Why I Refuse to Comment On Personnel Changes in the Bush Administration

Yeah, I ignore this, pretty much.

Here's why:

Everyone else blathers about it. I will not pretend that I have additional blather which would make for compelling reading.

I could sit here and pretend that I have some special insight into the legal theories of Albert Gonzales. But I could not pretend well enough that you would believe me. (Except, of course, that you're all idiots, so who knows? Maybe it would work.)

I also think this is more of an inside-the-beltway/inside-baseball thing than something likely to impact actual policy. Where a change affects policy, I care. Where it may or may not, I don't.

Far as I know, Bush is still the President, and Dick Cheney is still his boss. Ergo, I could give a fig about who our current Secretary of Agriculture may be. You could tell me Bush just nominated Frank Gorshin, "The Riddler" from the old Batman show, and I would just say, "I hope he does a good job. Whatever, you know, his job is supposed to be. I imagine it involves alfalfa."

And I suspect that most people writing about this feel the same way. But they're paid to have opinions about nothing; whereas I, most emphatically, am not.

So, until there's some interesting appointment that actually has a fair chance of impacting politics or policy, I will take Bill Murray's position on the Best Supporting Actor and Actress Oscar categories: I don't think anybody knows who the hell any of these people are.

I've been watching politics long enough to know that what we're in right now is a slow news phase, at least as regards political news, and the media yappers have to invent or contrive controversy just to fill column-inches or airtime blocks.

But I think of the period after an election much like the awkward moments immediately after sex: now that the big event is over, there's not much left to do except quibble over ordering sesame noodles versus pork chow fun.

Yeah, maybe I do have a slight preference on the issue, but really, I'm just killing time until Seinfeld.

Well, the hell with that. When someone starts paying me big jack to do this crap, I'll play along. Until then, I'll write about the samizdat messages in Twisted Sister songs.

And let's just get this out of the way now: I could not possibly care less about Bush's Inaugural Address. We'll have weeks of speculation and leaks about what "themes" he'll stress, but really, who cares? We all know pretty much what he's going to do and what he's not going to do. It doesn't matter what he says.

You can count up the number of times he says "healing" and "strength" and it doesn't matter one whit the following Monday.

And if he quotes Maya Fucking Angelou, that doesn't mean he's reaching out to disaffected black Democrats; it just means he wants the newscasts to report he quoted Maya Fucking Angelou, just to make the sort of person impressed by quotes from Maya Fucking Angelou think he's a cool guy.

Newsflash: Maya Fucking Angelou sucks, and Bush knows it, and don't believe any differently if he starts quoting some excrementitious doggerell about rocks and trees and waters and peoples coming together to thresh wheat.

The only way I could possibly gin up any interest in the Inaugural Address would be if Bush delivered DeNiro's "baseball" speech from The Untouchables ("A man becomes pre-eminent, and he's expected to have certain enthusiasms. Enthusiasms.") and then brains Arlen Specter with a Louisville Slugger.

That I'll watch. That I'll blog about. But a bunch of airy rhetoric about coming together and uniting in common purpose and that sort of crap-- if I want a rejuvenation of my sense of community and optimism about the future, I'll just watch Hoosiers again and give the speech a miss.