The Top Ten Conservative Idiots (No. 102)
March 10, 2003
The We Want A Letter From Dick Cheney Too Edition

Attention Dick Cheney's lawyers: This week the Top Ten Conservative Idiots features some first-rate lowbrow humor at the expense of your boss and his wife, and we're really hoping to receive one of those cool letters like you sent to that other website. (Send us an email if you need our mailing address.) To everyone out there who isn't a lawyer for Dick Cheney, we've got even more conservative idiot fun... George W. Bush (2) held a press conference but didn't actually answer any questions. MSNBC (4) is packing its TV schedule with right-wing extremists. Regent University (5) is building a bridge to the fourteenth century. And Colin Powell (10) took a break from warmongering for a little anti-gay fearmongering. Enjoy, and don't forget the key!

Dick Cheney
Looks like Vice President Crashcart can't take a joke. After discovering a parody about his wife Lynne at whitehouse.org, Dick had his lawyers fire off a letter to the site's owner, John Wooden, to inform him that "Lynne V. Cheney's name and pictures - altered to show her with a red clown's nose and a missing tooth - could not be used to make money without her consent," according to the Associated Press. Yes, it seems that John Ashcroft's shredding of the Constitution has gone to Dick's head. Fortunately the New York Civil Liberties Union sprang into action and insisted that despite Big Time's delusions, the First Amendment does still exist and therefore he should probably just leave the whole thing alone. Kinda makes you wonder whether Dick's got anything better to do in his spare time - although to be fair he was probably just looking for that porn site whitehouse.COM and got confused. Note to Dick's lawyers: we would like to make clear that Democratic Underground is in no way suggesting that the vice president of the United States is viciously spanking the monkey in his undisclosed location. And if he is, then it's between him and Jesus. Clarification to the note: we of course mean that the MORAL DILEMMA of vicious monkey spanking is between him and Jesus, not the ACTUAL ACT of vicious monkey spanking - if there is indeed any vicious monkey spanking going on at all. And we're not saying there is.

George W. Bush
Anyone tuning into Our Great Leader's press conference last Thursday night may be forgiven for thinking that they were watching a rerun. Bush offered no new insights into or evidence for war with Iraq, instead he simply kept repeating "Saddam is evil. Iraq must disarm. Smoke them out." like some kind of bizarre slightly-worn mechanical parrot. Uh, yeah George, we got that. How about answering questions like this one from Bloomberg News reporter Dick Keil: "If all of these nations, all of them our normal allies, have access to the same intelligence information, why is it that they are reluctant to think that the threat is real...?" George's answer, naturally, was to explain how Saddam is evil, that Iraq must disarm, and that we would indeed smoke them out. Since decorum states that it is not proper for reporters to stand up at prime time presidential press conferences and scream "Oh my God! Just answer the frickin' questions already! Do you HAVE a brain?" Dubya was once again given a free pass. Not that it couldn't have been made more difficult for him - but White House communications director Dan Bartlett explained to the Washington Post the next day how Bush's political propaganda works: "In this case, we know what the questions are going to be, and those are the ones we want to answer." So basically the whole thing was a completely pointless charade. Hey - a bit like Bush's presidency!

Crossgates Mall
Surely everyone's heard about this story by now - a 61-year-old man named Stephen Downs was arrested at Crossgates Mall in Guilderland NY last week for wearing a T-shirt which read "Give peace a chance." Downs was approached by security guards and asked to remove the shirt or leave the mall. He refused, and was arrested for trespassing. Days later, 100 anti-war protesters marched through the mall in support of Downs, and now the mall would like to drop the charges. But the question is, why on earth would they have such a policy in the first place? Tim Kelley, director of operations for the company which owns the mall, said in a statement that "Downs' behavior and clothing was disruptive to other shoppers," according to the Associated Press. Mr. Kelley has clearly been worked up into an anti-peace frenzy by the Limbaughs, Hannitys and O'Reillys, because how anyone could suggest that Mr. Downs' T-shirt could be disruptive to other shoppers is entirely beyond us. So congratulations right-wing hate-radio dudes - you've successfully managed to vilify the concept of peace itself. Hope you're proud of yourselves.

Speaking of right-wing hate-radio dudes, what the hell is MSNBC playing at? First they ditch Phil Donahue's show (incidentally their top-rated show), and then to compensate they hire nutjob Michael Savage. For those of you not familiar with Michael Savage, you may be interested in perusing his website, where he suggests that once we go to war, the leaders of the antiwar movement should be arrested under the sedition act. Savage has also referred to child victims of gunfire as "ghetto slime," and suggested that Latinos "breed like rabbits." Yup. But Savage isn't the only hard-right lunatic to be snapped up by the desperate-to-emulate-Fox-News MSNBC. The ailing network has also hired former Republican congressmen Dick Armey and Joe Scarborough - Scarborough, you may remember, had a dead intern show up in his office around the same time that Gary Condit was being hauled over the coals. Funny then that the Joe Scarborough story somehow didn't seem a big deal to the same people that were hunting through Condit's garbage. But that's the "liberal" media for you, I guess.

