In the woods

My wife and our poodle and I took a long walk in the nearby woods yesterday. We walked through glorious fall foliage, up and down some fairly rugged, rocky hills, along a wild-enough creek to provide many sounds of falling water and continual picturesque vistas. Though at no moment did I experience one of those "surpassing feelings,"¹ the walk restored in me a sense of calm and balance. And I needed that.

Ironically, the way this country is "in the woods" politically now is anything but calm and balanced.

In his New York Times op-ed piece Friday ("Insulting Our Troops, and Our Intelligence"),Thomas L. Friedman wrote:

George Bush, Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld think you’re stupid. Yes, they do.

They think they can take a mangled quip² about President Bush and Iraq by John Kerry – a man who is not even running for office but who, unlike Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney, never ran away from combat service – and get you to vote against all Democrats in this election.

Every time you hear Mr. Bush or Mr. Cheney lash out against Mr. Kerry, I hope you will say to yourself, “They must think I’m stupid.” Because they surely do.

They think that they can get you to overlook all of the Bush team’s real and deadly insults to the U.S. military over the past six years by hyping and exaggerating Mr. Kerry’s mangled gibe at the president.

...if the Bush team can behave with the level of deadly incompetence it has exhibited in Iraq – and then get away with it by holding on to the House and the Senate – it means our country has become a banana republic.

And in today's New York Times ("Throw the Truthiness Bums Out"), Frank Rich writes:

While lying politicians and hyperbolic negative TV campaign ads are American staples, the artificial realities created this year are on a scale worthy of Disney, if not Stalin. In the campaign’s final stretch, Congress and President Bush passed with great fanfare a new law to erect a 700-mile border fence to keep out rampaging Mexican immigrants, but guaranteed no money to actually build it. Rush Limbaugh tried to persuade his devoted audience that Michael J. Fox had exaggerated his Parkinson’s symptoms in an ad for candidates who support stem-cell research purely as an act.

In a class by itself is the president’s down-to-the-wire effort to brand his party as the defender of “traditional” marriage even as the same-sex scandals of conservative leaders on and off Capitol Hill make “La Cage aux Folles” look like “The Sound of Music.” Just in recent days, the Rev. Ted Haggard, a favored Bush spiritual adviser and visitor to the Oval Office (if not the Lincoln Bedroom), resigned as leader of the National Association of Evangelicals after accusations that he patronized a male prostitute, and the Talking Points Memo blog broke the story of the Republican Party taking money from a gay-porn distributor whose stars include active-duty soldiers. (A film version of Mrs. Cheney’s "Sisters," alas, still awaits. [Sisters is an out-of-print lesbian sex novel by the wife of "vice president" Dick Cheenie.])

As I said, American politics is the cheapest entertainment going, but it's not pretty or funny or fun³.
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1. My post about a "God experience" in my back yard.
2. But why would the hapless Kerry joke [a verb] about this in the first place? Pathetic. When he read my post about Bush jokes not being funny, he obviously didn't get it.
3. My first post about Kerry's "joke."