Mark Morford, SF Gate columnist: Evil Evildoers Of Evil — How to feel calmly patriotic and yet not the slightest bit reassured by Bush & Co.

This much is true: It really is possible to

love your country and value your freedoms

and still believe the government is full of

fools and prevaricators and BS artists and

Dick Cheney. Really.

It is still possible to feel warmly patriotic in

personal and important ways and yet believe

the military and the generals and the war

machine do not have your best interests at

heart and really couldn’t care less what

those interests are anyway but thank you for

sharing now please sit down and do as we

tell you and by the way, thanks for all the

flags and the money.

And it is still possible to feel unified and

spiritually connected to all that is good and

righteous about your generally nonviolent

Americanism — you know, wine and sex and

good music, large dogs and literature and

clean water and tongue kissing in the streets

— and still be depressed when our famously

nonintellectual president talks to the

country like we’re all five years old and

heavily dosed on Ritalin.

When Bush employs phrases like “bring the

evildoers to justice” over and over, 17 times

in one speech alone, and he furrows his

brow like a serious Muppet and offers

carefully scripted reassurances deliberately

lacking in polysyllabism and detailed

explanation because that would be, you

know, complicated.

When he delivers very earnest speeches he

had no part in writing, and when he is

forced to speak extemporaneously, sans

script or TelePrompTer, and is reduced to

simplistic good-guy/bad-guy platitudes and

flustered, rapid blinking, and who cannot

for the life of him articulate a complex idea,

some sort of nuanced elucidation of our

nation’s motives and positioning, that

contains more than one possible level of

meaning. [via Looka!]