly improbable that he’ll take his grudge with Ted Kennedy to a physical extreme, but it’s unfashionable, impolitic, and even of questionable humanity to speak ill of the lion of the Senate, the last stalwart of Camelot. With his upcoming comments in the Baker NYT piece, the President has crossed a verboten line with restraint but resolve, and is demonstrably in control of his bile in a way that he wasn’t on the campaign trail last year. Yet by that very control, he’s clearly indicated that not only does he have no intention of mellowing, but he’s going to take his anger and make it his cudgel.

And he’s only teed off on the terminally ill Kennedy and doughy but benign turncoat Richardson. Imagine what he has percolating for the likes of Starr, Gingrich, and company.

“Mellow”? Hardly. Surly to bed, surly to rise, and sleeping with the enmity all the while have reinvented Bill Clinton.

When I was a child, I was cute and precocious and smart. I scored very high on all my early tests, and my parents and teachers loved me.

When I was eight years old, I was cited by the police twice in two nights, first for shoplifting at the local Safeway and the next night for throwing a brick through the window of the Lutheran Church–while my parents were back in Iowa burying my grandmother (and this was just three weeks after I lit an empty licorice pack and tossed it into a dry patch of woods abutting an apartment building, calling out all of Hood River’s fire engines–they never nailed me for this one, but I was questioned heavily, and everyone involved always wondered).

It didn’t ruin my life, though. I may not have realized why, but I sensed early that being a young, straight, white male meant that I didn’t have a higher standard to live up to. I was a complete fuck-up, but I didn’t have any predetermined suspicion against me, so all was forgiven, and I was free to move on with my life. I could have become a pillar of the community, a Mayor or a Congressman or a Senator even, if I hadn’t chosen to squander my second and third and fourth chances on an adult life of alcohol and sloth and jobs that were either beneath me or that I held onto by my fingernails through a combination of obfuscation and glad-handing, hoping no one would figure out that I had little clue what I was doing.

The Great American Tradition had always meant being able to be a Caucasian screw-up and never having to say you’re sorry, and that tradition didn’t start to fracture until Joe McCarthy and, later, Watergate.

Of course, everything would have been different for me if I’d been black or gay. America has gone kicking and grumbling toward giving either constituency any power, influence, or respect at all. If I’d been either of the oft-affronted constituencies, I might have thought differently. And I would have had a lot more to answer to.

I can’t speak to what it’s like to be a gay male in 2009. But I’m tired of hearing about how The Gays are going to destroy our society. I thought we were finally past this madness, until Proposition 8 passed in California on November 4, in what was otherwise an almost-unblemished referendum on positive human values. So it was an undeniable point of pride in Portland, Oregon, when this past May we elected the first openly gay mayor of a major American city. He was elected in the primary, in fact, by a margin that didn’t require competing in the general election.

So this should have been a great week for not just Portland at large, but Portland’s gay community specifically. Sort of like, well, I don’t know…maybe if we put a black man in the White House or something.

But if you Google “portland gay” this week, you’re going to get a very different set of results (though Steam Portland is offering three free months to new members who sign up before January 20th).

Our new mayor, Sam Adams–openly, proudly gay in a city that a city that doesn’t judge its citizens or leaders on the basis of their sexuality or their peccadilloes that have nothing to do with their capability to govern–fell into that eons-old middle-aged male trap of thinking with his penis, and as the pattern goes, finds himself in very hot water and his constituents on hold.

I hate to side with the scolds, especially after living through the Clinton Impeachment debacle. It was common knowledge for years that he was dipping his pen everywhere else but in Hillary’s ink, and no one cared as long as their 401(k)s were going through the roof, and our kids weren’t dying en masse overseas. When Ken Starr, after years and years of flailing and never connecting with anything but the wall, finally came up with a handful of blowjobs from a then-22 year-old intern that Clinton lied to cover up, nobody cared. He had a 69% approval rating when he was impeached by a Republican Congressional cabal that had been trying to nail him since before he took office, and the Americans would have none of it. The Republicans got clobbered in the ‘98 midterms and lost their Speaker (and his successor) in the process.

The message was clear: As long as it doesn’t cost me money, it’s a man’s private business what happens between his penis and his wife/buxom mistress/Denny’s parking lot prostitute/cabana boy.

That said, I have a very different take on Portland’s (latest) sex scandal. Our local affair is all bad, though, and so very tawdry–and possibly illegal. We’re not just talking marriage vows violated or a chowder stain on a blue dress. And Sam Adams will be neither the first nor the last gay middle-aged man tantalized by the allure of an attractive young man, and normally I would be all for it if it would help him govern more effectively.

The problem is, first, that the object of the new Mayor’s lust was barely an 18-year-old man at the time, and was possibly 17 years old when they consummated. We’re a little funny that way when it comes to our kids. If you don’t believe that, you can call Roman Polanski and ask him–but call soon, because it’s almost 10:00 PM in France right now. His victim is in her 40s now, and he still can’t come back.

The Ick Factor is fairly high here, in large part because the Mayor’s actions hovered perilously close to classic sexual predator behavior. He brought the boy into his office when he was 17 years old, lavished him with gifts under the pretense of “mentoring” him, and drove 50 miles to attend the boy’s 18th birthday party–very shortly before the then City Councilman saw the statutory green light to consummate his sexual relationship with the newly-legal–and I’m not making this up–Beau Breedlove. His staff at the time was very nearly apoplectic at the perceived impropriety and urged the Councilman to get the kid a job at Abercrombie & Fitch and get him him far away from the office, even if he wasn’t slathering him in peanut oil and having him bring him Mai Tais.

