So, the president laughed on TV and that’s big news, or at least a big topic of conversation about his sensitivity or perceived lack of it towards the plight of many working people who are suffering in this bleak economic climate. Well, to some of us it looks like a simple case of the Bullfrog Blues. The what, you say? The Bullfrog Blues, where the lyrics describe a situation where “you got to wake up laughing, laughing just to keep from crying.” First recorded by its author blues man William Harris in 1928 and widely popularized by the great blues/rock band Canned Heat in the late 1960’s, “Bullfrog Blues” describes having “one woman on your mind” that presumably doesn’t have you on her mind anymore, but can be used to describe any situation that’s so frustrating you’ve got to laugh to keep from crying.
And crying is what a lot people would be tempted to do if they got to be the President of The United States and found out that the guy who had the job before them screwed up the place in more ways than you would think humanly possible. Well, it seems the breathtakingly inept Bush The Younger spent eight years with an unblemished record, having never made a correct decision about anything. He inherited a balanced budget, a financial surplus, a booming economy and peace and all he was expected to do was not screw things up too badly. Well, a quick glance at his previous life reveals that Bush The Younger screwed up everything he ever touched; the oil business (possibly the only man in history to ever lose money in the oil business), a baseball team (the lousy Texas Rangers) and the governorship of Texas, where he set records for both incompetence and retarded teenagers executed.
His crowning anti-achievement, however, was being the worst American President ever and into any possible future. He left the joint broke, with two unresolved wars, a Bill of Rights under attack (from him, no less, who swore to uphold the Constitution twice), a drowned New Orleans and an economy headed toward the Second Great Depression. So how do you follow an act like that? Is there a broom wide enough or a bottle of disinfectant strong enough to clean up after this man? The only people sorry to see him leave office were comedians and the super rich, the only two groups of people to prosper under his watch, and now even they are suffering. You know you’ve screwed up Big Time when even the very rich are losing money, something that hasn’t happened since 1929.
So let’s hope Mr. Obama can keep laughing. The guy’s been busier than than a one-armed juggler since he took office, trying desperately to get the economy jump started so that the country can afford to fix the many other vexing problems we face in a lot of areas. The olive branch he sent to the Republicans has been sent back to him wrapped with a dead fish and the right wing media has been going into mouth-foaming overdrive to discredit his policies, even though the guy has only been on the job for two months. Then there’s the desperate morons bringing up his birth certificate again, a non-issue already disposed of during the campaign. Even evil old Shotgun Dick Cheney, the guy who decided to bring back the Spanish Inquisition, has gotten in on the act, bitching and moaning that his policy of torturing people just for the fun of it has been discarded. And still Obama maintains an eerie calm in the face of all this, and can even laugh at the irony of it all. That’s just what we need right now. When you’ve got the Bullfrog Blues, that’s the only thing to do in order to keep on keeping on.