The
Top Ten Conservative Idiots (No. 161)
June
28, 2004
"F--- Yourself" Edition
So,
if you think some of the comments on this website are inappropriate
or indecent, well... at least you can take comfort from the
fact that we don't hold any high office in the government of
the United States, unlike a certain person (1) who was
caught changing the tone in Washington last week. But Dick Cheney
wasn't the only idiot last week. There were also People Who
Can't Handle The Truth (2) who are still pooping their collective
pants over Michael Moore's new movie. And speaking of pants
- or the lack thereof - check out former Republican Senate Candidate
Jack Ryan (3) and conservative talk-show host Jon Matthews (10).
Enjoy, and as usual, don't forget the key!
Dick
Cheney
There's an exciting new level of political discourse in town,
and it's all thanks to Vice President Dick Cheney! For years,
partisan activists such as ourselves have remained on the
fringes of legitimate political debate partly due to our use
of coarse
and colorful
language.
But now it appears that Dick Cheney has blown down the barriers
by dropping an F-bomb on the floor of the Senate. At a photo
session last week Crashcart got into a heated debate with
Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) over the Democrats' investigations
into Halliburton war profiteering. When Leahy retorted that
Cheney was standing by Republicans who accused Democrats of
being anti-Catholic, Cheney replied, "Fuck
yourself." Yay! Fuck yourself! Fuck yourself! Go
fuck yourself! Thank you, Dick Cheney, for lowering the bar
for all of us partisan outsiders. Because if it's okay for
the vice president to tell a senator to fuck himself on the
floor of the Senate, it should be perfectly okay for a bunch
of political hacks on a website to say it. Fuck yourself!
(In an added comic twist, I should mention that the incident
occurred on the same day the Senate passed the so-called "Defense
of Decency" act. Ha ha.)
People
Who Can't Handle The Truth
Citizens United made the list last week for their appalling
anti-Clinton ad which blamed the former president for terrorism.
This time, along with Move America Forward (who also made
the list last week), they're launching a campaign
to get Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 banned from cinemas.
Not only that but Citizens United has complained to the FEC
in an attempt to get the movie's advertising blocked
under campaign finance laws. My, my. They're making an awful
lot of fuss over something which they claim is nothing but
lies. I mean, if it's such a blatant crock of shit, why don't
they want people to go see it? Do they think that people aren't
smart enough to make up their own minds, so Citizens United
have to do it for them? Sounds to me like exactly the kind
of intellectual elitism that Rush Limbaugh bemoans on a daily
basis. And clearly the Bush administration has learned from
the Richard Clarke incident and was trying to give Fahrenheit
9/11 as little publicity as possible last week - but one or
two poisonous comments
still oozed from various White House mouthpieces. Take Communications
Director Dan Bartlett for example, who said,
"I can speak for myself and I can speak for the President,
and I can assure you that neither of us have seen ['Fahrenheit']...
This is a film that doesn't require us to actually view it
to know it's filled with factual inaccuracies." Oh really?
What a shame they didn't have the same remarkable foresight
when it came to Ahmed Chalabi's information on Iraq's weapons
of mass destruction.
Jack
Ryan and Friends
Poor Jack Ryan. The Republican running for Senate in Illinois
has boldly gone where several other politicians have unfortunately
gone before - into the dumpster
of history after a sordid sex scandal. His wife, ex-Star
Trek actress Jeri Ryan, claimed in divorce papers that Jack
had taken her to at least three sex clubs, one "a bizarre
club with cages, whips and other apparatus hanging from the
ceiling." Sounds like Ken Starr's basement. According
to Ryan, her husband "wanted me to have sex with him
there, with another couple watching. I refused. [He] asked
me to perform a sexual activity upon him, and he specifically
asked other people to watch." Jack, for his part, first
denied
the charges, then came up with a variety of excuses which
included blaming the vast left-wing conspiracy, hiding behind
his "special needs" son, and - this is my favorite
- saying, "I think my character has been proven by this. There's
no breaking of any laws. There's no breaking of any marriage
laws. There's no breaking of the Ten Commandments anywhere."
