The Top 10 Conservative Idiots
(No. 200)

June 6, 2005
Bicentennial Special

Not long after the founding of Democratic Underground a member of FreeRepublic.com wrote, "go back in eight months time and they won't even be there." Sorry Mr. Freeper Guy - four and a half years later, DU is still here, and it's bigger than ever. This week we're proud to present the 200th edition of the Top 10 Conservative Idiots. We've come a long way since the first ever edition, which wasn't exactly what you might call insightful. Still, you've got to start somewhere - and these days the Top 10 is read by more than 20,000 people every week. So what do we have in store for the 200th edition? Well, the Top 10 Fun Facts are back, we've got an action-packed photo-story report on George W. Bush's recent press conference, and there's an opportunity to win DU stuff in our special Top 10 contest! Enjoy, and as usual don't forget the key!

Bret Schundler
Now, of all the things you might see at the very beginning of the 200th edition of the Top 10 Conservative Idiots, this is probably the last thing you would expect:

Image used courtesy of John Pettitt/Cloudview.com

Yup - it's everyone's favorite party chairman, Howard Dean. Not exactly a person one would consider to be a conservative, nor an idiot. But there's a very good reason for this picture to be at the top of the page today. See, our old friend Bret Schundler, who previously appeared on the list way back in Idiots 12 and Idiots 18, is running for governor in New Jersey again this year. What does that have to do with Howard Dean? Take a look at this picture from Bret's campaign website Bret2005.com:

Notice anything... familiar... about that picture? If you guessed, "Wait a second, it's just a picture of Bret Schundler badly Photoshopped onto a crowd of Howard Dean's supporters," then you'd be absolutely correct. Let's take a look at the composite shot:

Personally I like the way you can still see Howard Dean's thumb behind Schundler's left elbow.

Unfortunately Schundler's ass-brained attempt to make himself look popular has since been deleted from his campaign site, but you can still see a screen-grab here.

Bret Schundler legally changed his name in 1986. His real name is Dick Wadd.

Richard Nixon And Friends
We'd like to say a special thank you this week to Mark Felt, aka Deep Throat, for waiting until just before our 200th Top 10 Conservative Idiots to reveal himself. Thanks to Mr. Felt we can now do a special retrospective entry on Richard Nixon. From burglary to espionage to subverting the Justice and State Departments, as well as the U.S. intelligence services, Nixon and his administration were not just criminals, but experts in the field of conservative idiocy.

Of course, there are some people who say that Felt is not actually an American hero but a dastardly traitor who betrayed his country by telling the truth when the patriotic thing to do would have been to to, um, cover-up the government's very real crimes. But since those people are Pat Buchanan, Robert Novak, and G. Gordon Liddy, we can pretty much ignore their ramblings.

So the question remains, who will be the new Deep Throat? Who will come forward to blow the whistle on the Downing Street Minutes, Valerie Plame, Enron, election theft, Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, Halliburton, the August 6th PDB, Donald Rumsfeld's cozy relationship with Saddam Hussein, the failure to capture Osama bin Laden, the dubious corporatization of Social Security, the...

Oh, wait a second, we already know about all those things.

We can exclusively announce that the missing 18-and-a-half minutes from Nixon's Oval Office tape recordings reveal who shot John F. Kennedy, the current location of Adolf Hitler, what the aliens REALLY want, and the recipe for Pat Nixon's famous rhubarb crumble.

George W. Bush
And now, a special photo-story report on Our Great Leader's recent Rose Garden press conference:

There were actually a couple of great quotes from the press conference - for example, how about this fantastic solution for the Social Security "crisis":

BUSH: One idea is make sure that low-income seniors get benefits such that, when they retire, they're not in poverty.

Hey, that's brilliant. I can't believe nobody thought of that before. Then there was this critically-acclaimed quote:

BUSH: It seemed like to me they based some of their decisions on the word of - and the allegations - by people who were held in detention, people who hate America, people that had been trained in some instances to disassemble - that means not tell the truth.

Bzzt. Actually George, disassemble means to take something apart. It's what you're doing to Iraq. It's what the corporate media isn't doing to you and your administration every single day of the week.

It should probably be noted, however, that Bush is at least making something of an effort to use polysyllabic words. In fact it appears that he's even been doing a bit of that fancy book-learnin' - and on the Internets no less. An astute Top 10 reader pointed out that "dissemble" (the word Our Great Leader was trying to use) was actually the Word Of The Day on Dictionary.com the day before Bush's press conference. So give him a point for trying.