Regent University
Regent University (founder: Pat Robertson) isn't exactly what you might call a pillar of educational excellence. Unless you're specializing in Medieval Studies, that is. Herbert O. Chadbourne, a Gulf War veteran, just settled a lawsuit with the university (he sued Regent, Pat Robertson, and two administrators last year) after being suspended for developing an unfortunate facial tic. Chadbourne claimed that the tic may have been the result of exposure to chemical or biological agents during Desert Storm, but that wasn't good enough for Regent University, who came up with the much more likely explanation that he was - wait for it - possessed by demons. Chadbourne said in court papers that, "It was the sudden onset of this disability that caused at least one, if not several, of the plaintiff's religiously fervent classmates to inform the plaintiff that he 'had a demon and had therefore been cursed by God for being sinful.'" Apparently an associate dean told Chadbourne that nine students had "expressed concern" about him (but refused to identify the students, naturally) before suspending him and barring him from returning to campus. Perhaps in light of this incident Regent University should rethink their curriculum - courses such as Practical Witch Dunking and Flat Earth Science could bring them kicking and screaming into the fourteenth century.

Free Republic
And it's a classic this week from our favorite hive of inadequacy, FreeRepublic.com. "50,000 PRESENT AT LOS ANGELES 'SUPPORT OUR TROOPS' RALLY" screamed the FR headline last week, and if you were a Freeper you might actually believe it was true. What really happened was that about 20 Freepers decided to hold a pro-war march during the LA Marathon - at which 50,000 people were present - and then claimed that everyone who was there to see the marathon was actually there to support the march, and by proxy, the war on Iraq. So in effect there were two marathons in LA that day - the official Los Angeles Marathon, and Free Republic's Marathon Effort To Look Completely Stupid. Good job, lads!

The Pentagon
Oddly enough, while the Bush administration is coming down hard on any country that might soon be in possession of nuclear weapons (um, unless they're not a military pushover, or they already have nuclear weapons, or they're our "friends") they've also been slashing global non-proliferation treaties. Why? Because the Pentagon wants to start building new nuclear weapons, silly. After all that disarmament nonsense in the 80s and 90s, I guess they just realized that suddenly we don't have enough weapons to blow up the planet, and that has to change, pronto. So they're developing an excitingly-titled "Nuclear Earth Penetrator" which is designed to, well, penetrate the earth and blow up any bunkers underneath. Don't worry though, the bombs only have a yield five times greater than that of the one used at Hiroshima, and Congress would only have to lift a 10-year ban on developing "small" warheads. So what the heck, pass the plutonium and let's start blowing shit up!

The Bush Administration
Props to the administration for capturing terrorist Khalid Shaikh Mohammed last week. Fewer props to the administration for the campaign of disinformation and propaganda that surrounded the arrest. See, shortly after September 11 the administration released a list of the world's most-wanted terrorists, and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was in last place at number 22. There seems to be no doubt that Khalid is a big link in the al Qaeda chain, but it is certainly odd that after his capture the administration promoted him from "al Qaeda operative" to the man behind the September 11 attacks. Even Bush himself, during his soporific press conference last week, described Khalid as "the mastermind of the September the 11th attacks against our nation [who] conceived and planned the hijackings and directed the actions of the hijackers." Wow. Funny, they described Ramzi bin al-Shibh in a similar way when he was captured last September. So, as Debra Pickett speculates in the Chicago Sun-Times, you have to wonder whether the administration is either changing the status of terrorists depending on who they capture, or they really don't have a clue what they're doing. I wonder which it could be?

George W. Bush (again)
To get some measure of the hypocrisy behind Bush's reasons for invading Iraq, you only have to look at this story from Australia last week. It seems that the Australian Feds have been investigating certain Saudi princes for funneling money through Europe to the al Qaeda operatives who performed the Bali bombing. Got that? Saudi princes... money... al Qaeda. Yet Bush wants us to believe that it's Saddam who is bin Laden's best pal, despite bin Laden's unflattering description of Saddam as an "infidel." Additionally, Saudi Arabia (like Iraq) isn't exactly a pillar of liberal democracy. But rather than boldly freeing the Saudi people from their oppressive regime (as he claims to want to do in Iraq) Bush won't put the Saudi rulers on notice for fear of upsetting his daddy's golfing schedule. Yup, we need to go to war to free the world from insane dictators and terrorist supporters - as long as they're not our buddies.

Colin Powell
And finally, while the war machine rolls on, Colin Powell has found time to make clear that you shouldn't fight for your country if you're gay. In an interview with TeenInk.com, where teens get to ask the questions, Powell said, "As you know, the military has the policy, 'Don't ask, don't tell,' so that somebody who is openly homosexual does not serve. I'm an advocate of that policy, I helped put that policy in place and I'm accused, therefore, of supporting homophobia. But I think it's a different matter with respect to the military because you're essentially told who you're going to live with, who you're going to sleep next to, and it's a different set of circumstances in a military environment." Well I suppose it makes sense if you assume that all homosexuals are raging sex fiends who can't control their primeval urges, much like dogs in heat. I mean, crikey, "who you're going to sleep next to?" Yeah, right... wouldn't want to be stuck on a dangerous two-week patrol in the middle of the desert only to wake up one morning and find yourself being rogered by Sergeant Jenkins, who'd only been able to hold himself back for ten days before exploding in a fireball of unrequited sexual tension. What else Colin? They won't be able to fight properly because they'll be too busy arranging flowers? Good grief. See you next week!

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