the vanishing

Mid afternoon coffee with my cousin Yankee Joe.
He is a native of Boston exiled by fate for the winter in Ireland.
We are posited at the window table of the Chat And Chew.
Outside as per usual a light October sun is dancing on Main Street.
School children skirmish on the path.
Ah life.
You bauble.
Come to me.
"What do you think of Sarah Palin?" enquireth the cousin.
I paused meditatively in mid quaff.
I like being asked my opinions and it happens less often than you might think. So I wanted to savour the moment.
"I think I want her to win," I replied eventually with an air of great erudition. "I've bet money on her and McCainers."
"Ah Heelers you always go for the Republicans."
"And you guys in Massachusetts always go for the Dems."
"Okay, but what do you really think of Palin?"
"The answer to your question is she's a bit of a gusher. But I like her."
The cousin digested this.
"How do you think she did against Joe Biden in the Vice Presidential debate?"
"Well Biden is very slick and he's cool under pressure. Neither Sarah nor McCain are in his league when it comes to the talking stakes. She did okay. Much better than when she was ambushed by that ABC idiot Charles Gibson asking her what she thought of the Bush Doctrine and then refusing to tell her what the hell he was talking about. Every journalist worth his salt knows there is no clearly defined Bush Doctrine. There are at least four instant possible definitions. But the term is not used in common parlance. It has no precise meaning. Gibson is a lying coward and he's a worse coward because he's trying to get Barack elected and pretends he isn't. That's all. It was a total set up. And then that Democratic party shill Katie Couric, holder of the Connie Chung Award for Journalistic Integrity, asking Sarah to itemise McCain's voting record over the past forty years. Sure, McCain himself wouldn't be able to do that. It was all a load of baloney. Partisanship from the supposedly objective unbiased media hacks. The great gotcha questions from these apparatchiks of the Barack campaign. They might just as well have asked: Why don't you love Barack the way we do... A few cheap shots. The best they could come up with. Still Sarah was flustered alright. It was different against Joe Biden. She gave as good as she got even if Senator Biden's a better communicator by a country mile."
Yankee Joe yawned.
"No surprises there," quoth he. "I could have predicted you'd say all that."
I wasn't finished.
"Really Cousin, the nub of the problem for Sarah and McCain is that neither of them can make a speech to save their lives," I insisted. "And they're up against two politicians who are indubitably superb in that regard. In fact Barack is probably the best talker on the planet earth. He could say: I need to go to the toilet. And it would sound presidential. Barack is the Mike Tyson of talking. You know, I'd put him in charge of the College debating team in a second. I just wouldn't put him in charge of the free world."
"But you're not an objective judge."
"True," I admitted.
"You even liked Bush."
I looked at him seriously.
"I still like President Bush," I said. "I think he's been a truly great President. He's ended the Saddam Hussein family murderocracy in Iraq and he's ended the Arab terror dictatorship in Afghanistan."
(Heelers believes the Arabs were running the Taliban regime - Ed note.)
Yankee Joe spluttered into his coffee mug.
"You can't be serious."
"Cousin, I'm absolutely serious. I'm Yahoo Serious. No other President would have stood strong after Nine Eleven. The pressure was on to talk a big fight and then do nothing. The useless media groups of the western world were all set to cry a few crocadile tears and then go back to business as usual. CNN, NBC, CBS, ABC, Time magazine, Newsweek, the New York Times and the Washington Compost. Utterly worthless quisling cold hearted swines. They'd have surrendered to the Muslim terrorists rather than end the clammy clubby consensus of Clinton era politics. But President Bush gave the Jihadi's the war they still can't believe. And history will thank him for it."
"You think the War On Terror will be won?"
"It will be won or we will be ruled by Arabs. There's no in between. President Bush played his part. Now it falls to our generation to decide whether we want freedom or whether we're willing to accept the imposition of a dysfunctional ideology posing as a religion that has no respect for women, children, science, freedom, culture, history or humanity in general."
(For any employees of CNN, NBC, CBS, ABC, Time Magazine, Newsweek, The New York Seyss Inquart, The Washington Feldwebel, the BB communist C, Channel Four, the Irish Times, Le Monde Esclavé, and the Nazi Channel Al Jazeera, you should know that the religion Heelers is referring to is the peaceloving religion of Islam, and not any of the genuinely peaceloving religions which you heroes of free speech are so accustomed to sneering at. - Ed note)
Yankee Joe eyed me with a certain disdain.
"How do you think President Bush has done on the economy?" sez he.
I grinned and shrugged and held up my hands in surrender.
"You got me. Right in the gizzard. It's the one serious problem that afflicts conservative parties or parties of principle everywhere. Big money bast--ds infiltrate us in order to make us their farm animals. In order to manipulate the political process and foster the illusion that without the banks or the stock exchange or the financial institutions, our democracies and our freedoms couldn't exist. It's a lie of course. Okay. The financial crisis is the perfect storm in Barack's favour. I don't deny it. And I'll admit something else. When I consider the corruption of stock exchanges and banks and financial institutions worldwide, I find that I have more in common with the Democrats and European left wing parties on those mattters. Of course Europe has been run by socialists for forty years. Even our right wing parties are just socialists in drag. And socialists have corruptions of their own. After forty years of buying off the trade union movement in Ireland, the socialists have left us in the rather sad position of blaming America for our rundown, moth eaten, rust bucket economy. The Irish Fianna Fail government has handed out forty percent payrises across the public sector. Forty percent to invidiously idle nursies, to extortionist school teachers, to thuggish jailbird bus drivers, and worst of all to corrupt cops who actually phoned in sick en masse to get their pay demands. The same cops who have replaced the internationally accepted motto of policing To Protect And Serve, with a motto of their own To Harass And Intimidate. And we're wondering why our money is suddenly worth forty percent less. The Irish government guarantees to support the Bank Of Ireland which last year paid its head honcho four million quid. Four million quid for a year's work? Four million quid just to place the Bank Of Ireland in such a competitive trading position that without government support it will collapse? I gotta say I think the scruff is being seriously overpaid and I'm not a bit happy my government is using my money to keep his bank in the style to which it has become accustomed. The same government welched on paying me Unemployment Benefit. Yes, the Irish government Department of Social Welfare in the town of Newbridge welched on paying me the Unemployment Benefit money I was entitled to under the law. A couple of twenty something trade unionised hags with jobs for life at the Department of Social Welfare in Newbridge found a pretext and welched on paying me the two hundred quid a week I was due after having paid social insurance every week for a decade. And yet with scarcely a week's notice the same Irish government comes up with a hundred billion to save the banks. Useless corrupt bast--ds. But I digress. You got me with that question about the economy. I don't know what to say. I genuinely think Mr Bush is a great President and an honorable man. But on the economy you got me. The old analyses don't apply. In a way I think it's time for people of goodwill to get together and set up new political parties. Ones that won't allow banking scumbags to infiltrate. Ones that won't allow the trade union movement to crash the economy by extorting forty percent payrises. Ones that aren't ashamed to be Christian. And ones that will never surrender to Muslim terrorists. Yes my Paddy Whack countrymen all think it's somebody else's fault that the European economy is collapsing and that the Jihadi's are committing mass murder worldwide. In truth it's all our own fault. But thankfully there's a cure."
Yankee Joe stood up.
"Sorry I can't stay," sez he, "I have to talk to a man about a dog."
Whereupon he vanished.