Get Bush and Palin Off My TV!
November 13th, 2008
Under the Microscope
by Glynn Wilson
I’ve got an idea for a new song for the Dixie Chicks. Maybe they could sweep up the redneck capital of Nashville with it.
After sleeping late this Thursday morning, and after I got the coffee going and the laptop setup to blog, there was the mug of George W. Bush, our lame-duck president, making another one of those misleading morning speeches that define his failed eight years in office.
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Then the next face to hit the screen was Sarah Palin, the diva of the so-called “New GOP,” the nitwit governor of Alaska who helped John McCain lose his bid for president, thank Dog.
I’m torn between two competing emotions.
On one hand, I want Bush and Palin off my TV.
Bush needs to go back to Crawford, Texas, and cut himself up into little pieces with his brush-cutting chain saw.
And Sarah Palin just needs to take her new wardrobe and go back to hunting wolves from helicopters in Alaska.
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On the other hand, maybe it would be best to just keep these two anti-intellectual losers on the tube every day as a reminder to the independents in this country of how sad and pathetic the Republican Party is now.
If that is going to be the strategy for ratings, however, I’m just going to turn off the TV. I don’t want to see their faces any more or hear their idiocy.
A very smart man has now won the presidency. And he’s assembling a team of smart people to fix our national problems, at least the ones the federal government is best situated to deal with.
Like a majority of Americans, I have confidence that the Obama administration will be able to straighten out our economic issues, which will involve getting the U.S. military out of Iraq. And yes, it will involve helping U.S. automakers to survive.
As Bill Clinton’s former labor secretary Robert Reich has been saying in TV interviews, the federal government is the lender and spender of “last resort.”
And Obama is going to need Detroit to re-tool the American auto industry in the coming Green Revolution. Alabama could have been part of that, but they blew it. McCain won Alabama and managed a higher percentage of the white vote than any other state except maybe Oklahoma.
But now is the time to take the politics out of policy in this country. We’ve had enough after eight years of Karl Rove making all the decisions about what the Bush administration would do in order to try and create a Republican majority for the next generation. He failed in that. And he failed the country.
We now know that Bush was not “the decider” after all. Every decision Bush made was guided by the perceived effect on politics. But that is no way to run the government of the most powerful country in the world, not if your goal is long-term success.
So maybe it’s time for the Dixie Chicks to get in the studio and break out a new record, perhaps with the title song: Get Bush and Palin Off My TV!
The song that is ringing in my head for no apparent reason is Money For Nothing by Dire Straits, maybe because of the line in the song, “I want my MTV.”
I remember distinctly when that song came out and hit number one on the charts in 1985. I recall hearing it up loud in Johnny Wyker’s family hardware store in downtown Decatur, Alabama. I was a political reporter for The Decatur Daily at that time.
Wyker was a member of the one-hit wonder rock group Sailcat, which scored with the song “Motorcycle Mama” in 1972.
Another tragic story of an Alabama native who almost made the big time but blew it. Wyker got too drunk and stoned before a showcase performance in front of a major record label and vomited on stage. So much for Sailcat.
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| Karl Rove Halloween mask |
The Dixie Chicks almost disappeared into obscurity when they became mired in political controversy after comments made by Natalie Maines about the 2003 invasion of Iraq and Bush. Maines told a sold-out crowd in London, England, “We don’t want this war, this violence; and, we’re ashamed the President of the United States is from Texas.”
But they made a major comeback in 2007 and won the coveted Grammy Award for Album of the Year for Taking The Long Way.
I have made a point of playing the first and third songs on the record at least once a week on the drums for the past two years, as a way of bashing out my anger on what Bush has done to this country. I have a mask of Karl Rove hanging on the wall of The Bunker right behind the drum set.
But now that Obama has won, I think it is time to retire the practice, burn the mask and bury the hatchet. Now if only Bush and Palin would get off my TV!
November 13th, 2008 at 4:30 pm
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