Bad Rats and Sick Ships

(The Warners of Virginia)As anticipated, the articles on Larry Craig's resignation have begun. We won't have to wait long. Less anticipated is that leading Republican Senator John Warner has announced that, like Dennis Hastert, he's had his fill of Washington and will not be seeking another term. Warner is one of the Republicans I support. His departure will be a loss for the senate. At 80, perhaps he's old and tired. Then again, perhaps the state of the situation has become so intolerable he just can't do it anymore. Remember, Warner returned from Iraq recently and suggested we start getting out of there by this Christmas.

While the GOP will massacre Craig and easily retain the seat, the task of retaining Warner's seat is far more challenging. Very popular and right there we have Mark Warner, well liked former governor of the state. Hillary, suggests the grapevine, has Warner in mind as a VP. That may have just changed. If Mark Warner runs for this seat and does not slip, he will be Virginia's next Senator.

Rat Gonzo leaves in a couple weeks, and today was Rat Rove's last day at the White House. He leaves a GOP boat that is taking on water and a presidency on the brink of oblivion, referring to nuclear holocausts. Play that lunacy out. Iran gets the bomb. Who do they nuke? The United States? No.

Israel.

What happens next? Spacecraft will have to be modified to navigate the chunks of Iran around the space station. Iran doesn't know this? Yeah, they have a kook in charge, but that country is actually rather intelligent if the government would get out of the way.

Sirocco posted a Congressional Exodus story recently, noting that Deborah Price, R-Ohio, and Chip Pickering, R-Mississippi, won't be seeking re-election either.

The GOP ship is not sinking, but it is infected. The president's speeches this week paint continued obstinacy and denial. He does whatever Lord Cheney tells him to do, but they keep crafting different reasons for doing it, and he is starting to lose his generals. The sequence of events follow murky forces and pressures that require time. Still, when situations meet certain tipping points, a lot can happen quickly.

In Stephen King's The Stand, one of the military characters states, "If the center does not hold, everything falls apart."

Someone much smarter than than most elected officials wrote in The Perfect Drug, "Without you, everything falls apart."

As far as I can tell, the GOP has lost its center. At a July 4th Bush rally in North Carolina on public grounds, two individuals wearing T-shirts with anti-Bush statements were arrested for "trespassing", handcuffed, and thrown in jail. They made phone calls that produced phone calls, and the ACLU got them out of jail and filed suit. The judge tossed the bogus trespassing charge, and the federal government settled for $80,000.

The topic to which Bush's entire address spoke, Freedom of Speech.

Freedom of Speech, unless of course, you want to say something our president does not want to hear.