I guess God forgot to add the one about "Thou Shalt Not
Take Thy Wife To Sex Clubs Against Her Will And Then Lie About
It When She Brings It Up During Thy Divorce." But
whatever - if Jack Ryan wants to risk wining and dining his
good lady wife in a BDSM parlor, that's his business. What's
surprising, however, is the Clinton-bashing conservatives
from Dennis Hastert to Bill O'Reilly who came forward to defend
Mr. Ryan's similar sidestepping of the truth. I'm sorry, did
I say surprising? I meant "entirely predictable."
Team
Bush
When MoveOn.org solicited entries for an anti-Bush ad competition
and some random guy submitted an ad which compared Bush to
Hitler, the right-wing had an absolute fit. Ed Gillespie called
it "the worst and most vile form of political hate
speech." Never mind that the ad was created by a private citizen,
MoveOn had no intention of using it, and deleted it from their
website. But now it seems that Team Bush are - in an extremely
sneaky fashion - doing the exact same thing they lambasted
MoveOn for doing. The official Bush/Cheney
2004 website put up a web ad last week that used part
of the never-screened MoveOn ad in an effort to compare Democrats
to Hitler. The ad begins with the teaser, "The Faces
of John Kerry's Democratic Party" and shows, in sequence,
Al Gore, Adolf Hitler, Howard Dean, Michael Moore, Dick Gephardt,
Adolf Hitler (again), Al Gore (again), and finally, John Kerry.
(I guess we can deduce from this that Al Gore is as bad as
Hitler, whereas the others are only half as bad.) Presumably
Team Bush's excuse is that they are trying to show how mean
and nasty MoveOn is. And in that context it's perfectly
okay to run an official ad on their official campaign website
labeling Hitler as one of the "Faces of John Kerry's
Democratic Party." Gee, whatever happened to "the
worst and most vile form of political hate speech?"
John
Rowland
Connecticut governor John Rowland made the Top Ten list six
months ago (see Idiots 139)
after he came under investigation by federal prosecutors in
a freebies-for-favors scandal. Among other things, Rowland
had improvements made to his vacation cottage which were paid
for by "politically appointed state employees, friends and
a state contractor," and subsequently lied about it.
The good news is that last week Rowland saw the writing on
the wall and resigned before he could be impeached. As well
as the improvements to his cottage, the Associated Press reported
that "Rowland received cigars, champagne, a vintage Ford
Mustang convertible, a canoe and free or discounted vacations
from employees and friends - including some with state contracts."
And so the once-rising star of the Republican party has sadly
come crashing down to earth. After announcing his resignation,
Rowland said, "I hope there have been times when I made you
all proud." Well, yeah - there was that time you resigned,
you corrupt bastard.
Senate
Republicans
It seems that the Senate Republicans are getting a little
worried that their boy in the White House might go down hard
this November, so they're doing what they can to prop him
up. Last week John Kerry was forced to interrupt his campaign
and return to Washington in order to cast an important vote
on funding health care benefits for veterans.
But guess what? As soon as he got there, Republican leaders
postponed
the vote. Way to play politics with veterans' health care
benefits, guys! But this isn't the first time Republicans
have played politics with Senate business in an attempt to
hobble John Kerry - the Bush Administration bashed the Democratic
nominee recently for failing to return to Washington to vote
on a proposal to extend unemployment benefits to jobless Americans.
The bill missed passage by one vote, which sounds bad - until
you learn that according to CNN, "one of the 11 GOP senators
who voted for the measure would have switched sides to defeat
it if [Kerry] had been there to vote for it." Well, you
know what that old conservative maxim says: If you can't beat
'em... cheat 'em.
Zell
Miller
Not so long ago, Zell Miller proclaimed, "I'm afraid
that my old Democratic 'ties that bind' have become unraveled."