The other problem is that the Mayor lied about the affair to get elected. Repeatedly. His primary opponent, Bob Ball, raised concerns about the relationship in 2007 and was dismissed for smearing his opponent for political gain.

To make matters worse, one of the reporters who was relentlessly pursuing the story was hired by Adams after his election to be his director of Sustainable Development–even though the 28-year-old had no experience in direction, sustainability, or development, and the $55,000 salary she would earn under Adams was far higher than what she was earning as a reporter for the Portland Mercury.

So once again, it’s not just the crime (if there even was one, but it’s very close, and in any case it doesn’t help the issue) but the cover-up. And if I were a gay man I would be livid this week. We have enough problem with knuckle-dragging morons in this country terrified that legitimizing Gayness will be the end of civilization as we know it, and that God-fearing straight men will have their wives and girlfriends taken away to lesbian training camps and the only sex they’ll ever know for the rest of their lives will involve biting down hard on a pillow or with their face pressed against a hard, cold bathroom tile floor. Here you have the first openly gay mayor of a major American city–and this is the baggage he brings. If this passes, I know you have the goods to govern this city effectively and even be a great mayor, but Jesus. Thanks for giving the morons cause to say “See, I told you so!” So very disappointing.

*Thanks to Neil Kerr

The harder they come, the harder they fall. November 4th finished a profound housekeeping that was set in motion in March 2005 when former physician turned Senator Bill Frist diagnosed Terri Schiavo from the Senate floor (at the same time prescribing what he thought was an invigorating elixir to his nascent Presidential campaign that would leave it dead on the examining room floor).

When the mid-term elections rolled around in November 2006, they watched the ones they thought were their Best And Brightest slink away in ignominy. A few like George Allen, Rick Santorum, and Frist were just the year before giddy with the delusion that they would be taking the oath come January 20, 2009.

That night was a stunning reversal of fortune for a party that rolled out of 2004 snorting the lines Karl Rove was chopping up for them about becoming a “permanent majority.” In January 2006, you couldn’t find even a handful of Republicans who would have thought twice about hiring a crew to take a reciprocating saw to their living room wall if they wanted a new picture window–never mind if they were renting. Hell, they weren’t going anywhere!

Well, long story short, besides the uptick in sales of scotch, “Your father needs to be alone right now” was probably an oft-uttered phrase in red states and districts all over America during Christmas 2006. And FOX News HR department was never busier.

Imagine the surprise of those who survived only to realize that, contrary to so much electoral history, this wasn’t a one-time bloodbath. It’s not uncommon for the majority party to suffer a mid-term battering, even the occasional bludgeoning, but Americans are notorious for their political buyer’s remorse. Chili dogs don’t roil the American intestines as quickly as their politicians.

Erstwhile Golden Boy Bill Clinton had his organs (in this case, his majority Congress) removed and handed to him in 1994, but the ink was barely dry on Newt Gingrich’s new mandate when he challenged the President to a game of fiscal chicken, and veered off into a phone pole. Whatever Clinton had done to spark the public ire was forgiven and he shellacked Bob Dole in 1996, as the Republicans lost seats in the House.

History would have suggested that the Republicans would have come back strong this year, after the Democrats took the pistol and blew off their own requisite number of toes. Even the flaccid stewardship of Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, though, couldn’t bring the voters back to that much-ballyhooed Big Tent when the economy cratered and business behemoths that for years had been declaring that an unregulated marketplace was the most miraculous balancing force on God’s earth were suddenly pleading for help from big government.

Add to the mix a charismatic young black man with a gorgeous young family, the ability to draw Pope-sized crowds, an oratorical prowess not seen since Mario Cuomo, and a stump speech that assailed the effects of years of Republican politics on the lunch bucket and mini-van crowd, and the Republicans were all but propped up for another shellacking. And that was even before they selected Sarah Palin.

Put it all together and that’s a lot of carnage over a relatively short period of time. The Republican Party is in little better shape today than Beirut in 1983. Jack Abramoff is prison, Alberto Gonzalez has joined the ranks of the unemployable, Tom DeLay is out of power and off writing grumpy books, Marilyn Musgrave ended the hostage standoff over her office and is conducting her vitriol against gay marriage and stem cell research from the relatively benign of ranks of the civilian, and on and on and on.

But this is America, and we have to have a vocal minority. The opposition has to start rebuilding somewhere. Coulter, Hannity, and Limbaugh don’t seem to count anymore. After years of the same shtick, they’ve become caricatures. Their audiences have the same expectations as the people who go to see Gallagher smash watermelons. It’s old, they know the routine by heart, but it’s comforting and reassuring, like an old warm blanket.

So, for anyone wondering about the new face of the Republican opposition, look no further than the snarling visage of Louisiana Senator David Vitter. Twice in the last week, Vitter has stepped up and all but proclaimed himself the leader of the resistance, first calling against any allocation of the remaining TARP funds and then being the lone member of either party to vote against Hillary Clinton’s confirmation as Secretary Of State.

