Stagecoach Driver, Economist, Bouncer

Once upon a time there was a stagecoach called “The United States of America”. The reins to the coach and the horse team were given over to a short, smirky, ex-town drunk from Texas, sometime around the year 2000. His name was Uncurious George, and he came from the town of Born Again Cistern. He and the guy riding shotgun, Dickless Dick, were supposed to get the coach through the next eight years without incident, no loss of life, no financial loss and no loss of dignity. And they were also not supposed to lose any luggage and to tell the truth about their pilgrim’s progress. They were supposed to deliver thee coach intact, in reasonably good shape and without harm to the passengers.

They were also supposed to take the coach and head west, from New York, for Los Angeles. They had about 280 million passengers in the coach, and a whole bunch of political ambulance chasers strapped up-top, who were along for the ride and slated to telegraph stories back their media folks as the coach travelled. Most of them were pretty main stream types, but there was one who was really Foxy, with bad eyesight and just a couple who wrote only with their left hands. Uncurious George would not speak to them “direkly” (in fact he could barely read or write), so he used spokespeople, who came and went through the revolving door at the rear of the stagecoach. The last one was an intellectually bleached blonde, Dana Peroxide, who served synthetic pablum laced with melamine from China for breakfast. Dickless Dick , given the slightest provocation, hid in an un-dick-closed location.

Before they could even leave NY, George and Dick got into a nasty bar fight down on Wall Street and took out two tall skyscrapers: when the cops arrived, George and Dickless denied even being there. They made lots of toxic dust, kept the NYFD busy and got their coach rates raised because they managed to ground all the airplanes.

The next several years were just more of the same. The next big event was a big bar fight in Iraq and then the two of them barely escaping with their goat skins in Afghanistan, spending like drunken sailors, ignoring the coach riders, feeding the pressers up-top bull shit, and signing checks from the surplus they got with the coach, as well as signing statements absolving themselves of any responsibilities for any calamity caused by their bad handling of the coach. They paid no attention to the passengers needs, stopped only at Chinese-owned Wal-Marts, performed no routine maintenance on the coach, the horses or the roads or bridges and told everyone that everything was OK because they had decided it was. They lost more luggage than anyone realized, and the closest they came to maintaining dignity, was the indignance they aroused in foreign countries from their lawless arrogance. They parked the stagecoach at prisons around the world, tortured the prisoners there and tortured the coach passengers with liable, lies and deceit.

After nearly eight years, with the wheels coming off the wagon, running on broken spokes and with broken down horses, the coach passengers were fed up: they had paid full fare for years and only gotten as far as Chicago. The pressers up-top were starting to discover they had a left ear as well as a right one, the check was NOT in the mail, and some guy back in the Wall St. rubble, named Paulson, had just joined the apocalyptic movement and announced that the end was perilously near, right around the corner, and everything really sucked…and he needed $700B, no questions asked. By the time the coach finally came to rest at the stop in Chicago, the passengers were looking for tar, feathers, rail and rope (they already had a jackass). They all got off the coach and stayed overnight in empty, foreclosed houses. And everyone was hoping that there might be a change in the works.

Just about everyone had decided that George would no longer be allowed to drive. In fact, some had even posited that he might be drinking again. Over the next several weeks and months, a search went underway for a new driver.

No one knows just exactly when the call came, but the rumor is that Mel Brooks called, and alerted everyone to the fact that there was dark-skinned renegade guy, staying at the bunkhouse in Chicago. He was known to be a straight-shooter and could handle a team. No one had ever had a minority driver before, but he looked so much better than George and Dickless (and nobody in the conservative camp had a Blackberry), that in almost no time (and several million dollars later) Kid Barack was given the reins and the roadmap (or what was left of it: about all that was left of the Constitution map was a few tatters. It turns out, Dickless had been using a secret paper shredder and never had any intentions of getting to Los Angeles. But that partially explained why they had always managed to find a place to stop for dinner where Dickless could get broiled Halliburton.