(That was around the same time he called John Kerry an "out-of-touch
ultraliberal from Taxachusetts" by the way.)
In fact, it seems that it's Zell-Out's mind that's become
unraveled - for some reason he seems to think he can still
call himself a Democrat while not only endorsing George W.
Bush for president but now also giving
a speech at the Republican National Convention. As Bobby
Kahn, chairman of the Georgia Democratic Party, put it, "Maybe
I'll switch to the Republican Party so I can speak at the
Democratic Convention and bash Bush. It makes about as much
sense." So,
to clarify: thus far Zell Miller has endorsed George W. Bush
(Idiots 133),
written a book slamming Democrats (Idiots 136),
started an organization called "Democrats for Bush"
dedicated to bashing John Kerry (Idiots 149),
wanted to stop the 9/11 investigation because it would "energize
our enemies and demoralize our troops" (Idiots 150),
and has now announced that he will be speaking at the Republican
National Convention. Zell, in the words of our illustrious
vice president, fuck yourself.
The
Supreme Court
The Supreme Court bought Dick Cheney some time in a 7-2 ruling
last week which prevented
the Bush administration from having to release details of
Cheney's secret energy task force meetings until after the
November election. (Judicial Watch and the Sierra Club are
suing the administration for details of the meetings which
allegedly involved executives from oil and gas companies and
subsequently shaped policies designed to help those companies.)
But the Supreme Court's decision is not just suspiciously
partisan because of Antonin Scalia's duck-hunting trips with
Dick Cheney (see Idiots passim). You see, back in 1993
the courts ruled that Hillary Clinton had to reveal the participants
of her health care task force meetings because non-government
employees were involved, and therefore, according to the U.S.
Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit wrote, certain disclosures
were required by law. Cheney's case deals with the exact same
law, but with last week's ruling the Supreme Court essentially
said that there is a different set of rules for the Bush administration.
As the Washington Post's editors wrote
last week, "The Clinton administration was subjected
in a range of cases to intrusive discovery that, it frequently
complained, burdened executive confidences. The Supreme Court
okayed personal sexual harassment litigation against the president
with blithe disregard for its potential impact on the presidency.
Now, by contrast, the high court bends over backward to emphasize,
even at the risk of tension with its own precedents, the president's
special needs in fighting off lawsuits." But let's face
it, we shouldn't expect anything less from the court that
installed Monkey Boy in the first place.
Arnold
Schwarzenegger
Governor Groping Austrian Beefcake is at long last starting
to live up to his "Terminator" nickname, announcing
last week that he wanted to skim a measly $14 million off
California's $15 billion budget shortfall by overturning
a law known as the Hayden Act which forces animal shelters
to hold stray cats and dogs up to six days before killing
them. The current law makes adoption of stray animals a priority
over euthanasia, but I guess Arnie doesn't much care for pets.
According
to the Los Angeles Times, as well as proposing
to overturn the Hayden Act Schwarzenegger would also "eliminate
a requirement that people convicted of animal cruelty be prohibited
from owning a pet for three years and be forced to pay for
medical care for the animals they have mistreated." Great.
Oh, and "Shelters no longer would be required to search
for owners who have embedded microchips in their pets that
store addresses and phone numbers." So if you lose your
pet in California, don't bother going to the shelter to look
for it.
Arnie's probably already used it for target practice.
Jon
Matthews
And finally, a Republican family values update. We first took
an interest in the Jon Matthews story back in Idiots 133
after the conservative talk-show host's radio program was
pulled from KSEV in Texas when he was under investigation
for indecency with a child. Seven months later, the results
are in - Matthews
pleaded guilty
to the charges last week, and, among other things, will have
to register as a sex offender when he is sentenced in about
six weeks time. Last November Republican congressman John
Culbertson said of the charges, "I just can't even imagine…
I refuse to believe it… It must be a mistake..." Better believe
it, pal. Your buddy likes to expose himself to 11-year-olds.
See you next week...
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