We’ve seen the messenger, but it’s still not clear what the message is going to be. “Government is not the answer” doesn’t even make it up the flagpole in the wake of AIG, Citigroup, Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, etcetera. “Standing up for the working class” is just as rickety, with much of the working class seeing their former houses boarded up while watching finance executives clamoring for their $10 million bonuses. “Family values?” That one’s dead on the side of the highway in Wasilla, Alaska. Besides, given the address books his name has appeared in David Vitter won’t even visit the same time zone as that one.

It’s been suggested that Vitter is facing a primary fight in 2010 and doesn’t want to be outmaneuvered on the right, but it’ probably not worth a lot of conjecture at this point. The position exists and someone’s going to fill it. There always has to be an opposition, and over the last few decades, it’s been fashionable to be as rancorous as possible. That tone may not carry as much heft as it used to. With more than enough problems to send the delivery truck around everyone’s neighborhood twice a day, and even the rich getting ripped off, a lot of people are going to be inclined to relegate contrarian bomb-throwing to the “not helpful” category.

A healthy questioning of issues is essential for any functioning democracy, unless it’s merely surliness for its own sake. We all learned at an early age that we could do dramatic and attention-getting things with our urine and feces, but most of us learned early on that it served little purpose to do. Some have taken longer than others to learn that. Some never learn. But, if only for a brief few years in time while people are more inclined to work together to figure out how to restore solvency to the country, it’s a little safer to walk into the fray at least. Just pay no attention to the man from Louisiana.

I didn’t drink that much on Election Night, but I think I got a contact high from the hoopla. I’ve had a lot of shit cleanup jobs in my life, but I’ve never had a mess that kept me busy for more than a few weeks. Even if he didn’t have the job yet, I figured he’d have all the Glad bags filled and be hosing off the mop by now, and that he’d get to the basement later.

But I guess, like the rest of the country, I greeted the New Year with my first massive hangover of 2009 after the last delirious drunk of 2o08. I got out of bed on January 1…and my country was a fucking mess. Who the hell did I invite over last night? And the last eight years?

It’s not a happy time to be a President-elect of the United States, unless you’re coming to the job with pixie dust and a magic wand (which, even if they don’t work, is still a refreshing change from our last President-elect, who came to the job with Rohypnol and 282 million ball-gags). Every foreclosure that a realtor finds with its fixtures stripped and rotten with garbage, gang graffiti, and human feces is a timely and topical metaphor for the mess that Barack Obama is discovering now that he’s taken possession of his new house.

I can’t speak for the rest of tenuously-employed America (and except for process servers and collections employees, everyone in 2009 is tenuously-employed), but I miss the good old days when I used to be able to drive into work and decide if I wanted to skip my exit and head to the beach or some tavern near the docks that opens at 7:30 AM to serve the graveyard crowd.

Because, whoop-de-doo. It was 1999, and there was so much fat in the land that we couldn’t eat it all. I had a warm body with a pulse and I’d never committed sexual battery in the company break room. I could get hired somewhere else tomorrow. The only people who couldn’t get a job were the ones who would cop to a nail gun assault on their application and inquire about the company’s workplace open-container policy. I still knew four convenience stores in my neighborhood that would have hired me with that jacket. And even if everything else washed out, there was still Wal-Mart.

Of course, I never wanted to lose my job and still kept up my Cal Ripken attendance record, but it was nice to know that if I did want to put an ice pick in the back of the head of my work ethic, I could, and I probably wouldn’t be let go. Besides, the company I was with did have a liberal open-container policy, so if I really wanted to get my swerve on during the day, I could just wait until 2:00 PM when we were permitted to tap the keg of IPA in the refrigerator in the employee kitchen.

In any case, it’s a very different world ten years hence. My commute is five times as far as it was then–you can even discern a change in dialect between my neighborhood and where my office is. If there are free Tootsie Rolls in the break room, I’ll pass them by lest I dislodge a filling and have to put myself further in the hole with uninsured dental work. Sick days? That’s a dangerous roll of the dice for a contractor like myself. Unless I happen to have caught a fire axe through my sternum, I’ll be at work.

There were hoozahs across the land Thursday when President-elect Obama gave his morning speech on the economy at George Mason University. But it was equal parts encouraging and unsettling when he dropped the phrase “fear itself” into his address. It’s music to the ears of hopeful progressives to hear a leader invoke the memory of FDR in these turbulent times, but when President Roosevelt uttered those two words, much of the country was still years away from being able to afford to keep its electricity turned on for consecutive months.

And just to make sure we understood what we’re facing, he added, “it is altogether likely that things may get worse before they get better.” That’s not good news for any urban and suburban Americans who have already started pondering the logistics of shooting their food from their front porches.

The downside of this can-do nation is that we have a tendency towards irrational assurance. As much as we want to be pie-eyed and calling for Mimosas, celebrating that the election results of nine weeks ago heralded breakfast in bed for a nation awakening from a nightmare, God has since slung a few reminders–in the form of Bernie Madoff, Rod Blagejovich, and the mess in Gaza that we can’t ignore–that we’re still sleeping in a bed with soiled sheets. And the washer’s broken and the maid can’t make it into work because of the clobbering, holiday-crippling weather in nearly every county in the nation.

We did buy Hope on November 4th, but in this new credit-strapped America, it’s clear that we may have bought it on layaway.

