There remains to be decided where to put George W. Bush.

If I were a powerful liberal blogger, I would feel compelled to link to news stories which documented my decisions here, but I’m not, so I won’t. You will just have to accept this as the last ravings on eight years of hell.

And so, on to hell, specifically Dante’s Inferno, where he has generously categorized all the places one can end up if one is a) non-Christian, and b) unrepentant. For my purposes here, which is chiefly anticipatory schadenfreude, we’ll just plop George W. Bush down in one of the Circles rather than somewhere in Purgatory, where I’m sure a just and loving God would allow him entrance. But I’m not, so I won’t.

Unlike Dante Alighieri, we’ll start at the bottom and work our way up.

Circle 9: Traitors

Well, of course. W would easily gain entrance to Round 2, traitors to homeland. Yes, his apologists will whine that he thought he was doing the right thing, but you know what? So did Judas, Brutus, and Cassius, and they’re down at the bottom in Round 3. W has betrayed everything this country has stood for to the rest of the world, and he could easily find himself up to his neck in ice.

Circle 8: The Fraudulent

Where to begin? Bolgia 10: The Falsifiers? Easy, what with the whole WMD fiasco. No, I do not think for a minute he believed there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. He lied to us. Bolgia 9: Sowers of discord? Heavens, the number of wedge issues used by this man and his cronies to capture the White House in 2001 and especially 2004 have filled several books. Bolgia 8: Fraudulent advisors: maybe more for Cheney and Rove, but I don’t mind letting W keep them company. Bolgia 6: Hypocrites: in case you had any doubts, W has given interviews recently that completely blow his cover on evolution and other key wedge issues. Now that he doesn’t have to pretend the Bible is literally true, he’s pretty open about it. But for the past eight years? You’d think he’d attended Oral Roberts U., which for all the good we’ve gotten out of his Ivy League education, he might as well have. Perhaps it’s simplest to put him Bolgia 5: Corrupt Politicians, and leave it at that.

Circle 7: The Violent

In the inner part of this circle, the Violent against God are bound to burning sands, with a rain of fire making their eternities particularly unpleasant. I’m not sure W qualifies for blasphemy specifically, but I’m pretty sure God cannot be pleased with W’s claim that He was giving W complete instructions on his policies. However, to be submerged in the river of boiling blood with all the other Violent against Neighbors, there can be no doubt. Throw him in!

We can mercifully skip Circle 6: The Heretical, although if you have any thoughts about this, I’d be glad to entertain them.

Circle 5: The Wrathful

Well, yes. Has any man positioned our country as a force of anger in the world as much as George W. Bush? Has any man incited as much hatred for our fellow humans, whether gay or liberal or Muslim? Put him in the swamp with the others.

Circle 4: The Avaricious

Again, no contest. The entire thrust of W’s two terms has been to reward his rich friends, the upper 1% of our population and to abandon the less fortunate to their well-deserved fate. And as for his incredibly immoral spending, taking us from a budget surplus to a record level of debt, he deserves far worse than rolling rocks around.

Again, we can skip Circle 3: The Gluttonous and Circle 2: The Lustful. Whatever else we can lay to his charge, being an overeater or, Pan help us, a satyr were not issues for him. As far as we know. Poor Laura. (If this were a high-powered liberal blog, then the wingnuts would recognize their cue to begin screaming, “But Bill Clinton! Got a blowjob! In the WHITE HOUSE!!~!!@!!!” So you see, it all balances out, doesn’t it?)

Circle 1: Limbo

At last, here, and only here, is where I want to put George W. Bush, the 43rd President of the United States. Like this blogger over at DailyKos, I am wary of attempting actually to punish him for his many, many, many crimes against this country. As much as I would love to see him standing in the dock at The Hague, I think a far greater punishment is to consign him to anonymity. Don’t interview him a month from now for 60 Minutes. Don’t give him the microphone the first time an international crisis erupts. Don’t refer to him (sort of like the Republicans at their convention last summer) and don’t mention him.

Instead, refer constantly to our efforts to “reform” and “fix” and “bring back” and “salvage” and “redeem” all the horrible things he did to our country. Let him see the joy in our nation at his departure and in the radical shifts of government and governance we embrace. Let the ideas he based his entire regime upon be reviled and ridiculed, publicly and without rebuttal. Let his name rank with Benedict Arnold and with Herbert Hoover in our nation’s mythos.

And let him live to see it.

These are for you.

For everything you’ve done to my country.

I just had to share this, and I will share it on my Facebook page just to broaden its distribution:

from one of my favorite Evil Liberal Blogs™, Eschaton:

I’m so old I can remember when spending $8 billion to give more health care to kids would spook the bond markets so badly that it just couldn’t be done.

