I've mustered up a new batch of political poems: two limericks about a pair of our country's Crackpot Pats, Pat Robertson and Pat Boone; and a poem and haiku about Bush's extended vacation and his summer reading list. Here's my Pat Robertson limerick:
A Broadcasting Preacher Named Pat By Madeleine Begun Kane
A broadcasting preacher named Pat, Who quite frequently talks through his hat, Seems to think it's God's will That we Prez Chavez kill. Then we'll take all his oil, and that's that.
"America was never innocent. We popped our cherry on the boat over and looked back with no regrets. You can't ascribe our fall from grace to any single event or set of circumstances. You can't lose what you lacked at conception.
"Mass-market nostalgia gets you hopped up for a past that never existed. Hagiography sanctifies shuck-and-jive politicians and reinvents their expedient gestures as moments of great moral weight. Our continuing narrative line is blurred past truth and hindsight. Only a reckless verisimilitude can set that line straight."
--James Ellroy, American Tabloid
Ensure a Free and Fair Election (Ban Paperless Voting Machines
"The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words."