So, we’re deep in the rough. There might not be any miracles forthcoming, but we can say a prayer for our new President that he can return us to a day when we could do what modern Americans do best: Photocopy our genitals, look at pornography when we’re supposed to be responding to a client RFP, call in sick so we can stay home and watch Law And Order reruns, have our co-workers cover for us while we go and nap in our car; take for granted our livelihoods, and treat with disdain our indispensable roles in what makes this country work.

Speaking as just one hopeful American, I really miss those days of not feeling we have to give a shit. And who knows? After this mess, maybe next time around we wlll.

We were so young and the world was a much more hopeful place.

This was a drawing from a simpler, more innocent time. Wayne and I met in November 1987 and our first real collaboration landed about a month later, when I asked him to draw an idea I had for a Christmas card which I couldn’t do myself because I couldn’t even draw badly and was hard-pressed to try my hand at Photoshopping my idea, if for no other reason than I didn’t have a computer and that Photoshop didn’t exist yet.

Wayne and I took my embryo of an idea and we sussed it out together, and brought it to fruition. We wanted to evoke an era when Norman Rockwell was the artist-in-residence at all of our Christmases and his poignant illustrations reminded us of community, family, and the possibilities inherent in the American Dream.

Sure, it wasn’t easy, in the wake of the worst stock market crash in American history, with a discredited President in the waning days of his administration (though not leaving soon enough for many people’s tastes), with unemployment soaring, and America’s pre-eminent economists portending an economic crisis as the most serious we’ve seen since the 1930s.

Thank God those dark memories are a tiny speck in our rearview.

But even in these different times, we have new challenges.

That’s why today, in December 2008, we believe it’s important to remember those uncertain times 21 Christmases ago, and how we rose above. I know our vintage holiday card seems a bit quaint and Pollyanna in retrospect, but now, as then, we want to remind our own friends and family–and now, our many, many Internet friends–of the hope of a Christmas that was all about snow and pajamas and presents and stockings on the mantle, and the possibility of a tomorrow every bit as bright and warm and promising as all those idyllic Christmases of our youth.

Happy holidays, to you and yours, from the Veeps.us family.

“This is a sad day for Illinois government. Governor Blagejovich has taken us to a truly new low.”

That was U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald (of Scooter Libby fame) decrying the corruption that’s rendered the unpronounceable governor’s office a political SuperFund site that may just have to be fenced off behind a thicket of barbed wire and yellow tape instead of cleaned up. Oh, I don’t know that seems something of a hyperbolic statement. The Governor’s hair might be a new low–honestly, it’s even worse than Donald Trump’s–but his corruption? Please. This is Illinois we’re talking about.

From a strictly academic point-of-view, I suppose we should all be upset about this. Corruption, influence peddling, general wrongdoing. It’s terrible. And tragic, also.

Okay, I tried. I can’t do the Rick From Casablanca moment and pronounce myself, shocked, shocked. This is Illinois politics, and if it weren’t as dirty as Burning Man, that would be news. This is the state that is the Midwestern field office for American political corruption. Hell, since they took down Tammany Hall and Boss Predergast, it’s the undisputed Washington, D.C. of graft. This is a city where columnist Mike Royko once wrote of a particularly crooked police officer whose own friends said of him “He(’ll) steal a hot stove, and go back inside for the smoke.”

It’s a damned shame that Mike Royko isn’t around to witness the core meltdown of Governor Rod Blagejovich. He would have had such fun. But he wouldn’t have been surprised.

In a 1978 article in the Chicago Sun-Times, Royko noted with amused exasperation the naivete of an ERA lobbyist who was frustrated that their bundle of money that they were pouring into advertising and lobbyist fees wasn’t guaranteeing the votes that she wanted. She was aghast at Royko’s suggestion that a smartly-placed $5,000 in the right palm could give the EPA ratification effort at least a little traction.

She didn’t get it. In case the rest of the world didn’t get it either, Royko elaborated, “That’s the problem with the ERA and most do-gooders. They are earnest, diligent, and energetic, but they don’t have much sense.

“Throughout the history of this state, sly people have been getting what they want out of Springfield. They haven’t done it by being honest, earnest, diligent, and energetic…They have done it by throwing a shoebox full of money throgh the transom of a Springfield hotel room.”

She was still incredulous, so just to ram the point home, he consulted a lobbyist friend and told him about the Pollyannaish nature of the woman from the ERA lobby, and their massive $200,000 war chest that they had devoted to Illinois alone. The lobbyist was practically wistful, “For $200,000,” he said. “We’d not only get her the ERA ratified, we could get her a highway.”

I think we’re missing the issue in our indignation over the Governor’s transgressions. (Yes, it’s reprehensible that he’d hold the construction of a children’s hospital hostage until he received proper tribute.) A goldfish is going to swim and a cat is going to lie around and claw the furniture when you aren’t looking. A politician, while hired by the voters to take care of the public’s business, is probably going to prioiritize the business he or she takes care of based on the level of influence exerted upon or inducements offered to them. If their job or their winter trips to Majorca are jeopardized if they don’t act, then they are going to act.

That doesn’t mean that they aren’t going to also do the things within their purview for which they don’t receive anything above and beyond their daily pay.  They just aren’t going to address them with as much urgency.