Stuff like this reminds me of why I hate Republican governance.

Open letter to religious opponents of gay marriage:

First of all, when you say that “God ordained that marriage is between one man and one woman,” do us all a favor and say, “I believe God ordained that marriage is between one man and one woman.”

This keeps the debate over the topic a little clearer, because then others who might still be thinking about which way to think about it have the opportunity to reflect that you might also believe that the earth is 6,000 years old, or that God hates shrimp.

And I know you’re not given to thinking about ambiguities, but you really need to mull over this idea: with California’s Proposition 8, you restricted the right to marry to heterosexuals. The problem is that when a right is given only to part of the population, it is no longer a right, it is a privilege. And you remember what your parents told you about privileges. That’s right, you have to earn them. And they can be taken away by the Authority Figure who grants them. “It’s not a right, it’s a privilege,” remember? So by converting the right to marry into a privilege reserved for only a portion of the population, you have just stripped all of us of our right to marry.

Hope this doesn’t make your brain hurt too much, but remember: no pain, no gain.

Dear Republicans:

When you ask me why I’m voting for the socialist, and I reply that the nation cannot afford more Republican governance, your next line is not, “Well, they were all part of it.”

Your next line is, “I like where our country is after eight years of Republican governance, and I’m voting for McCain so we can keep going down this road.” Try saying it out loud.

Just try.

Sincerely,
Dale

Things Joe Biden might have said after Sarah Palin asked him, “Can I call you Joe?”

• “That would be fine, Governor Palin.”
• “Whatever you like, sweetcheeks.”
• “Say, that’s pretty cute. Isn’t she cute, ladies and gentlemen?”
• “Really??”
• “Did John put you up to that? It sounds like his lame sense of humor.”
• “Sure, Sarah. Cute shoes.”
• “No.”

And winked at her.

As I continue to figure out ways to nudge friends and relations away from their deep-seated impulses to vote for John McCain, I realized in full the tidy little scam being pulled on the Amurkan people.

1. Cut taxes for the richest 1% of the populace (let’s call them “George’s Friends”) on the grounds that they invest that money and keep the economy going. The rest of us (let’s call them “the Rest of Us”) get basically nothing.
2. George’s Friends invest said moneys (when they’re not buying another home or car) in Bear Stearns.
3. Bear Stearns makes risky decisions in order to increase profits for George’s Friends.
4. Bear Stearns goes belly up, so the government bails it out.
5. The Rest of Us pay for the failure through our continued tax payments.
6. Profit! (Well, for George’s Friends, anyway.)

When you’re George’s Friends, who needs Underwear Gnomes?

I am extremely disturbed by the reaction of the paleocon crowd to John McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate. They have gone from apathetic about his candidacy, if not outright antipathetic, to joyful. Finally, a real conservative on the ticket, change they can believe in!

And why? She’s one of them: a rightwing, conservative Christian, anti-abortion hardliner. And I’m thinking: is this all you got? Abortion? Is this the single, overwhelming problem you think we need to solve in our nation, so much that all other positions, policies, and qualifications of a candidate can be disregarded? Should be disregarded? Now you can be excited about electing the man who will continue almost all of George W. Bush’s disastrous policies?

There’s also something ghoulish about their glee. I read one supporter’s comment who actually said that it wasn’t reasonable to expect McCain to live through his first term, and then we’d have our first woman President. Heavens.

I am not too torqued about her “lack of experience.” Some of us on this planet are just preternaturally competent, and she may be one of us. It does mean that the McCain campaign have to drop their attack on Obama as unprepared.

It’s more her religious extremist background that concerns me. Creationism? No place in our educational system or in our government. Anti-abortion? Dangerous. That’s on top of her usual Republican issues. Anti-environmentalist? Can’t afford it, people. Big Oil buddy? Been there, done that, and look how that’s worked out.

She’s anti-corruption? Where was she when the Republican party needed her for the past eight years? And does that include her own Troopergate, which is scheduled to hit the news cycle right before the election?

The base of my extreme unease over her selection, and the joy with which it’s being celebrated out on the fringes, is that the American people are just so damned dumb. There are a host of issues and policies that they need to be looking at before selecting a candidate, but they go with gut feelings and personality traits. I actually had a teacher ask me the other day if I thought Obama was secretly Muslim. WTFF?

Don’t do this, people. For once in your Fox-News-blighted lives, find out what the candidates would do if elected, and vote for the one who would make the America you want your children to live in, even if he is black or can’t remember how many homes he owns. Then maybe I could sleep at night.