KEY POINTS:
I thunked my palm against my forehead. "Oh, my Gawd." It was the epiphany this week that nearly wrecked me, "I miss Dubya".
You heard right. Wherefore art thou, Voldemort? Back in Texas, when the world needs you as a counterbalance to virtuous boy wizards from Chicago?
My life is empty, like a Merrill Lynch CEO without his US$1.22 million office remodel, or Sarah Palin without her "Naughty Monkey Double-Dare" red pumps. Keep your government car, Winston. Blacken the streets of Auckland, Transpower. My entire raison d'etre has been decaffed - and I am lost.
For eight years I've injected righteous indignation into my arteries just to kick-start my heart. I need my dark world back.
When Dick Cheney rolled out of Washington in his wheelchair, complete with saucy black fedora and leather gloves like Dr Strangelove only with better lines ("Deficits don't matter"), a large piece ripped out of my raisin-sized heart.
There is so much about those dark arts I will miss. Let me count the ways:
- There's the gag-inducing US$147 billion in no-bid contracts the Bush Administration dished out last year, according to Harpers Index.
- The 60 per cent of Environmental Protection staff who say they experienced political interference in their work.
- Bush's four out of five education directors who had financial ties to the reading curriculum they used.
- And, of course, there was the comfort in knowing that a gobsmacking 98 per cent of Bush appointees were regulating the very same industries they used to represent as lobbyists.
I can't even mention the unprecedented politics injected into the formerly untouchable Justice Department without getting teary-eyed for the days when the words "Department of Justice" wasn't a contradiction in terms.
But most of all, I miss my Homer Simpson of elocution, the man who left us with one last pearl in his final press conference - "Sometimes you misunderestimated me."
Good Sir, we surely did. I say this with complete and utter conviction; George W. Bush, you were certainly effective at what you did. You were the one who gave us that crystal-clear, cartoon beauty of world leaders in black or white hats, evildoers or freedom-fries eaters.
Suddenly life with Obama is like an entire paint fan-deck of fluffy grey tones, and I'm so confused. I have to think now. All this intellectual complexity, political light-footedness and lovey "unclenched fists" is making my head hurt.
Obama gave his first interview to (gasp) Arab television. His Middle East envoy has a reputation for big picture softly-softly and has already gone a-courting. And Hillary says she's touting a three-footed stool of diplomacy, development and defence, claiming America will use the last one least.
Waterboarding is so 2008 now. Yet I loved those "childish things", as our new Prez would say. What's a girl to hate next?
Delightfully, February is already bearing fruit. There's the new sport of banker bashing, with once reputable scions now turned pond-scummy financiers, stuttering over their US$1400 parchment garbage cans. If I try hard enough, and mentally paste Cheney's face on to ex-Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain's body, I can muster up the same distain for the billions Thain handed out like a lolly scramble to his buddies just before his firm tanked. No worries, boys, taxpayers love paying for that stuff out of their unemployment cheques.
It was like old times when I heard that gimme-money Citibank only stopped their order for a new US$50 million corporate jet after the new Treasury Secretary gave them a nice telephone call. How deja-vu-ish. We just went over this with the Big Three Auto Boys last month. Must Treasurer Geithner have to get out his Naughty Monkey Double-Dare whip to get the red out? It's not just about money. Recently, the Bank of England actually sent a memo to women employees telling them that successful women should always wear make-up and high heels. The world would be a better place if it was 1963.
I can set my sights on other things. I will move on. I sat immobile in my car on my way home from holiday, transfixed to hear that the BBC actually employed Joe the Plumber to be a war correspondent. He came back to report that journalists shouldn't go anywhere near war. That was nice.
Some Aussies are talking about removing obese children from their families just after their Prime Minister got over apologising about removing Aboriginal children from their families. That was nice.
I'll be okay. I'll find a place for all this untapped vitriol. Maybe Cheney will do lunch. We can reminisce about the good old days when men were men and diplomacy was for sissies. Things are looking up. It's a new era of responsibility. I hear Obama may even be expanding the use of rendition, the practice of stealing suspects so they can be secretly held in other countries. That could be fun.
* www.traceybarnett.co.nz