As much as we want to believe in the purity model of public service, if that’s what you’re really expecting from your government, you’ll sooner get a straight answer about the Kennedy or Allende assassinations.

No. The real problem with Rod Blagejovich is that he broke the compact. He could have done his job quietly, taken his money quietly, accepted his tribute quietly. That wasn’t enough.

Even worse than that, his behavior the last several weeks has suggested that there might be something to the murmurs floating around Springfield and greater Illinois and now the country: That the Governor has gone insane.

How else to explain it? He could have accepted a modest fifty or sixty large under the table, or a $300,000-a-year job for his wife, six steps removed from his actual part of the transaction. He could have tossed the expected bone–and hidden a fat steak around the corner, out of view of the judgmental eye of the media, and around another two corners from that sent his aide-de-camp to pick up the nondescript brown bag left on top of the garbage can, left their explicitly but discretely for his honor the Governor.

That is what the sane and careful public servant would have done. But even the sober and responsible in Illinois are saying it: He hasn’t gone dirty–he was always dirty. This is different. He’s actually lost his mind.

If it was a secret to anyone, it was the worst-kept secret in American politics since the fact that Richard Nixon had jowls that Governor Blagojevich has been under investigation since by federal authorities since 2003. Wiretaps, office surveillance, potential state’s witnesses–these aren’t new arrows in American justice’s investigatory quiver. It’s equal parts hubris, greed, and stupidity that, with the knowledge that your office has been under investigation for nearly six years, that you would actually use your office space, including your phones, to stamp and shout and call the President-elect a “motherfucker” and insist that the new President’s gratitude for his desired appointement of his Senate replacement wasn’t enough.

“They’re not willing to give me anything except appreciation. fuck them….I’ve got this thing and it’s fucking golden, and, uh, uh, I’m just not giving it up for fucking nothing. I’m not gonna do it. And, and I can always use it. I can parachute me there.”

I understand gubernatorial leadership is a demanding job, but if this is going to be your agenda, at least set aside a few hours to catch an episode of two of The Sopranos when Tony visits Uncle Junior at his doctor’s appointments, because he knows that it’s the one place that there won’t be wiretaps.

In a state notorious for stupid corruption, this is stupidity on a grand scale. If they awarded gold medals for this kind of behavior, there would be no Wheaties box for Michael Phelps.

It was escpecially poetic that the Governor got his bracelets on December 9th, which was designated by UN General Assembly Resolution 58/4, on October 31, 2003, to become “International Anti-Corruption Day.” That Blagejovich’s arrest landed this past Tuesday wasn’t an accident, nor was the fact that Wednesday was his birthday. As dour and driven as he seems, Patrick Fitzgerald isn’t without a mischievous sense of humor.

Life is going to go on as usual in Illinois and in Illinois politics. But Blagojevich, in his deranged overreach of the dark but lucrative powers that the governorship of Illinois affords any electee, Republican or Democrat, has queered the patch for his party for the next 25 years. And it’s worse than that for his successor. Any upstart who wins the next gubernatorial race in Illinois who thinks he can exercise his implied institutional right to fill his shoebox with the tribute of patronage and legislative favors is going to be holding an empty cup, and if they have the sense that God gave your average mule, they won’t make a stink about it, but they don’t, so they will.

And Illinois will lather, rinse, and repeat, and the state penal system will have a very solid argument for a special wing for its homegrown elected officials, finally, because one of their own–after a storied legacy of public servants brazenly stealing hot stoves–went one step too far and filed a medical claim because his hands got burned.

Many have talked starry-eyed about Barack Obama’s alleged brilliance. That remains to be proven, but to date the smartest thing he’s ever done for his ethical legacy, is to carry himself as far away from Illinois as possible. Not that he should forget the power of a well-placed $20 bill, though. Discretion really is the better part of valor.

It wasn’t long ago that Rod had dreams of the White House–he might still; he’s that far off the rails. But he’s not going to get close to Washington anytime soon. Rod is going to jail. It’s surely not the legacy he was after, but a legacy is a legacy, right? Unfortunately, he will be the third man to hold his seat in the last 35 years to also take up residence in the Illinois correctional system.

While that distinction is out of play, he can at least take pride in that he’s the most dimly-lit Illinois chief executive ever to get his marching orders to the big house. Consider it Witness Protection, though, because the magnifying glasses are going to be focusing on the Windy City, thanks to his hubris, and changing the way everyone from his day forward does business. He might find his place in history yet.

I drive a lot. More than the average person.

I bought my latest car in July 2007. I had a relatively short commute for a short time, and with an ice-storm freeway accident that left my rig in the body shop for a month, I’ve still put 22,000 miles on my car in just under seventeen months. Due to an ill-considered lifestyle choice following my divorce and God evening things out after my cushy five years working out of my home (following another five years where I had the luxury of walking to work most days), I now drive from Earth to Neptune and back at least six times a week. And given the chokepoint I have to endure entering and leaving my atmosphere, there are apparently a lot of other people doing the same.

God bless my handsome and dependable 1992 Honda Accord LX, but it’s a 1992 car with 173,271 miles on it. If it were a human, it would be attaining that venerability that Studs Terkel began confronting a decade or so ago. That’s not bad, because Studs Terkel at 90 could have tossed the salads of men forty years his junior. But even Studs knew his chassis only had so many miles on it (”Hey, you know that old Ivory Soap slogan–’99 and 44/100% pure?’” he asked an interviewer several years ago. “Well, I’m 99 and 44/100% dead.”),  and he finally blew his last gasket just a few months ago.

