A BushCo Pimp-Slap Threesome

============= SF GATE MORNING FIX =============
June 27, 2003 -- Tobey Maguire is 28 today
By Mark Morford: [email protected]
http://sfgate.com/columnists/morford/a/
"Lube up, lean into the fire, and laugh"
~~ nil desperandum ~~

== MARK'S NOTES & ERRATA ==
Where opinion meets benign syntax abuse

== A BushCo Pimp-Slap Threesome ==
Is the latest trio of Bush policy atrocities enough to make you scream,
or just cry?
(By Mark Morford)
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2003/06/27/notes062703.DTL

Onward they come like some sort of vicious and sad joke, some sort of
maniacal stabbings at the very core of joy and intelligence and
progress and hot sex and easy laughter, the regular grisly onslaught of
BushCo policy insults, with you just sort of sitting there saying, no,
no way, this can't really be happening, can it?

Oh my yes. Let us now scan the latest salvos, the most current round of
BushCo karmic bitch slaps, three little tales of environmental and
economic and sex-ed woe to make the toes of your id curl and your soul
recoil.

And let's kick it all off with the big bad and blatantly abridged
Environmental Protection Agency report on the environment, shall we?

Did you notice that story? About that major new report on the state of
the world environment, air quality and water quality and greenhouse
gases and all the rest, as scribed by Christine Todd Whitman's
increasingly impotent EPA, right before she found out her decidedly
pro-corporate GOP-licking kowtowing skills were somewhat at odds with
the utter knavelike skills BushCo required, and she quit?

A very serious and comprehensive report it is, too. And, until
recently, it included a major section on climate change, on greenhouse
gases and ozone depletion and the now widely accepted perils of global
warming, the dire effects now taking place, and worsening, and what we
can expect if we continue on our current, dangerous trajectory.

And wouldn't you know it, BushCo stepped right in there and hacked that
section down to virtually nothing just prior to publication. Just
snipped the dire climate-change info right out lest anyone be reminded
of the utterly contemptible anti-environmental, pro-industry slant of
the Bush regime.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=536&ncid=536&e=5&u=/ap/
20030619/ap_on_go_ot/global_warming_4

Can't make it too obvious how much Dubya supports major polluters and
industry self-regulation, or how he gutted the Clean Air Act, now, can
you? It's so cute it almost makes you retch.

Hey, that coupled with the recent BushCo decision to allow more logging
in the nation's largest protected national forests and, lo, you've got
yourself a nice new reason to drink more heavily and escape to Canada
to numb the savage karmic pain.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/usatoday/20030610/
ts_usatoday/5227309

Ah but let's not stop there. Not where there's a truly astounding
deficit looming like a thundercloud. Not when BushCo just passed yet
another absurdly pointless tax cut that makes the extremely wealthy
squeal like hogs, while almost simultaneously comes the Congressional
Budget Office announcement that the national deficit will actually
*double* by the end of this coming September, soaring right past a
whopping $400 billion, a new record, ha-ha suckers. Good thing most
Americans don't care, polls say.

http://www.startribune.com/stories/587/3930017.html

Yes, you read correctly, *double*. Remember when we actually had an
enormous budget surplus, just a few years ago? Before BushCo snuck into
power and cranked military spending and passed that first ridiculous
tax cut and spent tens of billions to attack a defenseless nation and
blatantly lied and smirked about the reasons why?

And just before he reconfigured the national policy to favor major
corporations and CEO cronies and leave states cut off and hanging,
begging for fiscal scraps, Medicare gutted and schools stunned into
sudden poverty and cities cutting back on vital services for the poor
and elderly and children and, well, you? Ah yes, the salad days.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2003/06/23/
national1457EDT0657.DTL

Speaking of gutted school budgets, let's talk sex. Or, rather, let's
talk no sex, given how the snide sexless GOP very much wants kids to
know sex is icky shameful wrong anti-Christian sin (well, hello, Mr.
Ashcroft!) and hence we have BushCo's malicious and asinine little $135
million abstinence-only-until-marriage" program for schools.

http://www.choice.org/abstonly_feddef.html

Yes, it's $135 mil of your tax dollars set aside for these already
Bush-reamed schools, but they get a cut only if they agree to teach the
wee ones that the only -- repeat, the *only* -- proper approach to
sexual awareness at their age is, of course, not to have it.

That's right, just shut that intense natural libido right down, kiddo.
Repress it and hold it back and cram it down and defenestrate your
divine sexual self because we can't have you feeling all free and open
and happy, now can we? Take that, you hormonally ravaged little punks.

This bears repeating. This bears a second look, if only for the sick
invidiousness. Schools get a chunk of that $135 mil only if they
promise to teach the "joys" of completely abstaining from all sexual
activity, and *nothing else*.

Are we clear? No words about condoms, no safe sex, no HIV awareness, no
celebration of the body, no notions of any sort of reverence for
sexuality and sensuality and respect for your partner and pleasure and
love and lust and tongues and joy and discovery and human goddamn
nature. God forbid.

And still we wonder why teens lash out and rebel and listen to bad rap
metal and have massive amounts of sex anyway and flip off the
establishment and then, through some sad, mutated cheese grater of
culture, turn out to be violent flag-waving psychopatriots who drink
cheap beer and smack their wives and watch way too much Fox News. Your
tax dollars at work, honey.

You have to ask. Are they idiots? This is the ultimate question. These
lawmakers, the GOP in particular -- are they really such vile and
mean-spirited imbeciles? Or are they just wealthy and relatively
heartless corporatized jerks protected by cocoons of fear-based support
and warmongering and power, insulated from authentic reality and
entirely devoid of soul and perspective?

No, it simply can't be. They can't be that sneering and small-minded.
This is what you say to yourself. Maybe they're just misguided,
money-drunk, power-sucked. Maybe it will all change for the better
relatively soon. Maybe it really is just a bad and vicious joke, one
that we as a nation will, with any luck, laugh off in about, oh, say a
year.

Because if we don't, well, the joke is most definitely on us.