1115.org

I post this today not because I don’t have the decency to wait for Alberto Gonzales’ career to finish dying.* I post it today only because, starting yesterday evening, I am on vacation (and resolutely offline) until Monday night. It is my carefully considered opinion that the body will be cold by then. And I would rather not let this go unremarked.

The Gonzo-mobile is clearly careening towards the exact opposite of a happy ending. It’s out of control, the brakes have failed, and there are still miles of twisting, winding mountain roads to negotiate. He’s simply never going to make it to the bottom. There are too many hairpin bends. (Poetic justice lies in the fact that they are mostly of his own making.)

Should we be surprised?

Maybe that depends on how idealistic you are. One of the people who live inside me is a Pollyanna clone. I have always known that no matter how bad things get in life, love always wins in the end. No matter how bad things get in our politics, democratic values always win in the end. (And I do mean democratic, not Democratic.)

After all the ox-crap that has gone down in the time of Bush – quite simply, the betrayal of every value we as Americans think we hold dear, every value we think is an inalienable part of our character as a nation – it is inevitable that there will be some spectacularly bloody settling-up.

Some comeuppances come with sudden swiftness, under klieg lights, while the culprits are still in office—and that seems to be the script the comeuppance gods have written for how the public service career of General Gonzales will unravel.

Some comeuppances come with painful, faith-testing slowness, long after the misdeeds were committed, long after the perpetrators have finished celebrating how they got away with it. And maybe that is what has been scripted for the likes of Bush and Cheney and Condi Rice. (Or maybe not.)

Should we shed a tear or two for Buttercheeks?

Maybe I could and would if I were Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr. or Mother Teresa. But I’m not going to apologize for my lack of saintliness.

It’s not like I’m celebrating what has already happened (so quickly since Friday) and what seems slated to happen (in the very near future). I’m just deriving what I regard as an entirely justified grim satisfaction from this turn of events. About effing time, is how I feel. Also: serves the bloody bastard right!

Serves him right for enabling and justifying kidnapping and torture. Serves him right for abandoning “innocent until proved guilty” in favor of “guilty until we decide otherwise”. Serves him right for presiding over what can only be described as gulags. Serves him right for the serial rape of what he swore to uphold and protect. Serves him right for the arrogance of thinking he/they could go on doing this forever with no consequences (other than a Presidential Medal of Freedom, down the road).

* Note to Cheney: this is what death throes look like, buddy.

***This was originally posted Thursday morning, wiped out by Wordpress, and re-posted on Friday***