Eventually, some time around the middle of January, with The Kid at the reins, and a new guy riding shotgun (Big Bad Joe Bidenhammer, a former Amtrac conductor), the stagecoach left Chicago. Champagne flowed, Jesse Jackson tears flowed, everybody back in Washington balled everyone else and no one was able to tell, at least right at first, if that bright orange glow was the sun setting in the west or that it was just the radiance of Kid Barack. They had a new team of horses, new grease in the wheels and the smell of delusionary Obamanism was everywhere.

But the festivities and glee did not last long. To begin with, the old team of horses had only numbered four, and now Kid Barack had to handle eight. And three of the eight were Republicans, they pulled slowly and to the right and farted and Rushed around. Then, some of the people The Kid wanted to bring along to help, either couldn’t come along because they owed too much money to people back at Club Fed in Washington or had been sleeping around with too many stagecoach suppliers. Then the guy who was supposed to replace The Kid in the bunkhouse turned out to be a crypt keeper, and all of this meant that The Kid had to learn how to handle eight horses, keep the passengers happy (who all wanted to be in LA “yesterday”), handle his Blackberry, go find a birth certificate and get the pressers up-top top stop looking for scandals and start paying attention. That was all right after he found out that the checking account was over-drawn, the coachline’s credit limit was almost tapped out and Uncurious and Dickless had left some diplomatic, financial and foreign relations stink bombs in the back of the coach. (Did I mention that the coach had no brakes, either?)As quickly as everyone had become elated, many became deflated, just like the DOW Jones daily averages, and there was even talk of “let’s shoot the sheriff”. Mel Brooks urged patience: Blazing Saddles do not blaze forever. But the folks on the right started screaming socialistic treason and whining and the folks on the left started screaming for Kid Baracks’ head because he failed to turn water into wine. Eye of Newt was being hailed as the next millenium’s curative, to be possibly coiffed with some Alaskan mousse, and the right rang their Jindal bells but no one came to dinner except a Steele band from Jamaica, Queens. The progressives argued that there was no progress, the far out lefties, who are never satisfied how left anything gets, remained dissatisfied.

That is more or less where we are right now: the idio-ides of March. Just like we want everything else in America, instantaneously and right now and lots of it, with the help of the opportunistic pressers and the practitioners of naivite’, who have wanted to have their cake and eat it too (It doesn’t work that way),we are busily being anxious, schizophrenic children. Sooner or later, the horses will come under control and Kid Barack will learn how to better finesse them. (One or two from SC may need to be shot; they shoot horses’ asses, don’t they?), Rahm the man Emanuel, the team manager will fill out the ball team back at the office, stagecoach sales will pick up eventually and the passengers will realize they are a lot closer, perhaps, to Denver than they thought. They will learn to drink tap water and skip the Evian and the new holy trinity may well be Krugman, Reich and Galbraith. It will take awhile to know if Geithner can play ball if he ever comes out of his ivory clubhouse, and Kid Barack will learn to be a better economist. We will be able to take all of this to the bank…if we have one left.

I am very tired of the American desire for instant gratification, but I am equally tired of empty, childish, right-handed, obstructionist rhetoric. No matter how you mix up the letters from “tax cuts”, it does not spell nirvana. I am also tired of the new Obama team coming late to the party. This “after the horse is out of the barn, let’s close the AIG barn door” is ludicrous. He is the President, for crying out loud. Dickless is gone and Uncurious thumbed a ride to Dallas, where he can do us little harm. We can say anything bad about either of them we like. We paid for that with the full-fare rate we have been paying for the last decade. And maybe, once Kid Barack gets the horses under control, he will stop authorizing the use of the words “clarity” and “transparency”, since they ultimately mean nothing. That alone would make the stagecoach ride less bumpy and more comfortable. And if he will just lock Princess Pelosi up n the tower…

We could use a few good dogfights. It’s time to stop being nice. It’s time to kick some ass instead of kissing it. Obama may realize that he has the reins, but I wonder if he is also knows he is the bouncer at the entry door to this nightclub called “Reality”?