The American Spectator

Loose Canons

Maybe it's the heat. Maybe it's a reaction to Algore's speech to the Deanieboppers at MoveOn.org last week. And maybe it's just the normally abnormal stuff you see every August in Washington. But last week was a string of news that could only have come from L'Hôpital Psychiatrique where Chief Inspector Dreyfuss was confined after Clouseau drove him bonkers. You have to get through this mess because there's actually something important going on, and it involves a certain former president.

Just because we are at war, it doesn't mean that the heat of the summer can't cook up something pretty funny. Remember OBL's promises to his "holy warriors" that if they gave their lives in terrorist acts against us, they'd be guaranteed seventy virgins in Heaven, with all the rights and privileges thereunto appertaining? Well, according to a Newsweek report, that promise may be based on a mistranslation of the Koran into Arabic from what may have been the original in Aramaic. As Dave Barry often writes, I am not making this up. The report said that the term for "white raisins" was mistaken for "dark-eyed virgins."

Okay, listen up, all you suicidal morons out there. Every guy has said, at some time in his life, that he'd gladly die if he could just once sleep with some particular gal before he croaked. Seventy or so virgins sound good, at least in theory. (But just imagine sitting around with the lot of them for more than five minutes at a stretch. You think you'll ever hear the sound on Monday Night Football again?) I don't see too many guys -- even you idiots -- lining up to trade their lives for seventy raisins. Buy yourself a box of Raisinettes instead. As I said, it's August and it's just too hot. Just ask Air France.

A coupla days ago, an Air France pilot, displaying that wonderfully subtle French humor, told a security screener at JFK Airport that he had a bomb in his shoe. The aforementioned screener, seeing his own once-in-a-lifetime chance for humor, tossed the Froggie flyer into the slam, where he may be charged with crimes that could lead to an all expenses paid vacation at Club Fed for a decade or so. Now that's funny. But not as funny as California.

The best part of the gubernatorial food fight is that California -- taking a lesson from Palm Beach county, Florida -- is using paper punch-card ballots for the October 7 election. Too bad "Hanging Chad" isn't a name on the ballot. He'd be a shoo-in.

As far as I can see, the best candidate for the job is Angelyne. Her qualifications? " I don't do -- I AM! Some people become famous for music, films, TV, sports, whatever. I became famous for being on billboards." And why is she on billboards? "Well…I'm EXTRA LARGE on top, I have a tiny waist, and my hips are JUST RIGHT!!" She drives a pink Corvette, and is obviously better equipped to deal with politics in California than even the Terminator. Ah, forget it. Right now, it's just too hot to worry about all that, and there are important doings to which more attention should be paid.

The leadership of the Democratic Party is now being contested between Lil' Billy and Howard Dean, whose hate for President Bush seems to be his only message. This is a very important contest for one reason: Dean is casting aside the Clinton Cloak that concealed for a decade the fact that the Democratic Party -- deep down, in its gut -- is still the party of George McGovern. They tried to conceal that fact with Jimmah, but that failed at Desert One. Then Clinton -- grand master of triangulation -- succeeded. He concealed the "blame America first" party under his "don't worry, be happy" cloak.

Dean's all-out attacks on the president are based on the McGovernik dogma that requires America to refuse to defend itself or its allies, to disarm in the face of foreign threats, and to surrender control of our own security to others who are superior to us. The Dems, even Dean, always try to convince us that they really, really are concerned about national security, and will stick up for America in a fight. And if they get elected -- as Clinton did -- they ignore any problem until it is beyond a bloodless fix, and then surrender control of our actions to those who don't wish us well, such as the U.N. Security Council. Algore's speech was a textbook example.

Gore -- whose undead presidential aspirations must give Tipper migraines -- went straight to the McGoverniks' headquarters to sign up as a Deaniebopper. In the speech, Gore said that all of the facts Mr. Bush set forth as a casus belli for Iraq were "false impressions." Gore followed Dean's dogma to the letter by saying that Saddam was not partially responsible for 9-11, that Saddam was not working with al-Qaeda or supporting them with training and money, and that Saddam wasn't about to give terrorists "poison gas and deadly germs." Gore went on to say that our assumption that GI's would be welcomed by cheering Iraqis was proven false, as was our assumption that the rest of the world would fall in line with money and troops after we'd won. That none of Gore's assertions is true only fueled the enthusiasm of his audience.

Gore's August 2003 speech echoed many of the themes of McGovern in 1972. According to the McGoverniks, LBJ faked the Tonkin Gulf incidents in 1964 to get us into Vietnam. According to Gore (and every Dem talking about the issue except Clinton), Mr. Bush lied us into Iraq. Gore talked about huge collateral damage from the way we handled the Iraq campaign -- not among the Iraqis, but at the U.N. and the other diplomatic mechanisms Mr. Bush apparently doesn't appreciate sufficiently. Gore -- like Clinton before him -- wants us to surrender the control over Iraq's future to the U.N.

Clinton's legacy to us was supposed to be Gore, as a placeholder for Hillary. Now, both Clintons must be sweating it while Dean blows away the cloak under which the two of them had hidden the party of McGovern. They know that Dean can win the nomination next year, and if he does it will be another decade before the Dems will be in the White House again. By then, Miz Hillary will be old news. So Lil' Billy is talking about the President's decision to go after Saddam in complimentary terms while Dean and the rest of the Dem candidates drift off to Timothy Leary land. Both Clintons will be working harder and harder as the primaries approach to sink Dean and help someone like Vichy John Kerry get the nomination. If Clinton can pull that off, it will mean another presidential election cycle in which the party of George McGovern wears the mask of Bill Clinton.

topics:
Trade, Bill Clinton, Sports, Iraq, NATO