FearFest 2008

"We live in a dangerous world, and we need a president who understands the lessons of Sept. 11, 2001...”
-- President Bush, addressing Tuesday night’s session of the Republican National Convention.

If you expected to be spared having 9/11 wagged in your face, you should’ve been watching something else.

Here’s one of the “lessons of Sept. 11” we’ve all learned: Republicans will be conflating the misbegotten tragedy in Iraq with the terror attacks of 2001 for as long as there’s anybody still listening. They feed on fear, with the same shameless ravenousness of Democrats feeding on economic resentment, and the most terrible and terrifying day in the memory of most living Americans is just too rich a dish to pass up.

So it’s the muscular Republicans against the wussy leftists, patriotism against treason, victory – however they choose to define that, however long it takes and however many more lives it costs – against “retreat and defeat.”

None of which alters the reality that George W. Bush’s “understanding” of the lessons of 9/11 has cost more than 4,000 precious American lives against the wrong enemy in the wrong war in the wrong country, and the “dangerous world” he and his apologists keep trying to frighten us with (as if we needed their help for that) has only become more so.

Thanks, Mr. President, but we’d rather hear “lessons of September 11” from somebody who’s actually learned some.

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Driving in to work this morning, I saw something I’d never seen, although I’m apparently behind the curve on this one.

Dangling from the back of a pickup truck on Railroad Street in Phenix City was a pair of big, shiny metallic balls.

No, not the kind Captain Queeg kept clicking together in “The Caine Mutiny.” I mean the anatomical kind. As in testicles. As in “Look at my really, really manly truck.”

And I thought those stupid decals of cartoon Calvin urinating on something were pretty much the low-water (so to speak) mark in vehicular adornment.

I checked this out on the Web (don’t even ask what I Googled to get there), and it turns out that not only have they been around a while – there’s an online company you can order them from (don’t ask me what its Web address is, either) – but politicians in several states have actually tried to get them outlawed.

Yeah, that needs to be at the top of the political agenda.

One Web posting offered this commentary . . .

“For me it poses this question: Who is worse, the pathetic mouth-breathing cretins who actually buy these things, or the terminally anal-retentive church ladies who think the law is meant to be used to punish stupidity and bad taste?”

I won’t even try to improve on that.

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From the GOP convention to a truck flaunting oversized fake male genitalia. Why was that such an easy transition?

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