The new year has started and already the Republicans have restored dysfunction to the House of Representatives. We’re actually getting sick of pointing out the stupidity of the GOP because we’ve been doing it for the past twenty years. That’s right, folks. The Bilge Bucket Gazette, the site that shovels it to the public just like the regular corporate media, celebrates its 20th anniversary this year. Of course, back when we started on May 19, 2003 (or aught 3 as old codger staff member Chester Einstein puts it) it was Dubya, Uncle Dick, Rummy and their cast of greedy, neoconservative corporate lackeys who were causing the chaos on the world stage by setting America up for the quagmire in Afghanistan and the clusterf*ck known as the Iraq War while simultaneously helping bring about the Great Recession with little to no opposition from the Democrats. Since then, Republicans have lurched so far to the right that they brag about being fascist, are open in their admiration of Nazis and have openly tried to overturn legitimate democratic elections. We’ve made many a satirical photo-toon over the years blasting them about their greed, corporatism, racism, fascism, white christian nationalism and now they’re exposed, openly proud of the fact they want to rid America of democracy. They have truly broken satire.

When we first started out we wanted to be a poor man’s Onion. We wanted to be a web site that offered a wide spectrum of irreverent social, corporate, political, sports, religion and celebrity satire and humor that would be, as editor Dex Rexter put it, “1/20th as funny as the Onion”. But the Republicans were so bad that we morphed into being mostly an anti-Republican, anti-conservative, anti-religion, anti-racist and anti-fascist web site.

Since we’re sick of the current asshole Republicans, the Democrats seem to be letting the GOP getting away with overturning democracy and it’s our 20th anniversary, we’ve decided that in the coming months we’d retrospectively look at the spectacular debacle that was the Dubya years – the disastrous administration that started the Republican’s slide into insanity. We’re also going to honor our original humble intentions and repost some our non- political articles, photo-toons, polls, lists and other scchhttufffff. Back in aught 3, we had a basic html site as you can see by our posted screenshot below (there’s elegance in simplicity). The first two issues were only articles and headlines – our first photo-toon didn’t appear until our third issue. We also released more regularly, mostly on an every other week basis. We changed the look-and-feel in late 2005. After Obama won in 2008, we took a two year hiatus starting in June 2009. Then in July 2011 we converted everything to a much more convenient WordPress blog format that we still have today. But our original material was archived and we’ve only reposted selected articles, headlines, photo-toons and other material from the early years since then. We’ve also had staff come and go and we’ll repost some of their articles and contributions as well.

So, let’s enjoy the trip down memory lane as we look back at the Dubya years (2003-2009) on the 20th anniversary of the Bilge Bucket Gazette.