CrimQuips
Quips & Comments 5-8-'02 Wednesday, May 8, 2002
by Barry Crimmins
http://www.barrycrimmins.com
Charged in the midwest bombing spree is 21 year-old college student, Lucas John Helder, described by F.B.I. special agent Jim Bogner as "an intelligent young man with strong family ties." John Ashcroft immediately seized the opportunity to call for police departments from around the country to roundup and question intelligent young man with strong family ties. Expect increased security delays at airports as intelligent young man with strong family ties face heightened scrutiny.
Citizens are requested to notify the government if they see any intelligent young men with strong family ties behaving suspiciously. It's scary to consider how many intelligent young men with strong family ties must be enrolled in flight schools around the USA right now.
Thank goodness they didn't trace the bombings to a stupid middle-aged man with strong family ties or Ashcroft would have had to question W.
Several members of Take the Money Enron's board of directors appeared before a senate hearing on Tuesday, where they patiently explained why they were responsible for nothing that happened at the corporation for which they were responsible.
Enron board member Wendy Gramm did not testify because she was busy overseeing the construction and filling of a vault at the Grand Cayman Island retirement home she will share with her husband, Senator Phil Gramm. According to its own documents, Enron played all sorts of dirty tricks to spike, and profiteer from, the price of electricity in California. When it comes to electricity, we should no longer be shocked by anything Enron has done.Apparently Enron believed its job as an energy concern was to cause, and then exploit, concern over energy.
It's been a tough week for reactionaries. Voters gave Jean-Marie Le Pen le boot in France. Bolivia's Hugo Banzer has learned death isn't as easy to beat as political prisoners and and an assassin snuffed xenophobe Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn quicker than you can say "Holy Shiite!". Ariel Sharon had better hope this is one of those things that only come in threes. Texas is back! After depleting the Lone Star State's inventory of doomed prisoners in an election year demonstration of manly ruthlessness, George W. Bush went on to become the court-appointed president. But thanks to a large minority population and no shortage of bloodthirsty juries, Texas's roster of doom is once again overpopulated and its death chamber is about to begin churning out corpses like other state penal institutes produce license plates!
W now busies himself signing death warrants for entire nations.
Kaiser Ashcroft has expanded the Justice Department's interpretation of the Second Amendment so as to reflect the views of the National Rifle, Automatic Weapon, Pipe Bomb, Artillery and Personal Nuclear Device Association. Ashcroft's position can be summarized thusly: My president is Charlton Heston.
Well at least Heston was elected.
There was plenty room in the Bill of Rights for expansion of the interpretation the Second Amendment since Ashcroft had drastically whittled the rights guaranteed by so many of the other amendments.
The only way Ashcroft could promote a more radical gun policy would be to set up random national checkpoints at which anyone caught without a firearm would immediately be arrested.
The escalation of right-wing loopiness continues unabated here in the USA. Axis of Weasels CEO Jr Bush has now expanded his "Axis of Evil" list to include Libya, Cuba and Syria. So that's six nations of official evildoers plus several other hotspots where Bush has let it be known he will attack whenever the whim strikes him. The poison icing on the cake is the Court-appointed president's refusal to recognize the authority of the new International Criminal Court. So the USA is now a self-appointed judge, jury and executioner and has made it clear that it won't allow civilized international consensus to interfere with its own nefarious intentions.
In a speech to the Heritage Foundation (you know, the right wing organization Clarence Thomas stands outside wearing jockey silks while working as a hitching post) entitled "Beyond the Axis of Evil," Undersecretary of State John Bolton made the administration's public addition of Libya, Syria and Cuba to Bush's original alleged sinister collaborative of Iran, Iraq and North Korea. Let's hope whichever White House strategist decided to return to this lame rhetoric has a major and influential role in Bush's 2004 Campaign.
What will they call Bush's 2004 organization? The Committee to Reappoint the President?
That's it -- CRAP!
Sending out a Foggy Bottom second-stringer to revive the axis of evil rap is like following up a bad single no one bought with an even worse CD you can't even give away.
With each passing day it becomes more apparent that nothing is Beyond the Axis of Weasels currently operating out of the White House.
In his speech, Bolton actually said, "Cuba's threat to our security has been underplayed." Right... and the OJ Simpson case was under-publicized, too.