So, I’ve been seeing a car loan in my future. Except the word on the street is that they don’t offer such things anymore.

The chiefs at Ford, GM, and Chrysler came to Congress a few weeks ago, tittering at the possibility that they could get an enormous ladle or two from the kind of no-questions-asked gravy trough that Hank Paulson negotiated on his way out the door, shaking the death rattle that the American economy would die like a gutshot dog if we didn’t give him three-quarters of a trillion dollars to slap the paddles on the chest of the most high-profile money train in the free world. He was mostly correct, but that didn’t stop him from unilaterally deciding that the first $350 billion should go to banks so they could vacuum up dying smaller banks, and taking their newly fattened balance sheet into the cold, cold winter that is descending upon us.

(Vegas money is on Hank Paulson being hired by a prominent investment bank by 12:01 PM on January 20, and no one is taking the over.)

They didn’t do much to win sympathy for their cause, especially with their politically retarded decision to fly into Washington, to plead corporate poverty, on their private corporate jets. The poorest of the three–GM CEO Rick Wagoner–winged in on an elegantly appointed Gulfstream IV, which retails at something in the neighborhood of $30 million (roughly the equivalent of 734 2009 GMC Acadias).  They were sent away with empty cups, ordered to go back home and figure out precisely how much they needed; why, in essay form with appropriate bullet points, they needed it; and how they were going to justify the American taxpayer’s investment in their rescue, other than a headshake, a hand through their hair, and a shrugging, “…Well, otherwise, we’re fucked.”

They came back with numbers today–and they came in hybrids, having flown coach from Detroit. Better form, but 61% of Americans would still prefer to see these men carpooling for the rest of their days in a ‘93 GEO Metro–and they would have been better off if they’d done that for their trip to Washington. What is escaping the angry masses–understandably, granted–is that three million lost jobs down the chain would have most of us running around in public parks looking for food to kill. Perspective, people. Please.

But their constituents are still angry, and it’s not certain which way Congress is going to go.

I’ve got a car to buy sometime in the next six or eight months, though. There is nothing that would give me more joy than to see Rick Wagoner buying house-label green beans and a 40-pack of Jenny-O turkey franks at WinCo, but if the parents have sullied the bathwater, it’s neither prudent nor Christian to dispose of the wailing infant when we drain the tub.

Besides satisfying my baseline imperative of getting to work everyday (I checked GoogleMaps–it’s going to take me 2 hours and 16 minutes to get there via public transit, and 2 days and 4 hours walking [seriously–granted the pedestrian routes are sketchy after you get across the I-5 Interstate Bridge, but they’ve routed me around Hood River and Mount Hood, via the Hood River Oregon-Washington Bridge, which not only doesn’t allow pedestrians, but is precisely two Citroens wide–and it’s a two-lane bridge–and is equally as terrifying to drive across as walk. But that’s another blog), it keeps good Americans working, even if I buy another Honda.

If I have to go into the unnecessary extrapolation, when good Americans work, my tax dollars and yours don’t have to pay for them to collect unemployment and sit home and watch Montel (not that all of them will do that, but it’s far too easy to do, and you know what they say about the Devil and idle hands). Even better, if they’re at their jobs every day, they’re not only paying taxes (which now don’t have to go for people to sit home and watch Montel), but they’re earning money that they will pour back into the economy.

If it helps, let’s say we’re thinking of the children here. In this metaphor, the children are the autoworkers (and if you’re drinking the right-wing Kool-Aid, they aren’t making $70 an hour or anything close to it). Granted, there have been few parents in history who have deserved to be Mendendezed as much as the American car CEOs who presided over the renaissance of the SUV and the Hummer. The autoworkers are neither Eric nor Lyle, though, and not a jury in the United States would convict them if they unloaded a shotgun into the backs of their unsuspecting corporate parents.

When their industry dies, Ramen sales will skyrocket, and you and I will be fighting over those $5 48-count packs of Spicy Shrimp amidst the denuded shelves of what used to be our plentiful supermarkets.

Let’s give this some honest thought before we call our Congresspersons and tell them to let the auto industry perish. This is our last real industry that makes anything. We’re still in for some scary straits even if our befuddled, subpart American auto industry survives, but if it doesn’t, we ratchet up from scary to terrifying. Even Paul Krugman is scared. So, if we’re going to wind up living in these things, wouldn’t it be nice to come home every night to that new car smell?

It was November 5, just fourteen hours after America had elected its first African-American President. There were a few morons cutting eyeholes in their pillow cases and lamenting the certain befouling of what was left of the last few megaliters of pure white blood left in this great country after the man in the Black House ordered the conscription of their Prussian Blue daughters to make babies for the HNIC. But by and large, the country was trying to catch its breath, having a post-coital smoke, or running out of scratch paper trying to write down all the new Democrats who had won office the night before.

So, just for the hell of it, I posted my status on one of my Internet pages that “Bill is…fed up with the do-nothing Obama Administration.” You could presume, if I were a smarter man, that I was making a comment, Jonathan Swift-style, on the perils of irrational expectations. Yes, we’d elected the new President on his promises of hope and change, but…where the hell was it anyway? Huh? We’re waiting!

