8.1.03 @ 6:02PM
Getting rid of our problems.
It doesn't get any uglier, not when the man the New York
Times famously characterized as the only adult in the current
administration starts dissing like a Snoop Dog. "He's a piece of
trash waiting to be collected," Secretary of Status Colin Powell
rapped apropos the currently homeless, stateless and bodyguardless
Saddam Hussein. It's the kind of statement that resonates in New
York City, where trash collection is a sacred daily ritual subject
to strict political scrutiny and environmental controls. The
concern in NYC and the DNC alike is that under President Bush, Mr.
Saddam will be collected by non-union sanitation engineers and
disposed of without the requisite permits and environmental impact
studies. And you can forget about recycling.
Not since the great people's democracies of the late Soviet bloc
have we seen such a regime as the one recently installed at the
marxy N.Y. Times. Its headline about a new ombudsman
position said it all: "Times to Name 'Public Editor' to Be Readers'
Representative." Such a happy day it'll be for your busy newspaper
reader when knows he is being represented at the paper by someone
he didn't even have to vote for. Elections are messy and
unreliable, as we saw with G.W. Bush in the year 2000. Better that
the people's representative be named by the vanguard of the people,
which at the Times means the two-man politburo of
publisher Punk Sulzberger and new editor Bill Keller.
Incidentally, Keller lists his religion as "Collapsed Catholic."
Not to be too Coulterish, but for the record we should note that
Joe Stalin was himself a Collapsed Seminarian. Rather ominously,
Commissar Keller announced his intention also to appoint new
editors "to monitor internal compliance with the paper's
standards." In case you've purged it from your mind, "internal
compliance" was first enforced by Bolshevik ombudsman Feliks
Dzherzhinsky.
In another nice nostalgic touch, there's little chance that
Jayson Blair, the man who sparked the recent storming of Times
Square's winter palace, will be rehabilitated anytime soon or
airbrushed back into the paper's picture. That's because "health
reasons" are being cited as the reason for his current
unavailability.
Most encouraging is the naming (i.e., via universal popular
acclaim) of Jill Abramson as co-managing editor. Unlike the ousted
Gerald Boyd, Abramson doesn't appear to be secure enough to work
alone, a trait she notoriously displayed when teaming up with Jill
Mayer to vilify Clarence Thomas in a book entitled "Strange
Justice." After the book was re-reported in the January 1995
American Spectator, Ms. Abramson co-wrote in response that
"The American Spectator has no intention of printing our
rebuttal." That was a Big Lie, and she knew it, though we didn't
know whether she was responsible for the "big" or the "lie" in that
combination.
Before riding off into the sunset somewhere in the vicinity of
Crawford, Texas, President Bush gave the pressies what they wanted,
a news conference, whereupon they denounced him for holding it and
saying many awful things. As President Lincoln once said, you can't
please some of the people any of the time. President Bush's
greatest sin? When he said, "We're all sinners." Some (in the
New York Times, where else?) thought the remark
homophobic. Others (in the N.Y. Times, where else?)
thought it "objectionable" for "attempt[ing] to impose that belief
on the rest of us." In other words, who made Bush God?
Faster than you could say recall, Larry Flynt announced he might
run to succeed California's incumbent hustler governor. For all we
know Larry is the people's choice, representing as well as anyone
an industry and an art form that an approving New York
Times last Sunday declared had gone mainstream in every
discernible way. He may face not be home free, though, now that
Rep. Loretta Sanchez, a Democrat with Playboy Mansion ties, has
hinted she herself might run.
Sen. John Edwards' effort to curry favor with conservatives
proved short-lived when he promptly ponied up $11,000 to cover a
property tax delinquency exposed by the Washington Times.
He's not home free, either.
Elsewhere, Democrats are finding it impossible to stay at home
at all. Down New Mexico way, eleven Texas state senators have asked
for asylum, which was immediately granted them by Gov. Bill
Richardson, a former jobs counselor to Ms. Monica Lewinsky. The
Texas Eleven fled to Albuquerque rather than risk defeat at the
hands of Republican redistricters in Austin. Their cowardice makes
them runaway Enemies of the Week, though if their pioneering spirit
catches on they could come to be regarded as heroes. Imagine what
the U.S. would be like if all elected Democrats headed for the
hills and never came back.
topics:
Religion, Environment, NATO
