It seems odd that I should let the release of George the Worst into history’s loving claws go uncommented upon for so long. After all, for years the cornerstone of Whatisdeepfried.com was the weekly Beepo and Roadkill strip which, after 9/11, primarily concerned itself with the misdeeds of the President and his bolshevik claque. 

For me however, the water hit the witch with the 2006 midterm elections. I returned from a trip to Canada to the news that the Republicans had lost both houses of Congress, and that Rummy had been given the axe. I could practically hear the swell of a John Williams-led orchestera. The end of the nightmare had begun, and so too had arrived the end of my fascination with all things W.

In 2006, you may recall, I called it quits as far as a weekly cartoon screed went. Burnt out on the nonsense, unable to convince myself that a once-weekly whack at the Bush pinata (by then spilling 3 Musketeers bars all over the lawn) was the most rewarding use of my energies, I took a hard stare in the mirror and realized that I was basically just another crank, crotchety before my time, seething over the antics of O’Reilly, Hannity and the rest, which is precisely what those ego vampires craved.

So, I boxed up  the greater share of my rage, but realized soon thereafter how hard it is to stop plunging your dagger into Caesar’s chest once you’ve begun, especially when the Internet makes you feel like you have the power of Matthew Broderick in War Games at your fingertips. Every fresh insult Washington delivered to my intelligence sent me running to my keyboard. In this nation, the holiness of the people’s vox is sold to us as an orgiastic experience best likened to a Red Lobster ad, the lemon juice of freedom exploding in slow motion over scarlet lobster tails, cascades of liberty shrimp scraped bouncing onto your plate from metal skewers. I imagined a NORAD crisis room filled with IMAX monitors across which my every word and Flash animation was splashed, Barry Corbin sputtering on the phone while Dick Cheney ripped him a new one over my latest comment on HuffPo.

The fact that in reality democracy amounts to nothing more than a quadrennial lever pull is what ultimately makes one seek illusory ways to feel involved. Naturally, one also has recourse to genuine political activism. I dabbled in this a bit.  I satisfied myself with being arrested at the 2004 Republican convention, attending a couple anti-war discussions and being too uppity to maintain an editorial cartooning gig. Maybe in the end it made an unquantifiable difference (anyone can claim to be the straw that broke the camel’s back). Realistically, I know that my most tangible contribution to constructing Bush’s already infamous legacy was my sheep-like participation in the credit card hustle, and not my half-baked attempts to be Hunter Thompson. But a man can dream.

So while I am happy to see Bush vanish, and happier still to witness the fulfillment of the Democratic dream of an off-white president, I find that any sense of triumphalism is for me already well in the past.

Codename: Owned

Not that the occasion of the passing of the torch didn’t have its moments. Seeing the injured Dick Cheney being wheeled around like Henry Potter was enough proof of God that Christopher Hitchens must be suffering night sweats. And then there was Obama’s public rebuke of the Bush tenure, with the man sitting there, forced to swallow it on camera like a virgin porn star fresh off the bus from Smallville. If that shot of Bush half-wincing as Obama rubbed his nose in it doesn’t make it into one of those Mastercard “priceless” ads then Madison Avenue needs an enema.

The crackpots of Fox News and its principalities still have the capacity to draw steam from my ears, but I suppose I will always be slightly vulnerable there. I am not a man of ill temper and I scream maybe once a decade. The fact that the entire news media has embraced douchery as legitimate political dialogue remains fascinating even as it is denotes our general intellectual decay.

I still love to hate those icons of barbarism. O’Reilly has gone flat for me, but I can’t help but rubberneck when I see Dennis Miller, his face like a yeti’s scrotum, trying to dazzle Fox’s inbred audience of GED recipients with his Google-like ability to cross reference Francis Crick, Donny Most and gorgonzola cheese as he cheerleads for waterboarding. Anne Coulter, too, will always get my attention, as I am counting the moments until this blonde Frankenstein begins to age and starts deforming herself with plastic surgery until Greta van Susteren looks like Aphrodite by comparison.

And Rush. Ah Rush. He deserves real credit for his bravado. He is the only one of his cringing brood actually willing to say out loud that Obama’s victory was also a final defeat, not for conservatives, but for the authority of white skin. He proudly stares and points, demanding that we recognize that the emperor has too much melanin. He is the only right wing media figure playing a dirge for the passing of the old aeon and not pretending to welcome the new. That he remains a bitter sack of shit is beside the point. Speaking truth to power comes in many forms.

As Bush waved his final farewell, that quick “see ya” from the stairway of Executive One, it seemed odd to think that this was the person who had made me fear for the very sanity of our nation for so many years, now that his irrelevancy was finally beyond doubt. Is this what conservatives felt when Bush took the reigns from Clinton, that after all, he is only a man? I am loathe to think that we are all led around by the nose this way when it comes to our political passions, that voters are, as Mayor Quimby noted, “nothing but a bunch of fickle mush-heads”.

