Comedy

Devo is back with a new album of their old songs but performed by children, the ingeniously titled Devo 2.0. Tonight, I'm thinkin' El Presidente George Bush is going through some devolution of his own.

With blogs suddenly influencing the mainstream media, particularly the center-to-left bloggers, there's a Mahatma Gandhi quote that's been popping up here and there around the blogosphere, "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." You could actually say that about the post-Goldwater U.S. Conservative Movement. At least on the East Coast they used to laugh at Ronald Reagan. Then they helped elect him President, twice.

Now Darwin seems to be working in reverse, in double-time. Bush gives a speech on immigration and the only people who take it seriously are entrenched in that very same Conservative Movement, the ones who hate whatever it was he said he was going to do. Don't ask me -- I've stopped listening, watching, whatever it was we used to do with Presidents back when they talked to us like adults.

These outraged Right Wingers range from the xenophobotic Michelle Malkin (ironically the daughter of Filipino immigrants) calling Bush's troop show "theater," to the World Net Daily "Christian libertarian" referencing Hitler for immigration solutions:

If it took the Germans less than four years to rid themselves of 6 million Jews, many of whom spoke German and were fully integrated into German society, it couldn't possibly take more than eight years to deport 12 million illegal aliens, many of whom don't speak English and are not integrated into American society.

And they say young people today have no sense of history.

In a brilliant column today Glenn Greenwald exposed the hypocrisy of the Conservative came which screams bloody murder over Democratic calls for Bush's impeachment should they win in November (a complete straw man, as no prominent Dem has done so) but is hyperventilatiing to impeach Bush over immigration.

So tonight Bush goes on the air and I'm far from the only American ignoring him. Nobody believes his act anymore, not the Left in 4 years, not the Middle in 2 and not the Right as of this year. Nobody thinks he's going to say anything where he'll do a damned thing about any domestic issue -- after all, it's his first Oval Office address on a domestic policy issue in the entire six years of his Presidency.

No commentator has to tell most Americans that Bush is out of touch.

Wait, I did, I did watch a little of the President's address tonight. Actually, that's not exactly true, I just watched a few seconds of his rehearsal. Maybe not a perfect substitute, maybe not as >chuckle< substantive, but undoubtedly the only part that will be remembered.

Crooks and Liars has it up, as always. Oh, SPOILERS, what happens is in the middle of Wolf Blitzer's scintillating pre-speech panel the pool camera or CNN accidentally switches on Bush rehearsing, but Bush is somehow cues that he's on live and freezes; yes, that "My Pet Goat" deer-in-the-headlights look. You can tell he's wanting to drop the mask but being just smart enough to keep fixed, wannabe fierce, same old smug.

I'll bet that a sizable percentage of the population will be with me. Bush has been completely Colbert-icized. While he was once a winner, while we used to fight him, we're mainly just laughing at or ignoring him. There's a lot going on around the President, the Rove/Cheney Plame Affair, the Rumsfeld squandering, the Delay/Abramoff/Cunningham/Foggo corruption daisy chains, daisy figure-eights, but unless he's ginning up another war, we don't want to hear what comes out his piehole. By now we all know, even the Conservatives: it'll always be a lie.

It's the Devo "Are We Not Decider?" George Bush devolution.

I wouldn't even be surprised if some technician flipped it on for a gag. Or maybe everyone's just getting sloppy around him -- he doesn't care about collateral damage, why should some guy in a switching room?

I'd like to think that the regular America worker is a heckuva lot better than Bush's heckuva-job cronies. I'd like to think it was actually on purpose, someone's idea so we could once again see what a clown his is, with duty on his face.

It's your turn, America. Whip it good.