On kidneys, drinking and war crimes guilt
May 11th, 2009 at 7:21 am
bush-drinking
At the White House Correspondent’s dinner the other night—that annual black tie affair where the Washington press corps gets together with a roomful of celebrities to gawp at the President in an attempt to remind themselves they still matter—emcee Wanda Sykes went after Rush Limbaugh:
“It was also Ms. Sykes who provided one of the more charged lines of the evening, when she took on Rush Limbaugh, accusing him of “treason” for saying that “he hopes this administration fails.”
“I think maybe Rush Limbaugh was the 20th hijacker, but he was just strung out on OxyContin and missed his flight,” she said, to cheers and nervous groans. “Too much?”
But then she continued anyway. “Rush Limbaugh. ‘I hope the country fails’? I hope his kidneys fail, how about that? He needs some more waterboarding, that’s what he needs.””
That’s all well and good, of course. I, too, want Limbaugh’s kidenys to fail, if for no other reason than he once made fun of a man with a hereditary degenerative disease (there are other reasons, of course). And, sure, I’d like to see Rush waterboarded. After all, who wouldn’t?
And, for good measure, Sykes also mocked former VP Dick Cheney and his penchant for torture, and former VP hopeful Sarah Palin for her confusion over abstinence. But while we’re on the subject of wishing ill on former Republican administration officials and conservative icons, you know what else I’d like to see?
I’d like to see George W. Bush start drinking again.
Seriously. Let me throw open the pages of the august New York Times one fine morning to see a headline that says something like “Family and Friends Worried About Bush Relapse,” or “Bush Seen Slurring at Speech for Corporate CEOs.” Let me imagine the look on his wife’s face when, one night, she realizes without a doubt that the reason her husband has passed out on the floor of their stately Preston Hollow home isn’t because he’s been working too hard on writing his memoirs. Let me picture the former president wandering the halls of his soon-to-be built Presidential library, talking to the paintings on the wall like some sort of 21st century Nixonian apparition, haunted by his own failure.
In fact, I beseech you, dear God, send me some YouTube video of the former President of the United States, one-time leader of the Free World and most powerful man on the planet; let me see the moment where he lashes out at the reporter who happens to catch him drunk and surly at some fancy Washington soiree for the American Enterprise Institute, where he has gone to pick up a lifetime achievement award or a plaque commemorating how many innocent Iraqis his policies ended up killing.
Because worse than having your kidneys fail, worse than suffering the indignity of losing control of your bowels while strapped to the water board or made the laughingstock of more than half the country because of your own hypocrisy, worse by far than simply having your political stock and the stock of your party fall lower than levels last seen during the heyday of the Herbert Hoover administration, is the knowledge, deep in your gut, that you are, in the end, alone, and nothing more than a war criminal and a murderer. On a grand scale, and for keeps and for real, and no amount of praying to your God or clinging to the Transformative Powers of Freedom will ever change it.
And that you have little choice but to go back on the one victory that you could ever claim in your whole life was yours and yours alone–giving up drinking. Because you have to find some way to stop the face in the mirror from calling you out every morning, and silence the voice in your head that drowns out the few last hopes and dreams you have left as you lay awake at night.
And that you would do anything to stop the pain, and the horror that comes from knowing.
Now there’s a joke I’d like to see told in front of the Washington press corps.
