Shell
Mood:  cheeky
One of my oldest and best friends and I stopped talking about a year and a half or so ago over some extreme political disagreements which, inevitably, became personal ones. Just as inevitably, because we share many mutual friends and acquaintances, we ran into each other last night at the home of a couple we know. I had promised the lady of the house beforehand that I would be civil and I was. However, I had no sense of just how graceless my old friend could be in the face of my presence. Not in any overt way, but it was plain to anyone who knew us before the war and before the Great Satan ascended his throne that he (my former friend) was studiously avoiding me. Not even his much better half was so tactless.

One of this former friend's final declarations to me was, essentially, that he had no intentions of speaking to me again so long as Bush remains President. This condition of our moratorium raises an interesting point. That is, this man is just the type who would take pleasure in Bush's death. He would probably break his silence to me just to celebrate this particular president's demise. This is the degree to which the pathological hatred of George W. Bush extends, and I am sure that anyone reading these words knows (or is) just such a hater.

Of course, one of the reasons it was so easy for me to abandon that old friendship was that my friend was reduced to using me as a crash test dummy for his own shrill and impotent ravings. It was irrelevant to his purposes what I actually believed or said; the important thing was that he had, in that special presumption of intellectual discourse, a convenient foil. Yet, these are not times for [nuance], so I rejected my assigned role and here I am.

Two thousand and four is going to be a long and frustrating year for the anti-Bush crowd. Eleven months of watching that dumbass Texan get over on the Dumbocrats before sticking it in and twisting it? Hmmm. Sounds like a winner to me.