I thought the first book ever written was the Legend of Gilgamesh but it turns out there is a much older collection of cuneiform tablets recovered from a burned out library in the ancient Hittite capital, where they had been placed after being stolen from the royal archives of Babylon, who stole them earlier from Sumer, who had pilfered them about 7,500 years ago from Ur. And these popular tablets are actually copies of much older originals. The oldest book ever written begins with a man sitting up in the black interior of his mud hut. Around him in the dark slumbers his family. By his side is a covered oil lamp. The night is uneventful until the hide covering the doorway is softly drawn aside, silhouetting against the distant lightning horizon a figure. The man rips the cover off his lamp and the flickering flame reveals his own teenage son. The father demands, "Where were you?" The teenager shrugs and mumbles, presumably in Babylonian, "I was here."
Don't you just want to choke the lying little bastard? And he's been dead for probably nine thousand years - because the first book every written appears to have been a self help guide to rearing children. Don't you sympathize with the father as he screams, "What do you mean you were here? It's a one room mud hut?! What were you, buried under the floor? And how the hell could you have been here if you're coming in?!! You've got to be coming in from someplace. That means you weren't here, doesn't it?!" Who but a teenager could display such arrogance, provide such a lame excuse, such a logic defying justification and bald faced lie that it could transcend maybe 9,000 years of dust and still piss off parents? Well it turns out, the current President of the United States is pretty good at it, too.
George W. Bush boldly declares, "I am the temporarily elected executive of a supposedly democratic republic and I have the right to eavesdrop on the private conversations of American citizens without having to justify or even explain my reasons for doing so to ANYBODY. And there is no limit on how long I can listen in or on how long I can keep any recordings, or what political hack in my administration can listen to them because without the need for a judicial review we don't have to keep any chain of evidence records because how can there be legal limits on "extra-legal" actions - not that I'm admitting what I'm doing is illegal, because it isn't. It's extra-legal, which mean it's more than legal. It's legal because I say so. And despite what you might think, or what our forefathers might have thought, or what all the politicians and cops and lawyers and judges over the past 200 years, between George Washington and me, might have thought or written about the importance of checks and balances, limits on power, civil rights and freedom of speech and thought and assembly and all that, the constitution actually allows me to violate it. It even encourages me, ...No, no, it requires me to violate it Yes, yes, the constitution was asking for it, wearing it's checks and balances split up to the knee, slinking around doing its Bill of Rights Strip Tease. It wasn't fair. Because the war we are now engaged in is so much more threatening than fifty years of having 10,000 nuclear warheads fifteen minutes from impact, it's so much more threatening than the Revolutionary War, right after which the constitution was written by the very people who fought it, and it's so much more threatening than anything else we have ever faced that I just HAVE to do what presidents pledge not to do. And I am so much more trustworthy than Richard Nixon, the last hack politician who felt a war justified wiretapping without any judicial review. I mean, have I ever lied to you?"
Does that sound like a teenager to you or what? As a parent, would you trust that kid with the family car? Hell, would you trust him with a book of matches? That's our problem - Our President is Georgie Houser. But where the average teenage male just wants to screw your daughter this guy wants to screw all of us at the same time. Ambitious, yes, but its time for a little discipline, don't you think?
Unfortunately this guy's parents are the Republican Party and look how well they disciplined Karl Rove for blowing the cover on a CIA undercover operation. They didn't even send him to his room. Look how well they disciplined Tom Delay for money laundering. Face it, the GOP is an enabler parent. We don't need congressional hearings on this; we need to call the Department of Children's Services. Our President doesn't need to be impeached; he needs to do a guest spot on Judging Amy.
To tell you the truth I'm not sure that anybody over the last 10,000 years has found an effective system for dealing with teenagers. Most behavior modification tactics used so far, from spanking to psychotherapy to tough love camps to military schools generally take ten to eleven years to work, by which time the arrogant bastards are no longer teenagers. But I will tell you this, this had better be our last president who is a spoiled over aged adolescent. Otherwise, we're going to wake up one morning and find ourselves deep in debt, caught in a stupid war, without any help because our long time friends and allies are going to get fed up with being lectured to by a morally impaired, arrogant little moron whose trying to work out his anger at mommy and daddy for pampering him.
I say we try spanking him again. At this point it can't hurt. Us.