substitute

from The Culture Ghost at Guys from Area 51

Bob, I'm sorry you had to go where you went, and do what you did.

I hope that place south of Da Nang is farther away than ever.

We're hardly into the new era, and already the honeymoon is over. Broken promises, failed reforms, and betrayals of principle have crushed my dreams of this so-called "change." To summarize:

• Plastic clamshell packaging has not yet been banned.
  
  
• I and several other friends have dry, painful skin and a recurring cough.
  
  
• Nothing, not even a plan, to replace our nation's dilapidated traffic cones.
  
  
• Open punditry is still tolerated and even encouraged.
  
  
• The President-Elect cannot cure the King's Evil by touch, nor has he called his men to horse against the Dragon, as it was foretold in olden times.
  
  
• Just like his predecessor, he has not protected us from the Manimals. I am already on record here and here and yet I hear nothing from Mr. Obama.

Welcome to another eight years of tyranny and incompetence. WON'T GET FOOLED AGAIN!

The Santa Ana winds parch me and cause wildfires, but wow, the LIGHT we get when they blow. The whole town is glowing and yellowy and clear and sharp. I love it.

From youtube because 236.com's embedding blows.

We're trying to figure out if they're okay and whether they were arrested.

When George W. Bush took office after the bitterly fought end of a tight race in 2000, he promised a consultative government of unity in which he and his opponents would work together. He then spent eight years behaving like King John without the Magna Charta.

Currently our President-Elect is making similar noises about reconciliation, moderation, including the opposition in government, and generally making nice and compromising. I don't want him to be King John, but I myself have no interest in making nice.

I am forty-three years old. I came of age just as the Equal Rights Amendment died, Proposition 13 gutted services in my state, and Ronald Reagan was elected president. In the last 25 years the country has gone so far to the right that nobody remembers what it was like before. Words like "liberal," "conservative," and "moderate" have entirely different meanings.

In this world, an Eisenhower Republican is a Socialist who has come to take everyone's hard-earned money. The middle class makes $300,000 a year. Endless war is a duty. Health care is a privilege. Basic environmental responsibility and a concern for the welfare of children are signs of creeping Communism. And the Bill of Rights is a "liberal" obstruction to the great tasks of war and policing.

The people who brought us to this place found Richard Nixon to be a dangerous internationalist and compromiser. They are extremists.

The idea that I should accept this state of affairs and sit down at the table of compromise with these phalangist maniacs disgusts me. They have never shown interest in negotiation themselves; they just take.

I am angry that my country has been shoved in the toilet for 30 years. I don't feel any great need to accept the world of religious fanatics, demagogues, warmongers, police state advocates, bigots, and whiny billionaires. That's not my America.

Fuck this conciliatory shit. I want my country back and I'm not interested in conciliatory arrangements with the people who stole it.