Grinching

Mark Morford is celebrating. It's less than a calendar year until we're rid of the Bush/Cheney mess.

It is now less than one calendar year until the next presidential election. It is less than one year until the country finally takes a deep breath and flexes its atrophied muscles and opens its bloody, Cheney-punched mouth and lets it be known to the world, to the universe, to its own numb and dejected soul just exactly how unwell it has felt, how much pain has raked its heart, lo, these past seven (eight, by then) years, by ushering in an entirely new political era, as we all exhale a massive sigh of long overdue relief that — praise Jesus, Allah, Buddha and the devil all at once — the long national nightmare of George W. Bush is finally over.

Pardon me for not celebrating quite that heartily. I think we and the world at large would have been more impressed if the Neocon Cabal had been kicked to the curb in '04. (Certainly I suspect a large number of tortured and abused prisoners in Guantanamo would agree.)

Granted, there's been some satisfaction in watching the Firmly Right's lockstep march toward destruction grind to a limping halt. There's been joy in seeing the Religious Right's disintigration into a handful of shrill subgroups, most of which are protesting rather loudly some aspect of the Cabal's policies that they were in complete agreement with seven years ago. There's been a lot of pleasure in seeing the Responsible Right slowly (oh, so slowly) come to its senses and draw back from the madness.

But the Hysterical Right is still with them. The people who refuse to see the situation as it is, the ones raised with a blind faith in "might makes right" and the ones too stubborn or stupid, having adopted a position, to admit they made a mistake. The ones without the courage to say they've changed their minds.

And the few (we hope it's very few) who haven't changed their minds and who think the impendnig recession, oil at $100/barrel and gas at $4/gallon are a small price to pay for achieving whateverinthehell they think it is we're achieving by stirring up another century's worth of warfare in the Middle East.

Tell you what I'm wondering. I'm wondering if there's any panic, breast-beating, or regrets in the newrooms of the major publications and broadcast network corporations around the country. Our holy "Free Press" let us down, as they haev done so very often before, by coming down solidly on the side of corporate interest and big money politics.

Sometimes I really do wonder if reforming the political system in this country might not be as easy as fixing the corporate ownership of the papers and programs that 75% of the USofA depend on for their daily news?