Then again, I must confront the fact that I am not the dullest knife in the drawer, either, which means that Bush probably was as bad as he seemed, which means maybe I should have done more as a citizen before he got away scott free. Maybe we all should have.

So Obama’s official presidential photographic portrait has been taken and will soon find itself being saluted in flag officer breakrooms around the country.

This is the first ever presidential portrait taken using a digital camera, and America’s megapixel surplus means that we already know more about this president than we ever learned about Bush…or would wish to. This for example:

Look Barack, we can’t let our enemies know that the America is so broke that her president can’t afford a blackhead gun.

And this!! I’m all for honest government, but hit this portrait with a fucking clone tool, wouldja?

How am I supposed to believe this man can command our soldiers when his eyebrows are in open revolt? Expect Marine Corps rifle drills to start resembling the Benny Hill Show as this grooming snafu works its way down the command chain.

This loose stitch will comprise a whole chapter in Anne Coulter’s next book.

Obama may be the Mozart of netroots, but our president has yet to learn the realities of HD technology: a single crumb on his lip and he may as well have just come from a pie-eating contest and used a half-rack of pork ribs as a napkin!

It’s official: the flag fucking continues for another four years. Now I’m really looking forward to the Afghan Surge.

Alright, so at close range Obama looks like he just bobbed for apples in the Ark of the Covenant. He could swallow a bucket of live kittens and be sworn into office on the Necronomicon and I’d still think we were looking at sunnier days ahead after the last eight years.

Rang in the New Year toasted like a bagel at Lux, a Rochester booze buffet with a patina of devil worship. I watched the ball-drop projected on one wall of the bar, the video not quite synched with the audio (or perhaps it was the weed) which left me uncertain whether there were still five seconds of 2008 left to me or five seconds less of 2009. Anyway, when the crowd was satisfied that we had crossed the event horizon I surrendered to mob rule and christened the New Year with a prolonged smooch for my girl, and then glugged the miniature bottle of complimentary champagne that Lux had provided me with. 2009 was go.

The New Year does not not begin for me until we have jettisoned the President, however. That blessed act of legal revolution, guaranteed to us by people whose shadow we are increasingly sensitive to living in, that will finally restore this country to the imitation of responsibility and democracy that was ours before W drove the American myth off a cliff.

Although we are left with hard times and a maelstrom of uncertainty in all sectors owing to our collective decision to test Colin Powell’s Pottery Barn rule on our own government, it has nonetheless been a great ride for a bitch-and-moaner such as myself. Every expectation I had for christian, corporate, right wing rule was fulfilled in all their delightful permutations over the past eight years, leaving the nation with a smarting lesson we will feel for generations.

Will we learn that lesson? We’re clearly a country that is slow on the uptake. After all, did our government glean that the instances of drunken businessmen bursting into airplane cockpits (a brief trend a few years before 9/11) was the signal to an enemy with a history of skyjacking that the coast was clear for a Great Leap Forward?

We didn’t get it then, the same way we didn’t realize that all those platinum cards that fluttered into our wallets like butterflies in the 90’s were the harbinger of another wicked scheme that has yielded a harvest of despair for the nation.

My native cynicism wants to kick into overdrive now, invoke Katrina, Iraq, global warming, and stab a finger at those who ignored the soothsayers who tried to shout their warnings above the din. I  want to throw my searing holy water on the devils of the media–O’Reilly, Coulter, Medved, the entire tenth circle of the fourth estate–who drowned us in their shit and irrelevance.

But no garden is without its weeds, usually choked by healthier vegitation, thriving only in an environment that is welcoming to them. And we the people people– doltish, bored, easily suckered–were the sunshine they drank.

Cynicism is a lazy man’s redoubt, however. An excuse not to reconstruct. A great deal lies in ruins at the end of the two-term catstrophe, but as the Buddha says, “after the fire, a blade of grass.”

And so, Obama. A blade of grass for certain, though much more of an unknown quantity than our desperate hallelujah’s would suggest. As he begins to write himself into history, we had better make damn sure we are studying more than his penmanship.

I didn’t vote for him. I am through with symbols, especially ones that have all the superficial appeal of a summer blockbuster (I didn’t go to see Hulk either, for the same reasons). “Must see” movies  and “must vote” candidates are all part of the same Hollywood glamour that has filled our eyes with sequins for too long

I voted Nader, and will judge Barack by those standards. At the same time I will not switch gears on command and let Jon Stewart (still a hero of the Bush resistance) or Rachel Maddow (ehh) goad me into discomfiture because Obama went all political when choosing who to deliver the invocation at his swearing in. Co-opting one of the most popular shepherds of the Bush base plays well for our side, and if it signals that butt sex will get put on the back burner of issues for a little while, I can cope. The other side might enjoy the break too. Let’s let the homeless have the spotlight. There’s about to be a lot more of them.

One year left, and then the roaring zeroes give way to the double digits of the third millennium which, of course, will be the era in which I die. I think I’ll scribble a few lines of my own into that history book this year. Lord knows I’ve got the ink.

Happy New Year.