His Rudeness, A Great American

The air can get quite rarified in the blogosphere, and we all sometimes lapse into mediacentric navel-gazing, absurdly esoteric wonkishness and the minutae of partisan gamesmanship. It's easy to lose sight of the horror of what has been perpetrated in our names, to misplace the realization that our country bombed population centers in a nation that posed no threat to us, and knowingly killed more than 10,000 Iraqi civilians who were already suffering a Kafkaesque existence at the hands of the Marquis de Saddam.

It's even more difficult to confront daily the terrifying realization that men such as Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz have ascended to the highest offices in the land, in the United States of America for god's sake, and wield unimaginable power, seized by febrile delusions of godlike dominion over other human beings and in pursuit of nothing more than the aggrandizement of their own perverted empire.

It is simply impossible for us to indefinitely maintain condign outrage and indignation at the violation of our republic by scum like Bush and his flying monkeys, too exhausting and too psychically wearing, and so we retreat to the quotidian and in our most narcotized states expound on the upcoming presidential election as if it were a horse race rather than a battle for the very soul of our nation. And truly, it is a battle. Pick your poll - they all say essentially the same thing: this nation is on the cusp of retaining in power an administration that has traduced everything good and decent about our country. My god, how could this be?

But there is one among us who never loses sight of the danger, never flinches at the horror, never for a moment succumbs to bloggish solipsism. The one among us ever vigilant, ever possessed of a perspective on the events of our time that is unwavering and true: the Rude Pundit.

Here's to you, your Rudeness. You're keepin' it real. Don't let the bastards get you up.