the october surprise in august

The october surprise came early this year. Did you notice it? Well, it began when it became apparent that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac might go belly up. In a sense, we can mark that as the end of the era of Cheney. It was at that moment that the money men, via the Treasury secretary, pulled the plug on the vanity next-war-in-the-making: Iran.

LI tries to remove himself from the painful spectacle of election year politics because, well, everything about it hurts. This year, in particular, we’ve watched the Dems watch the price of oil skyrocket. We’ve watched the press speculate endlessly about the cause of this, in one section of the paper, and report, in another section of the paper, about this or that statement or action implying that Israel or the U.S. is about to attack Iran. We’ve watched the crime in action, and we've watch the feebs that represent the opposition sit on their hands and seal their eyes. Did the Dems make a peep? Did they use this as a case study of the virulent blowback from pursuing a vain, egregiously stupid, manically male foreign policy in the Middle East, in contravention to the collective wisdom of the past eighty, gloriously oil fed years? Nope.

About three weeks ago, Bush changed course. There were no headlines – but the oil futures market could read what was happening. The signal was clearly sent – no war with Iran – and the security premium that had been inflating oil prices collapsed. Since then, the GOP seems to have started attracting, once more, its exurban constituency, the ones especially hit by the gas price jump. The exurbanites are also the ones that especially hate the environment – they are bred up to hate environmentalists, any limit to waste, and all the feminine frilliness that would keep them from growing fat in the ass and plunking that ass in an SUV. On the other hand, such is the ambient cretinousness that these same people are lovers of camping, hunting, and the great outdoors. Welcome to the moronic inferno of the 21st century. So, like the mouse people listening to Josephine the singer, they all swayed in unison when another stupid GOP-er, McCain, proposed destroying property values from coast to coast with pointless drilling – never mind the environmental havoc.

Of course, the opposition to the moronic inferno is caught up, still, in fantasies of unmotivated evil of its own kind. For them, preceding from the sound principle that the war class goes to war, they go to the unsound conclusion that the war class is a vast, planning organism that is going to bomb Iran tomorrow – in spite of our knowledge that such a thing would have the most evil effect on the moneymen who float the whole operation. As the planning for the occupation of Iraq shows, the new warmonger is not happy about war per se, but likes the vast corruption attendant upon pretend war. Plus of course the spectator value of being pretend warriors, exhibiting pretend bravery and pretend moral outrage all the way to the bank. That Iraq turned out not to be Panama is a bummer, dudes.

So the GOP did what it had to do – broke the back of the oil inflation monster. Since that is the most visible symbol of our economic shambles, who knows whether it will be enough to keep the exurban cretins in line. In one sense, that would be nice – let the fucks vote in ever more vile gangsters to pick their pockets and leave them out on the roadside, bleeding. But my more lamb-y, love side is against the rush of immediate gratification which this idea brings.

Put your raygun to my head - and please, press the trigger. Put me out of this misery.