What has been underplayed is any sort of sanity concerning Cuba. The US propped up the thug dictator Batista thus fomenting the Cuban revolution. Then it backed a failed invasion of the country, played Wile E Coyote to Fidel Castro's Roadrunner in one failed assassination attempt after the next and has been trying to starve the island to death with a Draconian trade embargo for decades. Worst of all, the US maintains a large military base on the tip of the island, where it recently reintroduced Batista-style prisons. And now, just weeks after a pitiful US-backed coup attempt in Venezuela, the Court-appointed Bush Administration tests the waters for yet another assault on Cuba with a crackpot speech to a crackpot organization and we're supposed to believe that Cuba is the threat that's being underplayed?
The next speaker to address the Heritage Foundation will be Boston's Cardinal Law who will give an address entitled "Underplaying the culpability of six-year-olds in clergy child sexual abuse cases."
Now a suicide bomber has killed 15 and wounded 55 more innocent people, mostly teenagers, in an Israeli pool hall. These insane killings give Sharon all the rationale he needs to step up oppression and state-sponsored violence against Palestinians. It's just never going to end and it's all over ancient religious superstitions that delude people into believing they have a divine right to massacre and oppress people.
A lot of people will never believe in god until he (or "it," I have a hard enough time with god without attaching gender) smotes people who claim their connection to the almighty provides them with a license to kill.
Bush has called Sharon a "man of peace" on numerous occasions proving that George Orwell was a good writer but off by 17 or 18 years.
Secretary of the Army Thomas White, the former Enron executive fighting the stench arising from both insider trading and his odious support for the acquisition and deployment of the Crusader mobile artillery system, has been given a vote of confidence by Donald Rumsfeld and the court-appointed White House. There are two schools of thought as to why White has survived. The first is that he has promised the Bush Administration to blow a bright, shiny whistle marked "Enron" unless he is allowed to keep his job. The second is that the Crusader is manufactured by Carlyle and the Bush family is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Carlyle Group.
The third is all of the above.
Thomas White is to George W. Bush as Father Shanley is to Cardinal Law. In defending White, Rumsfeld said,"It seems to me that the task is to find out the facts. And it isn't a matter of ready, shoot, aim, it's ready, aim, fire." In saying this Rumsfeld spelled out the difference between court-appointed the Bush Administration's foreign policy initiatives and how its cabinet level scandals are handled.
This could be the first inkling of a Rumsfeld/Ashcroft feud since Rumsfeld's softy position on aiming guns conflicts with Ashcroft's more broad interpretation of the Second Amendment.
In White's case, Rumsfeld used some of the benefit of the doubt he hadn't frittered away in the defense of innocent Afghan civilians.
© 2002 Barry Crimmins
http://www.barrycrimmins.com
Charged in the midwest bombing spree is 21 year-old college student, Lucas John Helder, described by F.B.I. special agent Jim Bogner as "an intelligent young man with strong family ties." John Ashcroft immediately seized the opportunity to call for police departments from around the country to roundup and question intelligent young man with strong family ties. Expect increased security delays at airports as intelligent young man with strong family ties face heightened scrutiny.
Citizens are requested to notify the government if they see any intelligent young men with strong family ties behaving suspiciously. It's scary to consider how many intelligent young men with strong family ties must be enrolled in flight schools around the USA right now.
Thank goodness they didn't trace the bombings to a stupid middle-aged man with strong family ties or Ashcroft would have had to question W.
Several members of Take the Money Enron's board of directors appeared before a senate hearing on Tuesday, where they patiently explained why they were responsible for nothing that happened at the corporation for which they were responsible.
Enron board member Wendy Gramm did not testify because she was busy overseeing the construction and filling of a vault at the Grand Cayman Island retirement home she will share with her husband, Senator Phil Gramm. According to its own documents, Enron played all sorts of dirty tricks to spike, and profiteer from, the price of electricity in California. When it comes to electricity, we should no longer be shocked by anything Enron has done.Apparently Enron believed its job as an energy concern was to cause, and then exploit, concern over energy.
It's been a tough week for reactionaries. Voters gave Jean-Marie Le Pen le boot in France. Bolivia's Hugo Banzer has learned death isn't as easy to beat as political prisoners and and an assassin snuffed xenophobe Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn quicker than you can say "Holy Shiite!". Ariel Sharon had better hope this is one of those things that only come in threes. Texas is back! After depleting the Lone Star State's inventory of doomed prisoners in an election year demonstration of manly ruthlessness, George W. Bush went on to become the court-appointed president. But thanks to a large minority population and no shortage of bloodthirsty juries, Texas's roster of doom is once again overpopulated and its death chamber is about to begin churning out corpses like other state penal institutes produce license plates!
W now busies himself signing death warrants for entire nations.
Kaiser Ashcroft has expanded the Justice Department's interpretation of the Second Amendment so as to reflect the views of the National Rifle, Automatic Weapon, Pipe Bomb, Artillery and Personal Nuclear Device Association. Ashcroft's position can be summarized thusly: My president is Charlton Heston.