George W. Bush's relaxed, folksy vernacular is not natural, but an affectation accomplished through years of training. Behind closed doors Bush actually speaks with an upper-class northeastern accent. To achieve his famous easy-going speaking style, Bush drinks six shots of Jim Beam every hour on the hour.

George W. Bush
Bush's grandest press conference hypocrisy came in response to this question:

Q: Last week you made clear that you don't think there's any such thing as a spare embryo. Given that position, what is your view of fertility treatments that routinely create more embryos than ever result in full-term pregnancies? And what do you believe should be done with those embryos that never do become pregnancies or result in the birth of a child?

Okay, let's start with a few facts about IVF treatment. First of all, as noted in the question above, IVF treatment creates more embryos than ever result in full-term pregnancies - a LOT more. Couples have the option to decide what to do with the left-over embryos. They can have them frozen, or have them destroyed.

There are currently about 400,000 frozen embryos in storage, and about 9,000 of the 400,000 frozen embryos are available for "adoption" by other people. People who adopt these embryos can get them implanted and attempt to have a so-called "snowflake" baby, which is somewhat Aryan-sounding but that's another story.

But guess what? Typically clinics will transfer up to four embryos to the uterus for possible implantation. And three out of four of those embryos die without developing into a fetus. So every time people try to have a snowflake baby, they're killing three other "babies."

Why, Tom DeLay should be outraged! In fact, to be completely consistent with the so-called "culture of life" position, radical right-wingers like Delay and Santorum and Bush should be trying to make IVF treatment illegal.

So bearing that in mind, let's take a look at George W. Bush's answer to the question:

BUSH: As you know, I also had an event here at the White House with little babies that had been born as a result of the embryos that had been frozen - they're called "snowflakes" - indicating there's an alternative to the destruction of life.

But the stem cell issue, Dick, is really one of federal funding. That's the issue before us. And that is whether or not we use taxpayers' money to destroy life in order to hopefully find a cure for terrible disease. And I have made my position very clear on that issue - and that is I don't believe we should.

Now, I made a decision a while ago that said there had been some existing stem cells and, therefore, it was okay to use federal funds on those because the life decision had already been made. But from that point going forward, I felt it was best to stand on principle - and that is taxpayers' money to use - for the use - for the use of experimentation that would destroy life is a principle that violates something I - I mean, is a position that violates a principle of mine.

So according to Our Great Leader, it's commendable for modern science to destroy three "lives" while artificially creating one life, but it's morally evil to do the same thing in order to cure millions of people who are already alive.

Hey, that's okay George. Keep on bending over for James Dobson and the rest of the radical pro-ignorance nutcases who have taken over the Republican party. I'm sure the millions of Americans who suffer from diabetes or Alzheimer's or Parkinson's disease will forgive you when you veto the bill that could cure them.

Not many people know that George W. Bush was himself a snowflake baby, as were all of his brothers and sisters. This is because their father, former president George H.W. Bush, was so sexually repulsed by his wife that the couple could not conceive through natural means.

Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld
And on the subject of not spending taxpayers' money to destroy life, let's turn now to the uproar caused by Amnesty International's recent report on Camp X-Ray, or "Six Flags Guantanamo Bay," as the Bush administration would apparently prefer we call it.

Amnesty's "exhaustive 300-page report" made a "substantive assertion that U.S. handling of 'war on terror' prisoners erodes our country's moral authority," according to the Miami Herald. But unfortunately administration officials were able to deflect much of the criticism by focusing on Amnesty's use of the word "gulag" to describe the Guantanamo Bay prison.

George W. Bush called the report "absurd," Dick Cheney said he was "offended," and Donald Rumsfeld appeared to lose the plot completely, saying "there's so much transparency in Gitmo and so much oversight" - which explains why we don't know who's there and what they're there for.

And after all the fuss about Newsweek's report of mishandled Korans, the dynamic trio had egg on their faces when the Pentagon was forced to admit last week that Korans were mishandled - including one incident where a guard's urine "splashed onto a detainee and his Koran." According to the New Zealand Herald, "Southern Command said a guard urinated near an air vent and 'the wind blew his urine through the vent' and onto a detainee and his Koran." Strange toilet arrangements they have down there at Gitmo.

