The Zong

Every so often, I start to believe that Dana Milbank is actually a pretty hilarious guy. I mean, he looks like you’d expect a Washington Post reporter to look, and his writing is frequently sort of ho-hum in a vaguely journalistic way, but every so often he breaks off the kind of piece he did yesterday, and I realize that the two of us are more alike than I’d normally expect.

There’s a war going on, American soldiers and untold numbers of civilians are dying, and the foreign policy of this country has destroyed entire nations and our standing as a force of good in the world. In the face of several scandals and a rising frequency in calls for his impeachment, you’d think that the President of the United States might make some sort of concerted effort to at least pretend he’s trying to do something about it. I mean, when things are as fucked up as they are right now, I’d like to think the only thing Bush and his people have time to do is work on fixing all the shit that’s going wrong.

Instead, we’ve lately seen the genius of the P.R. campaign that the administration called “The New Way Forward,” which was to authorize a surge in troops, and then sit around and do absolutely dick while continuing to say that the surge needs to be given time to work its crazy magic on the terrorists.

The absurd insouciance of it all reached a fucking fever pitch, if absurd insouciance can do that, when the frigging QUEEN OF FUCKING ENGLAND came to our shores, and it became time, all of a sudden, to forget about all the shit going on that England and the United States are doing together and wax historical about some bullshit that Bush probably didn’t even know happened until five minutes before Lizzie got off the plane. From then on, it was all pomp and circumstance and limp-dicked pageantry, and Dana Milbank’s piece on the whole affair suggests that he might have been a little dizzy from all the blue blood in the room. To wit:

But the president seemed to be enjoying himself mightily yesterday. After Bush and the first lady took an impromptu walk with the queen and Prince Philip across Pennsylvania Avenue to Blair House, White House pool reporter Tara Copp of the Austin American-Statesman reported that “the president was in as sunny a mood as the sky above.”

And why shouldn’t he be sunny? The queen would not bicker with him about the Baghdad security plan, and there would be no prickly news conference in which he would be asked about the Newsweek poll putting his support at 28 percent, equal to Jimmy Carter’s in 1979. Yesterday gave Bush a chance to put aside the messiness of being head of government and enjoy the trappings of being head of state: cannons on the Ellipse, an Army fife-and-drum corps, a troop review and red geraniums on the South Portico.

It might be hard to sound sarcastic when writing stuff, but Milbank has it down, and it gets better when he writes about the prepared statement Bush read about the Global War on Terror, and Queenie’s response:

That met with a dissonant answer from Queen Elizabeth, who read: “A state visit provides us with a brief opportunity to step back from our current preoccupations to reflect on the very essence of our relationship.”

But enough with the heavy stuff. Tony Snow, the president’s press secretary, announced at his briefing that he would take no questions about the queen’s conversation with Bush. “We’re going to allow them to go ahead and have very pleasant conversations,” he said. “It’s a pretty cool day, you know?”

I guess my point here is that Dana Milbank, who I won’t claim to be unbiased, has pretty much captured my general state of mind about this matter simply by writing as if he’s completely lost his mind. It’s enough to make you want to laugh yourself silly: Why the FUCK is this kind of stuff allowed to continue? How much money did it cost to put on this ridiculous procession of fucking inbred puppet-monarchs and NFL quarterbacks? Is the 400th anniversary of Jamestown and a goddamn horse race as important as trying to find a way out of Iraq?

It’s more of the same here in God’s America, where we’re still just trying to ignore everything we’ve screwed up until it goes away. Want to know why people are plotting to kill us? Maybe they’re just trying to get our attention.

- M.G.