Well at least Heston was elected.
There was plenty room in the Bill of Rights for expansion of the interpretation the Second Amendment since Ashcroft had drastically whittled the rights guaranteed by so many of the other amendments.
The only way Ashcroft could promote a more radical gun policy would be to set up random national checkpoints at which anyone caught without a firearm would immediately be arrested.
The escalation of right-wing loopiness continues unabated here in the USA. Axis of Weasels CEO Jr Bush has now expanded his "Axis of Evil" list to include Libya, Cuba and Syria. So that's six nations of official evildoers plus several other hotspots where Bush has let it be known he will attack whenever the whim strikes him. The poison icing on the cake is the Court-appointed president's refusal to recognize the authority of the new International Criminal Court. So the USA is now a self-appointed judge, jury and executioner and has made it clear that it won't allow civilized international consensus to interfere with its own nefarious intentions.
In a speech to the Heritage Foundation (you know, the right wing organization Clarence Thomas stands outside wearing jockey silks while working as a hitching post) entitled "Beyond the Axis of Evil," Undersecretary of State John Bolton made the administration's public addition of Libya, Syria and Cuba to Bush's original alleged sinister collaborative of Iran, Iraq and North Korea. Let's hope whichever White House strategist decided to return to this lame rhetoric has a major and influential role in Bush's 2004 Campaign.
What will they call Bush's 2004 organization? The Committee to Reappoint the President?
That's it -- CRAP!
Sending out a Foggy Bottom second-stringer to revive the axis of evil rap is like following up a bad single no one bought with an even worse CD you can't even give away.
With each passing day it becomes more apparent that nothing is Beyond the Axis of Weasels currently operating out of the White House.
In his speech, Bolton actually said, "Cuba's threat to our security has been underplayed." Right... and the OJ Simpson case was under-publicized, too.
What has been underplayed is any sort of sanity concerning Cuba. The US propped up the thug dictator Batista thus fomenting the Cuban revolution. Then it backed a failed invasion of the country, played Wile E Coyote to Fidel Castro's Roadrunner in one failed assassination attempt after the next and has been trying to starve the island to death with a Draconian trade embargo for decades. Worst of all, the US maintains a large military base on the tip of the island, where it recently reintroduced Batista-style prisons. And now, just weeks after a pitiful US-backed coup attempt in Venezuela, the Court-appointed Bush Administration tests the waters for yet another assault on Cuba with a crackpot speech to a crackpot organization and we're supposed to believe that Cuba is the threat that's being underplayed?
The next speaker to address the Heritage Foundation will be Boston's Cardinal Law who will give an address entitled "Underplaying the culpability of six-year-olds in clergy child sexual abuse cases."
Now a suicide bomber has killed 15 and wounded 55 more innocent people, mostly teenagers, in an Israeli pool hall. These insane killings give Sharon all the rationale he needs to step up oppression and state-sponsored violence against Palestinians. It's just never going to end and it's all over ancient religious superstitions that delude people into believing they have a divine right to massacre and oppress people.
A lot of people will never believe in god until he (or "it," I have a hard enough time with god without attaching gender) smotes people who claim their connection to the almighty provides them with a license to kill.
Bush has called Sharon a "man of peace" on numerous occasions proving that George Orwell was a good writer but off by 17 or 18 years.
Secretary of the Army Thomas White, the former Enron executive fighting the stench arising from both insider trading and his odious support for the acquisition and deployment of the Crusader mobile artillery system, has been given a vote of confidence by Donald Rumsfeld and the court-appointed White House. There are two schools of thought as to why White has survived. The first is that he has promised the Bush Administration to blow a bright, shiny whistle marked "Enron" unless he is allowed to keep his job. The second is that the Crusader is manufactured by Carlyle and the Bush family is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Carlyle Group.
The third is all of the above.
Thomas White is to George W. Bush as Father Shanley is to Cardinal Law. In defending White, Rumsfeld said,"It seems to me that the task is to find out the facts. And it isn't a matter of ready, shoot, aim, it's ready, aim, fire." In saying this Rumsfeld spelled out the difference between court-appointed the Bush Administration's foreign policy initiatives and how its cabinet level scandals are handled.
This could be the first inkling of a Rumsfeld/Ashcroft feud since Rumsfeld's softy position on aiming guns conflicts with Ashcroft's more broad interpretation of the Second Amendment.
In White's case, Rumsfeld used some of the benefit of the doubt he hadn't frittered away in the defense of innocent Afghan civilians.
© 2002 Barry Crimmins