It’s A Big Job, But Irony’s Got To Do It

I too enjoy the following ironies:

I finally set up a site of My Very Own Special Self after almost two years of working literally in the blogosphere, of breakfasting, lunching, and dining off of the word “blog.”

Following infinite half-baked starts in my head, I made this place and started putting words on the goddamned screen, instead of grousing about other people’s. Shop’s been set up for more than a week. Yet I’ve hardly to mention impeaching the President, which was the motivating force that first pushed this baby through the WordPress themey birth canal.

It’s ironic, too, that the task of where to begin talking about the reasons to impeach George W. Bush from Presidential office is so monumental, with such staggering amounts of evidence and argument, that a starting point can barely be found.

That’s part of the reason I wanted this space, anyway: the world, the media, and our slow-to-reality country have all finally reached the agreement that the United States government is broken. I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen that exact adjective applied: Bush, Cheney, and the rest of the gang — those who haven’t been arraigned, resigned, or fled — have literally caused us to stop functioning as a country in the way we’re supposed to.

Now that it’s finally OK to critique the President without being called Osama Bin Laden’s buddy, we’re seeing a lot of it. Endless articles abound, charting our disaster in so many spheres. Politicians — even the ones from Bush’s party, which has fractured under the obscene weight of its own self-produced shit — won’t let a soundbite go by without drilling home how soundly we need “change.” Change change change, change from what is now currently awful and unbelievably fucked up and broken beyond repair.

But it’s a relatively low murmur, you see, to have any follow-up buzz about impeachment, despite all those things that we can say now without fear need to be fixed. We’ve been scared, wearied and confused by nearly eight years of the tragic farce that is the Bush Administration, and these days, we’re so desensitized to its crimes we accept them with the same regularity and soul-tired shrug we take in news of another death in Iraq.

Do you remember a time when a death there on any “side” meant something, got ink and attention at least? Now, if we’re being honest with each other, Iraq is synonymous with death and destruction, and we’re only happy with the days without awful inky headlines that might make us remember that it’s our fault.

Impeachment. It’s writ large practically only on the Internet, spoken out by honest politicians like Dennis Kucinich who will forever be remembered more for elfin facial features than for being a warrior of civil and human rights, because in America we don’t value honesty that’s not presented in reality TV confessional form.

That’s why I’m here. That’s why IMPEACHMENT PIE is here. Not to furnish statistics or legal arguments: there are other and very accomplished blogs that do that, thank god, whole books that exist with watertight cases for the Administration’s dismissal. No, we’re here for the gut reactions, the good and the bad, the things we know are true and that we aren’t talking about.

We need to talk about why these people are still running the country you and I call our own. Was my three minutes in the voting booth, turning old knobs and pulling a lever — with always, now, the lingering question of whether I was even counted — all that’s really given to me as an American to decide what is done in my name? Somehow, I don’t think this was the way participatory citizenship was initially envisioned.

You might not have heard about it in between Britney Spears’ constant threats to national security, but a good number of our congressmen have even made excellent stabs at the impeachment issue — to be thwarted no longer just by Bush’s corruptly lumbering elephantine masses, but by the new, self-important Donkeys in the room.

When a country divided by fear and duplicity and twelve fronts of turmoil elects the defeatist, terrorist-loving, Karl Marx’s cock-sucking party over the one in power because the one in power has performed just that fucking badly, that’s called sending a fucking message to Washington. That’s called America wants some fucking change. Now. Not for campaign signs.

But somehow, perhaps dazzled by the overwhelming sensation of actually winning an election, the Democrats allowed their victory march into D.C. to become a study in How to Roll Over for the Darth Vaders In Charge 101. We just got here, and, man, the view is nice. Don’t want to lose a good thing with too much shake-up. Don’t want to cause a rift in the Dark Side. Or attention to how we all let the bad things happen.

To which I say: you were elected, you monumental pussies, you incredible cowards, not out of good will for your party, which is simply the lesser of two evils that are uniquely and politically American. You were elected because you were not what we currently had, because you swore to mandate a shift in policy and to hold criminals accountable. But mostly you were elected to not roll over, to thwart this president and his handmaidens. You’ve failed at that quite spectacularly, so much so that Tony Blair is on the line, praising your pet poodle impersonation.

No, I’m here, this blog is here, because for every person I’ve talked to who says but they’re on their way out anyway, I want you to be reminded that they are still there.

For every person who says but Pelosi took the option off the table, I want you to stop and sometimes think about that, and think why. And sometimes think: is that really okay? And maybe, sometimes, who the hell does she think she is?

This is here because I’ve seen the soul-defeated shrug come off of too many good people. I’ve given it myself, a hundred thousand times. We’ve forgotten that we have an option. We’ve forgotten that without the option to protest and critique and most especially hold authority accountable when it’s gone wrong, we wouldn’t have had this country to kill for anyway.

I’m also here about Vietnam, and about Richard Milhous Nixon, but there’s time enough for that. We go way back.