It wasn’t that long ago — 12 midnight, January 1, to be precise
— that we at Enemy Central made a New Year’s resolution to provide
timely Enemy exposes every Friday for 52 consecutive weeks here at
TAS online in the coming year. Too bad that the resolution
we made was…nonbinding.
But you should have heard the internal debates among our various
agents. J. Edgar Hoover and Eliot Ness would have been impressed by
the bravery it took to speak loudly and carry a papier mache stick.
Even better, our guys, in their individuality, came up with a dozen
or so different resolutions. You haven’t seen such crime-fighting
plans since the days of D.A. Giuliani. President-To-Be Clinton
committed 100,000 new cops to our beat, and no more meter-maid work
for the women. Stun guns were on order. Boxes and boxes of mace
too. Snappy handcuffs and the traditional ball-and-chains as well.
Pancho Villa never wore as many bullet belts across his chest as we
displayed. We were primed.
Alas, we’re based in Washington, where cleanliness rules. During
a bathroom break, everyone washed his hands. The disinfecting soap
took immediate effect. All our hawkish intentions went down the
drain. Literally, as they literally say in D.C. Our new policy was
DOA. Enemy targets were given new life, along with a cost-of-living
increase.
So here we are at the beginning of month two, week five of EOW
Year 2007, getting a “clean” start, as a Delaware dolt might say,
lifting a thought from the late George Wallace. We know our
responsibilities, to cut and run after those who cut crooked deals
and run our country down and its budget deficits up. No one is
immune, even if he’s a Jack Abramoff crony schmoozing with pundits
at a conservative summit. Or a Virginia senator once married to
that aging Hollywood startlet who now endorses President Hillary
for a third term, the 22nd amendment be damned. (To be sure, it was
written with men, not women, in mind.)
We’ve made an exception of Al Gore, as we’ve tended to do with
any Nobel Peace Prize nominee since the time Jimmy Carter
recommended Obama bin Laden for the prize. Besides, we respect
those whom history has slighted. In our book, Al Gore should have
won a Nobel for Literature back when he published Earth in the
Balance, as exciting a writerly debut as any since Normal
Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead. Gore remains a valuable
property — Hollywood is set to crown him with an Oscar (not
literally, we trust), which will thus leave him in fighting trim to
enter the race for the Democratic presidential nomination. Before
the school year closes, we’re all counting on Hillary to inform us
of the madrassa young Al attended back when he was said to be
precocious.
Seriously, we can’t wait to see which candidate, Hillary or Al,
Bill Clinton ends up endorsing once the race heats up in earnest
this fall. In a rare exception, the endorsement will be binding,
and worded in such disparate ways that Hillary will be certain her
husband has endorsed her just as Al will be convinced Bill has
endorsed him — why else would Bill have traveled to Al’s summer
home in Greenland to do the deed? By the way, you’ll love the name
of Al’s campaign plane: Puddle Jumper.
We only hope that Al doesn’t get too cocky too soon. The
weather, whether political or atmospheric, can be fickle. He might
want to pay closer attention to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s successes.
No sooner did the California governor sign his state up for
Kyotoization than the temperature in his state plummet to record
lows and its frost-bitten citrus crop develop gangrene. On top of
that, the governator is suffering from a very badly broken leg, all
because he was snow skiing on a frigid mountain instead of
waterskiing on Mission Bay.
And if you want the cooling to last, just send Hillary on a
listening tour to the polar regions. You’ll never hear cracking ice
solidify frozen shut so fast.
So who’s the EOW? They all are. Not that any call we make is
binding.
