Monday, November 06, 2006

It’s been an interesting election season, I’ll grant that. Our would-be gubernator, Mike Hatch, called a reporter a “Republican whore,” and it yielded a piece in the paper about how “stress” and “scrutiny” lead candidates to make mistake in the final days. Any who knows Mr. Hatch knows the comment had nothing to do with stress or scrutiny, but rather with the fellow’s personality; he is a mean, small man. But if he wins, Garrison Keillor will write a column about how the ancient true Minnesota virtues of Decency have been reasserted, because Mr. Hatch will quite possibly raise the gas tax, and nothing confirms our essential decency like the ever-steady rise of state levies sloshed off to indistinct purposes.

Finally: the Guardian ran letters welcoming Bush to Britain. Everyone piled on stupid old Harry Pinter, but I didn’t see anyone note this contribution from blogosphere star Salam Pax:

I hate to wake you up from that dream you are having, the one in which you are a superhero bringing democracy and freedom to underdeveloped, oppressed countries. But you really need to check things out in one of the countries you have recently bombed to freedom. Georgie, I am kind of worried that things are going a bit bad in Iraq and you don't seem to care that much. You might want it to appear as if things are going well and sign Iraq off as a job well done, but I am afraid this is not the case.

Listen, habibi, it is not over yet. Let me explain this in simple terms. You have spilled a glass full of tomato juice on an already dirty carpet and now you have to clean up the whole room. Not all of the mess is your fault but you volunteered to clean it up. I bet if someone had explained it to you like that you would have been less hasty going on our Rambo-in-Baghdad trip.

To tell you the truth, I am glad that someone is doing the cleaning up, and thank you for getting rid of that scary guy with the hideous moustache that we had for president. But I have to say that the advertisements you were dropping from your B52s before the bombs fell promised a much more efficient and speedy service.

Hey, Salam? Fuck you. I know you’re the famous giggly blogger who gave us all a riveting view of the inner circle before the war, and thus know more about the situation than I do. Granted. But there’s a picture on the front page of my local paper today: third Minnesotan killed in Iraq. He died doing what you never had the stones to do: pick up a rifle and face the Ba’athists. You owe him.

Let me explain this in simple terms, habibi. You would have spent the rest of your life under Ba’athist rule. You might have gotten some nice architectural commissions to do a house for someone whose aroma was temporarily acceptable to the Tikriti mob. You might have worked your international connections, made it back to Vienna, lived a comfy exile’s life. What’s certain is that none of your pals would ever have gotten rid of that “scary guy without the hideous moustache” (as if his greatest sin was somehow a fashion faux pas) and the Saddam regime would have prospered into the next generation precisely because of people like you....