You Need Help to Suck THIS Badly

George W. Bush has become -- in the opinion of many people, myself included -- the worst president we have ever had. As Bill Maher says in this piece in Salon, "Nixon got in trouble for illegally wiretapping Democratic headquarters; Bush is illegally wiretapping the entire country. Nixon opened up relations with the Chinese; Bush let them poison your dog. Grant let his cronies loot the republic, but he won his civil war. For some inexplicable reason Republicans have taken to comparing Bush to Harry Truman -- a comparison that would make sense only if Harry Truman had A) started World War II and B) lost World War II."

So how does such incredible incompetence happen? You can't fuck up this badly, not on your own, not with a system of checks and balances in place. First, he needed the help of the American people, who failed (or refused) to see what a sniggering, self-righteous chimp he was and re-elected him. Then, the media joined in the fun by spending time covering Paris Hilton and Anna Nicole Smith, giving Bush the cover he needed to engage in torture and suspend habeous corpus. Worst of all, we had a bunch of overprivileged, bribed, corrupt legislators who let his get away with all that shit. Even former presidents aren't using their remaining access to the media to call our national criminal to to the carpet. I used to have respect for Jimmy Carter (even met him once, in Geneva), but after showing a spine of tapioca after backing down from his "worst ever" quote like a puppy who peed in the wrong place and looked up and saw just how scary that rolled-up newspaper looked.

America needs help. We need to save ourselves FROM ourselves. Of all the culprits named above, the biggest is missing: the power players of the religious right. The ones who invoke a higher power and play on the superstitions (and hope and faith) of millions of otherwise good and honest (but frightened) Americans. Falwell is gone, at last, but Dobson and Reed are still in place. And what about the tens of thousands of ordinary preachers, the ones who don't make it on TV, but who have still fallen to their knees in obeisance of a criminal cabal simply because they mouth their prayers in the public square like modern-day Pharisees.