Look How Cute!

With all the usual caveats about the impotent symbolism of the Democrat's phony deadlines remaining in force, I admit that I enjoyed this:

Throughout the day, Democrats lined up to deliver floor speeches observing the fourth anniversary of the president’s speech on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln. At the front of the House chamber, Democrats positioned a blown-up photograph of Mr. Bush standing on the carrier deck on May 1, 2003.

Aides to the president were openly angry about the reminders, and the Democrats’ unusual legislative signing ceremony.

“It’s a trumped-up political stunt,” Dana Perino, the deputy White House press secretary, told reporters traveling aboard Air Force One. Others grumbled privately that Congress had sent plenty of bills to Mr. Bush without such pomp and circumstance.

“We’ve got the lights, we’ve got the characters, we’ve got the action for some fine political theater in the House of Representatives today,” said Representative Lynn A. Westmoreland, Republican of Georgia. “It’s time for the majority to take off their costumes and exit stage left. We owe it to our nation and our troops to see the ending of this story.”

You know, pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall. Or, to leave the proverbial for the truistic, you reap what you sow, motherfucker. When friends complain to me that there are no secrets in our gossipy social circle, that things said in confidence become common knowledge before long, and bad opinions and insults inevitably reach the ears of their targets, I alway give this advice: Never say in private what you'd be embarrassed to repeat in public. There is a corollary: If you're prone to regret, don't. Writers and artists understand that they will one day be embarrassed by their adolescent efforts, but they accept the embarrassment with the same basic good humor that most of us accept naked baby pictures. But the political class believes itself to be divorced from the weight of either a personal or common past, and the newsmedia, to be fair, largely obliges their wish to live in a new-agey, ever-present Now. They always seem a little bit shocked on the rare occasion that some past stunt or prior utterance out of harmony with the current tune arrives.

I suspect that George W. Bush and his courtiers are genuinely angry about this "trumped-up political stunt." That's not to suggest that they're legitimately angry. It's just to say that they don't percieve the President's past forays into costume drama as fair targets for derision. Even though that aircraft-carrier landing was spectacularly crafted and intentionally designed to be exactly a "trumped-up political stunt," they just can't understand why it should qualify as a reasonably target for mockery. It's receded from their vision. Lynn Westmoreland would not make so hysterically ironic a complaint as, "It's time for the Majority to take off their costumes," if the actual object of the Democrat's critique was clear to her. I have said it before and I'll say it again: what is most shocking to the decent mind about these people is not their viciousness, their bloodthirsty willingness to kill other people in the name of democratic abstractions and imperial fantasies. What shocks is their essential stupidity. These are prideful, lazy, stupid people, who have in their possession the vastest, deadliest resources ever available to the prideful, lazy, stupid people who have afflicted every government in the history of this earth.

Update: It appears, and we hate to judge before all the facts are in, that Lynn Westmoreland is indeed a He. A Him. A Male-American.