I made no pretense that I might be articulating a grander statement. I was just having fun.

But Jesus. I got a handful of comments along the lines of, “Yeah! Big fucking talk!!! I just HOPE I don’t get ass-raped, but I’m not counting on it. Fucked by The Man again!” That flurry was amusing and passed soon enough. But…

We’re not even a month off of the most historic election and still another 50 days before Barack Obama even takes office. He’s done more in four weeks than his soon-to-be-predecessor has done since the last mid-term elections. Unlike the last Democratic president-elect, he’s actually using the runup to his inauguration to recruit his staff rather than cashing in his electoral goodwill on donor’s wives and discrete stewardesses and legislative aides who don’t mind finding their way to his hotel via the backseat floor of an anonymous Crown Victoria and the Marriott’s laundry room entrance.

As much as I respect Rachel Maddow, though, it’s all I can do not to flip the station over to Hannity or Boortz when she starts her good-natured lament that Barack Obama is already handing the New United States he just won back to the American Right because he has been handing the plum assignments of his Administration over to the less-reprehensible members of Team Bush and the triangulate foot-soldiers of the Clinton era.

Rachel Maddow, for all her liberal bonafides, was one of four people who weren’t Steve Schmidt, Tucker Bounds, or Fred Barnes who weren’t predicting a Barack Obama victory. I’m not sure if that and her current railing against Obama’s isn’t part of some superstitious reverse-psychology hoping that Obama, Biden, Bush, Cheney, Nancy Pelosi, Robert Byrd, Condoleeza Rice, Henry Paulson, Hillary Clinton, and Eric Holder, all get assassinated this month and the government is left to a power struggle that’s going to roil for months in the U.S. courts while Michael Mukasey and Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne go hammer-and-tong over the rights to the White House.

I don’t know that I didn’t see this coming. The left-wing grumpiness, I mean. And most of them will concede that in not packing the Administration with the left-wing he isn’t exactly loading his team up on the right and betraying his campaign promises. But the corpse of John McCain’s candidacy isn’t even cold yet–hell, Sarah Palin is still getting press daily and Joe The Plumber just released a book he allegedly oversaw the writing of (even if the only writing he oversaw was his ghostwriter signing his name to the Joe Wurtzelbacher book he would take care of himself without any interference from the plumber-in-Carhartts-only grabbing far-too-large-a-share for lending his name to the book and sitting around drinking beers and bitching about Big Government (they left out the parts that came out when he got drunker the more he railed against the Palestinian and Iranian Jew-killers and paraphrasing Grover Norquist’s analogy about murdering Big Government in the bathroom, but in Joe’s example he’s bludgeoning it to death himself with an 18″ Stillson wrench instead of drowning it in the bathtub).

Anyway, everyone wringing their hands and digging the torches out of the garage that they put away at 8:01 PM November 4th needs copious and repeated doses of oxygen. If our President-in-waiting had nominated Phil Gramm as his Treasury Secretary, then I’d be digging out my pitchfork and joining you, but he didn’t. If you’re looking to fill your cherry baskets on January 20, bear in mind that all of those cherry trees have been hacked down with impunity over the last several years. We’ve got a lot of greenskeeping and landscaping ahead of us before there’s any fat of the land to live off of again. If you don’t believe me, head down to the bank tomorrow with your 796 credit score and try and get a used futon financed and tell me how that works out for you.

Relax, inasmuch as that’s possible with the axe of our economic reality ready to come down on our collective necks. We’re going to have to spend money that our unborn grandchildren don’t have to get out of this mess, and every indication is that the new tenant at that rickety old barn on Pennsylvania Avenue apprehends that reality only all too well. We’re not anywhere near “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”

Remember everyone pledging suicide or pan-galactic emigration just five weeks ago when there was even the tiniest shred of a possibility that Sarah Palin would be darkening Washington’s doorstep come third Tuesday in January. A little perspective is a healthy thing: The Governor hasn’t gone away, but she won’t be a fading heartbeat away from the highest office in the land either, and the grumpy Batman to her rogue Robin is slinking back to the Senate he ignored for most of 2008 and accepting his future as a senior member of the minority party.

I never thought that the most pie-eyed among us were expecting an instant liberal utopia. Those solar panels may well, and probably will, return to the White House, but even though we may not be a center-right nation as John Meacham suggested in a recent Newsweek cover story, Barack Obama appears to know his history well enough that he isn’t going to let himself get beaten with the cudgel of the wide-eyed idealism of Jimmy Carter or the victory-drunk caprice of Bill Clinton. God knows they meant very well, and neither of them had to jump into the White House with a government on life support, but even without economic Armageddon, it’s already apparent the incoming President has studied his history well enough to know why and how he intends to not remind the American people why a Democrat has in recent history had a better chance at winning the White House than the Buffalo Bills winning a Super Bowl.

“Pragmatism” isn’t a word that the outgoing Chief Executive would utter in front of his children, but it’s not going to earn anyone an FCC fine either. Given our current circumstances, there’s a measure of sobriety and practicality that are going to have to carry the day before happy days are here again.

Put another way, I’m all for the day when we can look over the pastel paint chips and have a spirited debate over what color we’re going to paint our new country, but it might be prudent to at least give the new landlord the chance to put out the house fire first.

