Showdown at the Supreme Court

I actually think it works something like this: George W. Bush, whining and petulant, shows up for another day of "hard work" in the Oval Office. He'd rather be on his elliptical trainer, he'd rather be on his custom Trek bike, he'd rather be in a bar in Dallas, he'd rather be just about anywhere than where he is. He's done this job. He has an IQ of about 115, one standard deviation above the population mean, and sure as shootin', that wasn't enough to deal with the complexity of this office. Smart guys like Clinton revel in this whirl of detail and power; it just gives George a headache. He doesn't really like thinking. He never has. He was never a student, never a big reader, and he doesn't like coming up with "creative" ideas. He doesn't write Pulitzer Prize winning histories or paint beautiful watercolors, like his "hero," Winston Churchill. He can't play the sax like Bill Clinton. He is, pure and simple, a bullshitter, and always has been. The reason he was a pretty good jogger and a fair bike rider (when he doesn't fall off) is because the one thing he can do is the same thing over and over and over and over and over and over. Take today's "press conference:" he had to go out there and say that he didn't hear anything about the National Intelligence Estimate declaring Iran's nucular program suspended as of 2003 until one week ago, although the report's been around for a year. He's the President, fer chrissake! Oh, he knows. Karl told him it was best to play it that way, because Fitzgerald is going to wind up giving those Plame transcripts to Henry Waxman, and they're going to be full of Bush's pathetic insistence that although the leakers were his own staff that he met with every day, he still didn't know anything about their identity until...well, you see. You need precedent for the President being treated like a cipher by his own aides. How humiliatin'. But George is good at that, say that for him. Repeating nonsense over and over and over and over and over.

So once in a while, I think Bush just gets fed up with the whole business, storms into the Oval Office, and demands to do something shitty. And the best people to subject to shitty treatment are those Arab-looking people down in Guantanamo, because if there's one group he can beat up on with complete impunity, it's that ragtag bunch of whoever-they-are. So you, Alberto, or John Yoo, or David Addington, or whoever's left around here, get me a goddam memo that says I can throw them in a cage in Cuba and forget about 'em. And, as with torture, black sites and illegal wiretapping, his mouthpieces produced just the authorization he needed.

And then that Hamdan vs. Rumsfeld case. Sheesh. Now they're telling me all these Arabs are human beings with Geneva Convention rights. Which means while we were half-drowning them and beating the shit out of them, we may have committed "war crimes?" What the hell?! We're the war criminals? Okay, get that flighty fat-butt Lindsey Graham on the phone and tell him we need a full-court press on this one. Give these animals their "trial rights" in front of some military brass, but exonerate the hell out of this "war crime" shit, and by the way, get rid of this habeas corpus crap, which another one of these crazy cases, Rasul vs. Bush (how come I wind up in the title of these things?) says these terrists have a right to. And a compliant Senate, wowed by the specious reasoning and sophistry of Lindsey, saw that it was done.

Whew. But now comes Boumediene vs. Bush (me again!). This one says that despite Lindsey's fast one, these ragheads still have a right to habeas corpus. What in the goddam hell? And based on Rasul, and counting noses despite my stacking of the Supreme Court, it looks like Souter, Ginsburg, Stevens, Breyer and Kennedy are going to prevail over Alito, Roberts, Thomas and Scalia. Missed by that much. And you know what happens then? Every one of these untermenschen (Karl taught me that word) is going to have a lawyer, and every one of them is going to file one of the Great Writs (yeah, real great), and then the world's going to know that a whole bunch of 'em, maybe most of 'em, ain't war criminals, ain't terrists, ain't the "worst of the worst" like I done said they were, but were humanitarian aid workers, opium farmers, teachers, tourists, and lots of other people who happened to have an "al" or "bin" in the middle of their names, and suddenly some Kuwaiti cab driver is going to have a high-priced shyster from a white shoe law firm claiming "illegal detention" and lack of probable cause.

Oh Lord. This gets to be too much. I don't even have anyone to bomb. Where'd my Axis of Evil go? Is it January 2009 yet? I'm going down to the gym.