September proved to be a month of frightful
economic turbulence, rudely distracting the electorate from the
delightful amusement provided by Senator Joseph Biden and the
Prophet Obama. Early in the month Senator John McCain appeared to
be pulling ahead of the Obama-Biden slapstick. The clever
Republican presidential candidate plucked from the Alaskan
countryside a lady governor who is both easy on the eyes and an
NRA-certified huntress. Then the country’s year-long credit
tightening suffered a veritable seizure! The Bush administration
rushed forward with a $700 billion tax payer rescue, but many
Americanos objected. In Ukraine, taxpayers were nonplussed in the
city of Golaya Pristan, after city leaders marked the town’s 299th
anniversary by unveiling a huge cement frog of indistinct national
origin. It certainly did not look like a Ukrainian. “What on earth
has a frog got to do with our town?” exclaimed Mrs. Natalia Slivka,
a local sage who went on: “And why have they put up a massive
statue using taxpayers’ money to mark the town’s 299th
anniversary?” Well, the city leaders could have unveiled a cement
ukulele or a pollywog.
As the presidential campaign wore on, Senator
McCain’s running mate, Governor Sarah Palin, was pummeled with
questions from the media about her foreign policy experience, which
could not compare with that of the delightful Senator Biden, who on
September 22 B.S.-ed a Baltimore audience with, “If you want to
know where al Qaeda lives, you want to know where bin Laden is,
come back to Afghanistan with me. Come back to the area where my
helicopter was forced down with a three-star general and three
senators at 10,500 feet in the middle of those mountains. I can
tell you where they are.” Two days later he added that al Qaeda’s
headquarters had been moved to “the mountains between Afghanistan
and Pakistan, where my helicopter was recently forced down.” Both
statements were rehashes of his September 9 pish-posh that “the
superhighway of terror between Pakistan and Afghanistan [is] where
my helicopter was forced down.” Left unsaid by the senator—who
rarely leaves anything unsaid—was that the helicopter was “brought
down” not by enemy fire but by inclement weather.
Actually, as September ended, knowledgeable
students of politics began to wonder why the vice-presidential
candidacy of Governor Palin raised any eyebrows at all, save for
the fact that, unlike her opponent—and so many other campaigning
pols— she is not a locker room B.S.-er or an airhead. On September
17, at an appearance in Ohio, Senator Biden tapped the chest of a
reporter (presumably male) and said, “You need to work on your
pecs.” Six days later he disclosed to his fellow airhead, CBS’s
Miss Katie Couric, that, in response to the 1929 stock market
crash, “Franklin Roosevelt got on television and didn’t just talk
about, you know, the princes of greed….” Literate Americans had a
good laugh at that one, but what has yet to be noted is that Miss
Couric gave no hint that she was aware that back in 1929 no
television audience existed and that Mr. Roosevelt did not become
president until 1933. Irony, oh irony, at the end of the month it
was this dunce’s rude interview with Governor Palin that the media
recalled and not her moronic moment with Senator Biden.
By the end of September, the old B.S.-er
himself had revived memories of his mendacious past, his phony
academic record, his plagiarism in law school, and his plagiarism
in pursuit of the 1988 presidential nomination. In that race, he
lifted from British Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock’s biographical
treacle, adapting it for an American audience thus: “My ancestors,
who worked in the coal mines of Northeast Pennsylvania and would
come up after 12 hours and play football for four hours.” In Mr.
Kinnock’s version his Welsh ancestors “could work eight hours
underground and then come up and play football.” In 1987, Senator
Biden’s B.S.-ing forced him out of the race, but now he has
returned to his coal mining fibs. On September 21, addressing an
audience filled with coal miners in Virginia, he fibbed: “…I am a
hard-coal miner—anthracite coal, Scranton, Pennsylvania. That’s
where I was born and raised.” He was not a coal miner, though his
father was a car salesman, which explains a lot. Nonetheless, after
an entire month of whoppers, Senator Biden remained plausible to
the media and Governor Palin dubious. In Charleston, West Virginia,
34-year-old Mr. Jose Cruz was charged with assaulting a police
officer after he leaned toward Patrolman T.E. Parsons and broke
wind. Mr. Cruz then allegedly waved his gaseous discharge in the
direction of Patrolman Parsons, who was preparing a breathalyzer
test for the assailant. According to the police complaint, “The gas
was very odorous and created contact of an insulting or provoking
nature….” More on this later.
In the month’s obituaries, Hollywood suffered
the loss of Mr. Paul Newman at the age of 83 and Miss Anita Page,
98, who was one of Holly wood’s last silent-screen stars. Would
that we had more of them today. Miss Susan Sarandon comes to mind,
and Mr. Leo DiCaprio. Death also claimed Mr. Ronald Kornblum. Mr.
Kornblum had the enviable duty of performing autopsies on “the
stars,” notably, Mr. John Belushi, Mr. Truman Capote, and Miss
Karen Carpenter. Mr. Kornblum was also an expert on chokeholds and
was called to testify in the trial of the “preppy killer” in 1986.
Tension continued in Georgia, where a Georgian police officer was
shot by Russian troops and the Georgians claimed to have shot down
a Russian drone, though it may simply have run out of vodka.
Earlier in the month, the leaders of South Ossetia and Abkhazia
signed “friendship” treaties with Russia, apparently of their own
free will and notwithstanding the danger such treaties have posed
to signatories in the past.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice met with
Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi, ending 40 years of frosty relations
between Washington and Tripoli. Mr. Qaddafi, dressed completely in
white bedsheets, his chest crisscrossed by sashes, possibly on loan
from the Shriners, remained alert throughout much of the meeting,
though his translators seemed perplexed by his efforts at speech.
Mr. Qaddafi has been unwell since President Ronald Reagan, irked by
Mr. Qaddafi’s repeated acts of terror in the 1980s, bombed his
headquarters, a tent. Mr. Qaddafi’s acts of terror slowed markedly
after the bombing, and as doctors attempted to repair disorders
that spread throughout the dictator’s upper gastrointestinal
system. Then, after President George W. Bush so rudely
inconvenienced President Saddam Hussein in 2003, Mr. Qaddafi became
a lot more reasonable—a cause-and-effect process that Mr. Bush’s
critics rarely note. Finally, Mr. Marco Evaristti, the Chilean
concept artist, is apparently repentant. In 2000, he made art
history by asking museum goers to turn on electric blenders filled
with water and goldfish. Now the great man has signed an agreement
with a Texas death row inmate, Mr. Gene Hathorn. Mr. Evaristti
will, upon Mr. Hathorn’s unhappy dispatch, take possession of his
remains and transform them into fish food. Museum goers at a future
“art installation” will then be asked to feed Mr. Hathorn to an
aquarium of goldfish. Doubtless the museums of the world will be
competing furiously for this “installation.” It will be a protest
of capital punishment in America. On with the Crisis.