It's okay though, because the White House is putting the blame for all this right where it belongs... on "the few isolated incidents of mishandling by a few individuals that violated military policies and practices," according to Scott McClellan. Now where have I heard that before? Ah yes - that's exactly what they said about our other house of fun, Abu Ghraib prison.

Is it just me, or does anyone else think it sounds like the administration doth protest just a tad too much? I mean, you'd think they might take some of the Amnesty report recommendations on board if they were actually serious about not provoking the Arab world during these difficult times. But then, when you have a president who thinks that it's his job to "catapult the propaganda," I guess we shouldn't expect too much.

During downtime, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld enjoy a spirited game of Risk in the White House basement - except they play on an oversized board using drugged mice for armies, which they crush with hammers. Actually, they don't use a board at all. And they're not really playing Risk. They just like to crush mice with hammers.

The Pentagon
Meanwhile, as Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Co. sit pretty in Washington D.C., life is getting ever-tougher for the men and women of the U.S. armed forces. Just last week Army officers reported that they "don't have enough troops to hold the ground they take from insurgents" in northwest Iraq. According to Military.com, "From October to the end of April, there were about 400 soldiers from the 25th Infantry Division patrolling the northwest region, which covers about 10,000 square miles."

Of course, it can't help that "The regular Army missed its recruiting goals for three straight months entering May, falling short by a whopping 42 percent in April. The Army was 16 percent behind its year-to-date target entering May, with a goal of signing up 80,000 recruits in fiscal 2005, which ends Sept. 30," according to Reuters. The Pentagon is now postponing the release of military recruiting figures in an attempt to save face.

Why is recruiting so tough these days? Clearly people are not too keen on signing up when they know they'll be headed straight into the middle of a bloody conflict - and especially now that the Downing Street Minutes have conclusively proven that Bush lied to the American people and to Congress in order to get his war. (Incidentally, John Conyers still needs your signatures.)

But there are other reasons: the Associated Press reported last week that "With thousands of reservists and National Guard members being called to duty, some families are not only left without a spouse's income but also their health insurance. The military provides Tricare, but with low reimbursement rates, many physicians hesitate accepting the government insurance. That has made access to health care difficult for reservist families." Meanwhile, the analysts who were behind the deeply flawed intelligence reports which Bush used to push the country to war have, for the third year running, received job performance awards. Nice.

But don't worry - Bush and Co. has a plan to fix the recruiting crisis. According to the UK Guardian, the Pentagon has "stopped battalion commanders from dismissing new recruits for drug abuse, alcohol, poor fitness and pregnancy in an attempt to halt the rising attrition rate."

Drug abuse, alcohol, poor fitness, and... pregnancy? Ah, you just can't beat the "culture of life."

According to the official Pentagon website, it is "one of the world's largest office buildings. It is twice the size of the Merchandise Mart in Chicago, and has three times the floor space of the Empire State Building in New York. The National Capitol could fit into any one of the five wedge-shaped sections." Since 2001, one of those wedge-shaped sections has been used exclusively to store the Bush administration's hubris.

Carey Lee Cramer
Back in 2000, Carey Lee Cramer hit the headlines with an anti-Al Gore campaign ad which echoed the famous 1964 Lyndon B. Johnson "Daisy" ad. Cramer's remake featured his then 9-year-old stepdaughter picking daisy petals, and ended with a nuclear explosion. The ad attempted to demonstrate the moral depravity of Al Gore by spreading a rumor that he sold nuclear technology to China in return for campaign contributions.

But it turns out that Cramer's stepdaughter had more immediate problems to worry about than being blown up by a Chinese nuke marked "property of Al Gore." Last week Cramer was "charged in Hidalgo County with multiple counts of molesting the girl and another young relative," according to The Monitor. His ex-wife (the girl's mother) thinks that he even molested her daughter during the making of the commercial.

Conservatives are constantly droning on about morals and values, and then they get caught molesting children. Er, what's up with that?

The Department of Homeland Security
Stop the presses! The Department of Homeland Security made a dramatic sweep last week and netted several dozen cells of domestic... filesharers? Yup - according to CNET News, "Agents shut down a popular Web site that allegedly had been distributing copyrighted music and movies, including versions of 'Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith.' Homeland Security agents from several divisions served search warrants on 10 people around the country suspected of being involved with the Elite Torrents site, and took over the group's main server."

