I wish George W. Bush were dead.

A few years back, I began taking to a new catchphrase. "I wish George Bush were dead." Now, previous to about 2000, I had always kind of shied away from presidential death 'humor' or 'fervent hopes.' You know, respect for the office, the nation, all that.

But heck. Bush himself doesn't respect the office or the nation. And seeing as how he's the asshole who has systematically dismantled our civil liberties, haphazardly ballooned our national debt, callously committed thousands of lives to a commercially motivated boondoggle in Iraq, trodden upon the lives and livelihoods of countless innocent foreign nationals, lied every possible way about every possible subject to every possible audience... I have not wavered from that wish. I wish he were dead.

So now I'm curious. My blog is read probably by me and three or four other people, tops. Mostly, it's about ballparks and movies. Will anyone care if I shout from a middling rooftop of the internet... "I wish George W. Bush were dead?!"

See, I really do. I wish a fucking meteor would strike DC and just wipe it from the earth. I wish he'd go hunting with Cheney and get shot in his stupid monkey face. I wish he'd have been in Southeast Asia when the Tsunami hit. I wish he'd be in an overturning gas guzzling SUV accident. The world really would be better off. This man has been a pox on humanity. We are poorer for his having existed.

Now, just in case there is some sort of secret NSA web-snooping initiative to punish all wrong-thinking Americans, let me say, clearly and unequivocally: In no way, shape or form do I have any intention or plan to see my wishes carried out. I haven't the foggiest notion how to do it for one, and secondly, I am actually bound by these little things called ethics and morals. If George Bush and Adolph Hitler were hanging from a precipice, pleading for me to help them up, I'd do my best to try. But that's a whole Hume debate about moral inclinations and feelings. My point is: I have neither the werewithal nor the desire to actually carry out any plot against the president. I just have a vague, detached wish that something awful would happen to him. The aforementioned meteors, tsunamis, or any number of other poetically just deaths would do. Maybe being crushed by a vat of stem cells. Being involved in a fire at a Creationist museum. Or maybe contracting Alzheimers and rotting away like a fucking Ronald Rutebaga.

But am I free to say it? I WISH GEORGE W. BUSH WERE DEAD.

Or has he succeeded in his war against our civil liberties? Will I be punished in some way? Arrested?

I doubt it. I have neither the ego nor the paranoia to think so.

But in Bush's America, who the hell knows?