|
5-11-03. The enlightened among us know that the war in Iraq was
really just a diabolically clever plot to inflate oil prices and further enrich Bush and Cheney. How such a sophisticated plan could come from people who, we have been told ad nauseum, are among the stupidest on the planet is a question the elite have not been willing to consider, much less answer. Well, the puzzle is solved. Gas prices have been falling steadily since the war. Does this mean that the “it’s all about oil” argument was wrong? Not on your life. It means that Bush and Cheney are really dumb after all; their plan didn’t work! Bush, at least, may be able to make a profit out of this mess. He has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, which carries with it a cash award. The nomination brought forth howls from the expected quarters, those who supported the awarding of the prize to the likes of Yasser Arafat and Le Duc Tho. Bush has almost no chance of winning but it is nice to see that at least one politician recognizes that sometimes peace is best achieved by the forceful removal of tyrants. In this case that man is Jan Simonsen, a member of Norway’s Parliament. Cheney will just have to live with his losses, reduced to begging on the street for money to buy batteries for his pacemaker.
The tax cut debate heated up as the President started an all-out push for his plan and the Democrats
pushed back. This debate is usually seen as highlighting the difference between conservative and liberal economic policies.
There certainly is one philosophy that wants the government to have as little of your money as possible and another that wants government to have all of it. What is being overlooked here is that politicians on both sides of the aisle are afraid of any tax cut, and that they share the same philosophy on this point. They want to stay in office and the best way to do that is to spend other people’s money to buy votes. Any diminution of federal revenue threatens their power. To put this tax cut into perspective, ask yourself this: if my income next year were to decrease by 2.5% would I starve? Would I lose my home? Would my children have to drop out of school? Would I have to forgo needed health care? Or would I just cut back on luxuries and handouts to undeserving bums? Then why are we being told that this tax cut, which is less than 2.5% of the federal government’s budget, will lead to starvation, closed schools, homelessness, and millions without health care? Why can we not just give a little less to those countries which oppose us, or stop subsidizing industries and businesses that have plenty of money? Maybe we could even cut back a bit on needless and redundant programs such as the $25 million International Fund for Ireland, or the $350,000 for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (the music business doesn’ have enough money???) All this, of course, presumes that cutting taxes will decrease revenues, when history teaches us that the opposite is true.
While this battle is going on there is continued fighting over the next Presidential election. Nine
Democratic hopefuls staged a debate last week, to which nobody paid any attention. Analysts agree that John F. Kerry (never leave out the F, he thinks he’s the reincarnation of JFK) is the frontrunner. Sen. Kerry looks more like a zombie than a potential president, and that is the problem; a slate of candidates as exciting as tofu. Comedic relief is provided by Al Sharpton and the party’s desperate attempt to neutralize him by throwing Carol Moseley Braun into the race. Ms. Braun’s major contribution to the nation so far has been limited to evading conviction on various charges of fraud and misappropriation of funds. Most Democrats spent the week complaining about Bush’s landing on the Abraham Lincoln. They are frantic that the film of this event will be used to bolster his campaign. Had they ignored the incident it would have gone away, a minor event among many more important ones. By constantly complaining about it they have kept the story and the footage constantly on the air, thus saving the Bush campaign a ton of advertising money. Showing much greater understanding of economic and media matters is Mayor Sabatino of Modesto, who has repeatedly claimed that Scott Peterson can’t get a fair trial in his town. Mr. Sabatino isn’t criticizing his town; he’s trying to save it millions by forcing a change of venue for the trial.
The citizens of Oklahoma City can only hope for so wise a leader. Instead they have a city
council whose first response to the tornado disaster was to fly in teams of crisis counselors. These fanned out
across the city and were accosting people in their own front yards who were trying to clean up after the storms, not to help these poor people salvage something from the wreckage of their homes, but to talk to them about the experience. Needless to say, they were met with something less than enthusiasm.
Next door, in Kansas, Mr. Wesley Fitzpatrick went to court to get a restraining order against a woman who
was, he claimed, stalking and harassing him. The court agreed and ordered the woman to immediately cease all contact with Mr. Fitzpatrick. Unfortunately for Wes, the woman was his
parole officer. Failure to meet regularly with one’s parole officer is a serious violation of the conditions of parole, as he found out when authorities returned him to prison.
The New York Times made its own news again this week when it fired Jason Blair for plagiarism. The
Times then published a lengthy editorial about the scandal and its efforts to correct the problem, saying it wanted to protect its reputation for accuracy (not worth much lately). Media analysts
praised the Times’ courage. They seem to have ignored some facts. Mr. Blair had a long history of inaccuracies in his brief reporting career, racking up more than fifty corrections in only
two years, a level of sloppiness that would have gotten anyone else fired. He was even caught falsifying stories. And it wasn’t even the Times that discovered his plagiarism; it was a small
paper in Arkansas that complained that its story had been stolen. So what’s really going on? For one thing, Mr. Blair is black. The Times denies that this had anything to do with its
tolerance towards his untrustworthiness, but no one really believes that a white reporter would have been granted so much leeway. No, the politically correct
Times just couldn’t bear to fire a minority reporter. Political correctness played another role as well. It is only now that the paper is discovering the full extent of his dishonesty, as an audit of his stories turns up error after error and fabrication after fabrication. Why were these not discovered earlier, ideally before the stories were printed? Simply because, in the world inhabited by the editors of the Times, politically correct stories are never checked for accuracy. This is the same world inhabited by the editors of the Washington Post, who ran Janet Cooke’s story about a nine-year-old heroin addict, and the Pulitzer Prize Committee, which award the story the prize in 1981. The story was completely false, but so tickled the politically correct fancies of the paper and the Pulitzer committee that they never bothered to subject it to even the most cursory scrutiny. It just had to be true.
In Oregon, the city of Portland is desperate for money and is trying to raise taxes so that basic
services can be maintained. According to the leaders of Multnomah County one of these basic needs is to have mental health workers who speak Klingon. The county and city are advertising for a
qualified person for this critical job, which pays $14.95/hr.
The Clooney Tunes Award this week goes to the senescent Robert Byrd of West Virginia for his rambling
diatribe on the Senate floor criticizing Bush for landing on the Abraham Lincoln. The speech was vintage Byrd, incoherent, bombastic, vitriolic, rambling, illogical, and fully worthy of the
man who epitomizes every caricature of a corrupt Southern politician. What won him the prize was his complaint that
the event was too costly. Coming from Sen. Byrd, a man who has spent more money building monuments to himself than Ramses II, this rises to the level of the sublimely absurd.
PTB
Archives
|
