The American Spectator

If ever there were any doubt that liberalism induces misery, the recent Rock Against Bush compilation CD/DVD should clear that right up.

NOFX, the band that spearheaded this project, has a solid reputation as a happy-go-lucky, if oftentimes lewd, group of pranksters. For more than a decade they have been content to churn out un-P.C. albums, with titles like Heavy Petting Zoo and songs such as “Hobophobic (Afraid of Bums)” and “Flossing a Dead Horse.”

But heaven knows they’re miserable now. By way of proof, here’s a sample verse from their song “Franco Un-American”:

blockquote> em>I never looked around, never second-guessed br> Then I read some Howard Zinn now I’m always depressed br> And now I can’t sleep from years of apathy br> All because I read a little Noam Chomsky br> I’m eating vegetation, ‘cause of /em> Fast Food Nation. /blockquote>

“George Bush is not just another bad president,” Fat Mike, the singer of NOFX, states plainly in the record’s liner notes. Rather, “He is THE bad president.”

Could there be any sadder commentary on the state of our nation than to have someone so lucky be so morose? Here’s a guy who learned to play rote three-chord songs on a guitar, with limited commercial appeal, and yet has still spent the past 20 years traveling the world doing exactly what he wants to do. That’s freedom. That’s capitalism. Yet here he is making himself completely miserable gnawing on the hand that’s fed him.

BUT I DIGRESS. The other folks on the disc aren’t much more chipper than the Fat one. Multi-platinum superstars Sum 41 contribute a song, “Moron,” and a short essay that reads in part, “Whatever happened to George Bush the comedian?…When he isn’t bombing a defenseless country, he’s destroying the environment or worse.”

Or the RX Bandits who, defying their track record as purveyors of catchy verses, posit in song that “ignorance is bred when falsified thinking is taught unto the youth instead of past mistakes and mind elevation like the graves that manifest destiny has created so we could build our capitalist consumer society.”