The Real State of the Union

At SFGate.com, columnist Mark Morford reflects on the real state of the Union. Maybe it's true. Maybe every cloud DOES have a silver lining. A few excerpts...

My fellow Americans, we're not as royally screwed as everything Bush has done during his miserable term in office would have you believe.

Yes, we are on the brink of epic destruction involving war and sweaty religious nutballs and a mad grab for the planet's few remaining gurgles of oil and the general appalling lousiness of the new TV season. But that's not necessarily a bad thing. Destruction can be healthy. A positive force. Destruction sweeps the place bare, scrubs out the spiritual colon, cleanses the palate for what's next. And besides, have you seen "Grey's Anatomy"? Totally cute.

But here's the best part: No one really knows what's next. Oh sure, we have prognosticators and pundits and professional fearmongers from the GOP and the religious right who want to tell you that the apocalypse is nigh and God hates everything you do and if the terrorists don't get your fresh innocent white babies, the gays or the pot smokers or the rappers will...

More excerpts after the fold.

Juicy progress has occurred, despite Dubya and his ilk. Hell, in 1942 you couldn't buy a vibrator to save your life, much less your marriage. People were playing scratchy 78s on their steam-powered turntables and danced in heavy girdles made of bailing wire and lost hopes. Merely uttering the words "double soy mocha latte" in some states would get you shot for being some sort of Communist. Life was brutal. Thongs had yet to be invented. Radiohead didn't exist. Telephones were made of wood and string and lots of yelling. People ate meat from a can. Power steering was science fiction...

A sort of chaotic, forward-lurching equilibrium prevails. Even powerful, seemingly ironclad secrets cannot hold. The Bush administration is the cagiest and most morally abusive in decades, and we've worked like paranoid ferrets to narrow the extent and application of America's landmark laws regarding open government, including the Freedom of Information Act, the Federal Advisory Committee Act and the Presidential Records Act. In other words, they don't want you to know crap about how deep their lies go.

But look. In one short year, the sneering, all-consuming GOP has gone from master of all domains, from owning every aspect of the federal government and launching multiple failed wars and abusing all laws and spying and wiretapping and torturing and lying, to one of the least stable parties in ages. Scandals, indictments, arrests, Abramoff, Enron, DeLay, thousands of dead U.S. soldiers and nothing to show for it but more enraged terrorists, an economy running on fumes. Regimes built on lies and religious fearmongering never last. It's like a genital rash -- it just seems to take forever to heal.