Democrats used to say all politics is local. But that was before their politics became loco. Does anybody in their party even know what time it is? A couple hundred hours after their last votes were cast, purchased or stolen, the Daschleheads have decided to politicize the president’s war on terrorism. It’s going nowhere, they jeer. Osama is out there, they think. And, they proclaim, we denounce the president’s threat to our civil liberties in his conduct of this all-out war that we now insist on. No wonder a woman named Pelosi is being asked to do the thinking for Democratic man.
Back when they were of sounder mind the Dems would have trotted out charges of an October Surprise. How else to explain Osama bin Laden’s recent comments from the grave, or cave, or Bill Casey’s bedside? OSL waits until after the election to announce his comeback? Perhaps Osama has as much trouble as Daschle Tom in synchronizing his watch with the political calendar. Or … or… — and here were need the Dems to do the conspiring for us — Bush emissaries met with Osama’s in Paris last month and cut a deal: no release of a purported Osama tape until after November 5.
It makes perfect sense, to everyone except a Daschle Democrat. His strategy, he would insist, is forward looking. By raising new questions about the effectiveness of Bush’s war leadership, the goal is to set the stage for a Democratic comeback in the 2024 elections. The thinking is that by then Iraq will have been invaded, and Al Gore might even be ready to put the 2000 results behind him. The only major obstacle will be the Democratic Party’s post-2002 election merger with the Communist Party. It’ll be hard for Democrats to run on a platform still calling for Warsaw Pact expansion.
But we are getting ahead of ourselves. Need we worry today that George McGovern might run again in 2024? Our faithful agent Roger Ross would rather we settle with a Washington press-corps Lilliputian first. Who is this Helen Thomas, he asks, to liken a U.S. attack on Saddam with the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor? Actually, Ms. Thomas has insulted the Japanese. After all, their goal in Hawaii wasn’t oil, other than coconut oil for the Empress’s complexion.
Enemy Central’s Jack Hughes, Eliot Ness’s successor in Chicago, questions the U.S. Catholic bishops’ “Statement on Iraq.” It explains a lot, especially why Reps. Jim McDermott and David Bonior are now in charge of the Tehran diocese.
But those two shouldn’t have to stray so far to search for sinners in need. In a major cry for help, Mr. Bill Moyers, still under the influence of driving under the influence, broke with fellow Democrats and Communists to denounce the notion that President Bush won anything last November 5. His biggest worry, other than that there may be a God after all, is that the GOP Manifesto calls for “using the taxing power to transfer wealth from working people to the rich.” We can see it already, rich dudes mugging average folk by taking from them everything they don’t have.
The war on terrorism is starting to get to Russian President Vladimir Putin. It’s not clear if he’s undergone a religious conversion, but he this week he started talking Moscow up as a holy capital of circumcision. Alas, his message was so stern the worry is he has now joined forces with radical feminist emasculators. As he said to the Danish reporter he was recommending for a circumcision, “I suggest that you do such an operation that nothing grows out of you again.” Well, at least we know there’s one major European leader Bill Clinton won’t be calling on anytime soon.
Putin, to be sure, continues to struggle with Russia’s diminished place in the world. The last straw might have been an obituary that ran in the Santa Barbara News-Press on October 28. It described the life of a Santa Barbaran who had fled the Nazi invasion of his native Poland in 1939 only to be “arrested for crossing into Russia.” Here’s where the insult to Russia’s historic legacy enters in. In the paper’s words, after his arrest the late Santa Barbaran “as a prisoner of war was sent to Serbia,” where he spent “two years in the freezing wasteland.” Next thing you know, they’ll be calling that loser Milosevic a former Russian czar.
Closer to home we have our Putins. One of them called up the vigilant Media Research Center to denounce its characterization of his work. St. Aaron Brown, still in mourning after CNN’s losses on November 5, took issue with an MRC suggestion that he might not have relied on the New York Times in denouncing the effort to have the Sniper Duo tried in Virginia, where they are more likely to receive the death penalty. In what’s been described as an angry phone call, he expressed his displeasure at how the MRC characterized his report, and demanded an apology and home page correction. Of course the real outrage was the substance of his argument, to the effect that use of the death penalty in Virginia would deprive families of the Snipers’ victims in anti-death penalty Maryland a true measure of justice. Is Aaron Brown as loco as Tom Daschle these days? You decide. We’ll just note he’s our Enemy of the Week.
