If you go down in the streets today

Baby, you'd better, you'd better oooopen your eyes...

Man, I like the eight hour retail workday better every day. Someone spent fifteen hundred bucks on clothes today. We don't sell designer clothes, either; that's no easy feat. To be more accurate, fifteen hundred bucks of some kinda gimmicky high tech shirts with sunscreen and bug spray built in. Another girl came in, complete with platform shoes and Prada bag (no joke), and was appalled that a nice jacket cost a hundred bucks. I'm not going to live in Scottsdale when I get big.

I can't just whine about the rampant materialism and snobby atmosphere here forever. I mean, I can do it a lot, but I did it last night, too. And I don't feel like I want to set that precedent for my blog.

The problem is, I really don't have much to rant about. Sure, people around here are rich and stupid, but that's really the only thing amiss in my life.

Wait just a minute. No it's not.

George W. Bush is still a delusional moron. And he's still in charge of this place. How about his new five-point Iraqi exit strategy? That's like something I would have come up with for the manipulated, crooked, brownnosing leader to say if I was writing a political thriller...and it was a role played by Henry Czerny...and I was five. He didn't say anything, yet he pretended he was being bold, resolute, and clear. Still no apologies for his (mis)handling of Iraq, which, by the way, is approaching a 2:1 disapproval rate.

Why is Bush's lunacy something amiss in my life? I'm not one of the almost 800 American soldiers dead, nor am I one of the 11,000 dead Iraqi civilians. But I have to watch it happen; and I can't stand to watch it without criticizing it. And I can't criticize it without trying to change it. And I really don't ever want to run for political office. If I wind up running in the future, some jerk is going to dig this up and use it in some kind of mudslinging campaign against me, and to counteract this, I'm predicting it. But I really don't plan on doing it. The game is too dirty, and if I can't even handle selling bug repellent shirts to people in Scottsdale, there's no way I could ever deal with criticism from someone so low as Bush. That would be like having a pile of dog crap tell me I smelled bad and harbored bacteria.

I could carry this on, but why? Really. It doesn't make any difference if yet another person points out that even if Bill Clinton lied about his sex life and John Kerry changed his position on Iraq, neither of them lied in a State of the Union address or to the United Nations over matters that would later spell out the death of 11,000 Iraqi civilians (not combatants, I will stress. What's worse, this is a third-party estimate -- the US doesn't consider such a figure important, even though it is a duty of an occupying nation as dictated by the Geneva Accords, which, apparently, we're too good for). Bush has integrity, right? Which people believe because he said so. And their dope-on-a-rope preachers said so (ahem...Bishop of Colorado). Why aren't we sick of being pawns?

Screw it. Now I'm all angry. I should have just talked about how Led Zeppelin is the best band ever, or how the Hummer H2 is the dumbest vehicle ever (HEEEEYYYYYY KIDS! Ask your daddy to buy you a knock-off of the vehicle torched by insurgents around the world!).

'Cause folk down there really don't care, don't care, don't care, really don't care whiiich way the pressure liiieees...