Now, the issues of pirating music and movies aside, would it be impertinent of me to ask what the fuck Homeland Security is doing targeting filesharers? Of course, it's not like they haven't done anything this off-mission before - remember when Tom Delay sent Homeland Security after the "runaway Democrats?"

Yes, you thought you were getting a vast, bloated government bureaucracy to stop evildoers from harming America - and instead you've gotten a vast, bloated government bureaucracy that stops evildoers from distributing Revenge of the Sith. Brilliant.

Ironically, former head of Homeland Security Tom Ridge had a small role in Star Wars Episode III. If you look to the left of General Grievous just before his signature battle with Obi Wan Kenobi, you can see Ridge wrestling a gundark.

Rush Limbaugh
On his radio show last week, Rush Limbaugh put forth a curious criticism of the Democratic party proposal to make election day a national holiday:

OXYCONTIN BOY: The two to three big opportunities so far mentioned by Howard Dean - pension portability and changes to election laws. ... So portability of pensions. What's the second one? Oh, yeah, Election Day a holiday. And well, you know - I don't know why they need to do that. Most of their voters don't work anyway, so I don't know how that's going to help them that much. At least in a percentage basis."

Funny really. I mean, you'd think Rush would be falling head-over-heels to promote this idea. Because if Democrats don't work then surely we have a huge advantage on election day over all those fully-employed Republicans who are so busy pulling themselves up by the bootstraps that they can't get to the polls.

So why isn't Rush Limbaugh trying to fix the injustices of election day? Why isn't Rush Limbaugh trying to level the playing field between layabout welfare-grubbing Democrats who can roll out of bed and head to the polls around noon, and industrious Republicans who must surely have difficulty getting there during their lunch break - if they're lucky enough to have a lunch break at all?

Come on, Rush! STAND UP AND BE COUNTED! Right these wrongs! Election day MUST become a national holiday! Otherwise it's simply not fair to decent, hard-working Republicans!

I'm sure that we can expect Mr. Limbaugh to come to the same conclusion and start advocating for a national election holiday in the very near future.

The Excellence In Broadcasting network is, in reality, a figment of Rush's drug-addled imagination.

BoycottFord.com
And finally, did you know that Ford motor cars are the gayest cars in town? Yes sir - Ford is now the Liberace of motor vehicle producers. Forget that tough old image of midwestern steelworkers hauling I-beams in their F-350's. Grimy steelworkers, sweating from a hard day's toil... looking incredibly rugged in their tight-fitting dungarees... counting the minutes till the whistle blows at the end of the day and they can jump into the communal shower with their buddies... but I digress.

According to the latest champions of the radical right-wing, BoycottFord.com, "If one looks for the company which has done the most to affirm and promote the homosexual lifestyle, he would be hard-pressed to find a company which has done more than Ford Motor Company." And therefore they are requesting that everyone should, well, boycott Ford.

If you need proof that Ford is a haven of homosexual hi-jinks, BoycottFord.com is more than willing to assist you. For example, check out this picture from a Volvo ad (Volvo is owned by Ford) which ran in the, um, Sydney Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras program book.

Just look at that car's giant boner. BoycottFord.com says, "Taking things to a new level, Volvo's risque ad phallicly shows an emergency brake handle as if it is an erection, with the headline, 'We're just as excited as you. Happy Mardi Gras from everyone at Volvo Car Australia.' At the bottom is an obligatory rainbow stripe."

Now, this is just a thought, but I might suggest that if one does not want to view such imagery, one might avoid reading the Sydney Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras program book.

Anyway, this boycott against the enormously gay Ford Motor Company got us thinking. Why specifically target Ford? After a special investigation, we discovered that Ford are most certainly not the only car company indulging in blatant homoerotic imagery. Just check out the slogans of some other famous car manufacturers:

Saturn: "A Different Kind Of Car"

Jaguar: "Unleash A Jaguar"

Toyota: "Oh What A Feeling"

Chevrolet: "Like A Rock"

Subaru: "Driven By What's Inside"

Dodge: "Grab Life By The Horns"

Come on, BoycottFord.com! It's not just Ford! These companies are all doing the devil's work! They must be stopped immediately, stopped I tell ya!

Stuck for what to drive? The members of BoycottFord.com recommend Volkswagen.

Hope you enjoyed the 200th edition of the Top 10 Conservative Idiots. See you next week!

Nominate a Conservative for Next Week's List