There’s no way anyone can do anything about Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Alberto Gonzalez, John Bolton, et. al. pulling a paycheck somewhere over the next few years–this is America, after all; everyone deserves the right to work. But rest assured they probably won’t be drawing their dime from the U.S. government.

Draw a breath, give your new man at least a shred of the benefit of the doubt, and let him try and do his job when it’s officially his, and there’s a better chance than not that you won’t be inviting your friends to celebrate your daughter’s wedding under a freeway overpass somewhere.

When people were getting a bit ahead of themselves and becoming understandably exercised about this annoying collapse-of-the-world-economy thing, President-elect Obama felt it necessary to remind the American people that “we only have one President at a time.”

I suppose you could argue that he was correct on the technical merits. But every other analysis would suggest that we’ve run into one of those vagaries they didn’t provide for in the 25th Amendment. We really don’t have a President at the moment.

Well, we do–certainly more than we have in the last few years–but Barack Obama hasn’t been inaugurated yet, and the Constitution is demanding the moving van keep circling the block for another eight weeks. George Bush is letting the hired help do the packing and sneaking out after Laura goes to bed to do shots with the White House greenskeepers. Morning comes, he’ll get up when he gets up, and if any papers come in that need signing, toss it in a box for the new kid. I’m off the clock, folks! Unless the country asplodes, I ain’t interested, and if it does, make sure they forward my pension checks to our place in Paraguay (heh, heh!).

Everyone except John Hinderaker realizes that if George Bush weren’t term-limited, the country would have had to fire him. I suppose if John Zogby and the Gallup Organization monitored the real world, there would be no shortage of Kinko’s employees with 20% approval ratings, and they still get to come back to work day after day. But there’s a certain point where sympathy and charity come into the picture, and in any case, the laws of free market selection limit these people to the realm of photocopies and away from nation-building and hurricane relief.

But even at Kinko’s, every now and then you get one imbecile who puts his junk on the copier after hours or inserts Asian rough trade 8 x 10s into a difficult customer’s proposal for investors in his South Korean apparel brokerage, and you just have to draw the line.

In the average workplace, though, when it’s been decided that an employee has queered the patch good, he’s usually not kept around as a curiosity to see what a clockpuncher does once his future employment has been voided and what kind of damage he can do when he simply doesn’t give a shit anymore. But that’s one of the perks that our system of government guarantees its lame-duck Presidents.

By nearly every objective measure, the George Bush Presidency couldn’t have been a bigger disaster if Bush were teaching eight-year-olds Home Ec drunk with a machete.

For months, the netroots on the left have been nearly apoplectic about the kind of havoc George Bush would wreak as the sand ran from the hour glass of his empire. Given the track record of this Administration, it wasn’t entirely implausible.

Time passes differently in politics. It’s easy to forget that just four years ago, fresh from their drubbing of John Kerry, Karl Rove was leading Team Bush in a call for a “permanent Republican majority.”

Well, if you were hanging your hat on that, you can thank Bill Frist and Mother Nature for knocking that train off the rails.

The Congressional intervention with Terri Schiavo was embarrassing enough (that it gave Bo Gritz a reason to come back on the public radar was only part of it), but the moment that Senator Frist diagnosed Schiavo from a piece of video that he watched from the floor of the Senate, it was game over for the GOP. They’d officially overreached and were stunned when they drew back a bloody, quivering stump. Within eighteen months, Frist, Rick Santorum, and George Allen–all much-ballyhooed Presidential timber just months earlier–were out of work, taking righteous wing blowhards Mike DeWine, Jim Talent, and Conrad Burns with them. Over in the House, Arizona’s loudmouth buffoon J.D. Hayworth led the pink-slip brigade, followed by California’s Richard Pombo (who made Rolling Stone’s October 2006 list of America’s 10 Worst Congressmen), and future guest of the Federal Penal System, Bob Ney of Ohio, and 28 other vanquished souls.

Similary, when George Bush flew back from John McCain’s birthday party in September 2005 and lamely gazed out the plane window as New Orleans drowned in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, that was the beginning of the end of any thoughts of a Bush Republican Dynasty.

A train-wreck of a war that many would argue shouldn’t have been waged in the first place, ignored subpoenas, industry lobbyists charged with overseeing the departments they’ve made a career of opposing, corruption pervading his Cabinet like an STD in an island prison, and a torrent of signing statements declaring, “Awright, I hereby acknowledge you passed this here law, but, by the empowerment invested in me, fuck all y’all.” There are tens of millions of doormats in mudrooms across America that are treated with more respect than the George W. Bush Administration has afforded the Constitution.

But we’re far past the point that this man cares, and Karl Rove has moved onto FOXNews. No one really cares how many office supplies he steals as long as they don’t involve environmental or banking regulations. He’s at least done the decent thing and ordered that none of his employees pry the “O” keys off their keyboards (BTW, that was a myth: Clinton’s lame-ducks never popped the “W” keys off).

Our current President isn’t engaged in the privileges of his office in any way, aside from the aforementioned pardons and diddling with regulatory authority here and there–the latter that the incoming President can and certainly will undo with a quick stroke of his pen.

True to his much-cited initial, the second Bush Administration is going to end with a loud, sad whimper.