== What's your poison, citizen? = By Mark Morford

[madokie]

New game! Which toxic news story is most insulting? Play now!

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2008/10/01/notes100108.DTL&nl=fix

How can you know? How do you possibly choose? How to decide which is your favorite cruelly disheartening tidbit of news to slide down the national gullet like a rancid oyster this past week?

Is it the wretched and touching fact that no one, not Repubs, not Dems, not animals or bacteria or flowers or rocks or the very air itself, no extant entity anywhere trusts George W. Bush as far as they can hurl him back to Crawford, Texas, in a quivering lump of historic failure? Is it his utter powerlessness and uselessness and ineptitude in the face of the biggest and most volatile fiscal crisis in 20 years? Might be, might be.

Sure, you already knew, but here is yet more reeking evidence, one more nail in this eight-year coffin: George W. Bush is "toxic," and he is "poisonous," and he is absolutely deadly to any hope of serving the United States in any helpful way whatsoever. Anything he says and any desperate squinty-eyed plea he makes to the nation, and even to his own disgusted party, is widely considered a joke and a ploy and barely worth listening to, no matter how many scowling financial whizzes he manages to corral around him to make him appear passably coherent and au fait.

Did you notice? Amid the wreckage of the failed financial bailout, amid the finger-pointing and the flaring tempers and the adorable splintering of the Republican side of the aisle, and amid the entire nation instantly becoming deeply disgusted with every politician and banker and fund manager and CEO in existence, there's one overarching theme: It's Bush. ...