The Top Ten Conservative Idiots (No. 116)
June 30, 2003
I Wanna Be Like Joe Edition

Welcome to the Top Ten Conservative Idiots, No. 116. Ann Coulter leaps straight to the top of the chart this week with the shocking news that Joe McCarthy was right all along. Yowser! Meanwhile the White House (2) continues to desperately clutch at WMD straws, Sonny Perdue (3) disses Maynard Jackson, and Darrell Issa's (4) dubious past is revealed. Elsewhere, Donald Rumsfeld (6) thinks that democracy is a bad idea, Antonin Scalia (7) doesn't like homosexuals (big surprise), and George W. Bush (10) fails to hit a camel in the butt, but does managed to bag a few sheep. Enjoy, and as usual, don't forget the key!

Ann Coulter
Looks like they let Ann Coulter out of the ol' padded cell just in time to promote her latest cavalcade of crap, Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism. In her latest effort (the follow-up to Slander: Liberal Lies About The America Right) Ann claims that Joe McCarthy - you know, you know, the Senator who spearheaded the hysterical anti-communist witchhunts of the 50s - was right all along. Yes, people who disagree with the administration should have their private lives delved into, be publicly humiliated, and possibly thrown in jail. Ann also claims that liberals "don't consider themselves Americans," an interesting statement coming from someone who supports the idea of imprisoning people for their political beliefs. And there I was laboring under the misapprehension that we lived in the land of the free. I've gotta tell you though, if Treason is typical of the quality work you can expect from Ann Coulter I'll be sure to pick up her next book, Adolf: Liberal Exaggerations About The World's Greatest Humanitarian.

The White House
We've found the weapons of mass destruction! Yes, after the shocking discoveries of unmanned drones which could barely get off the ground (let alone fly 6,000 miles to America) and the mobile bio-weapons labs which turned out to be balloon-inflating machines sold to Iraq by the British, the latest "bulletproof" evidence of weapons of mass destruction was laid out by the White House last week. Apparently the CIA found some parts of a gas centrifuge under a rose bush in Baghdad last week after following a tip from Iraqi scientist Mahdi Obeidi. And lo and behold, the White House claimed that this "bolsters" Our Great Leader's insistence that Iraq had a nuclear weapons program. Or does it? See, according to Mahdi Obeidi, he was ordered to bury the parts 12 years ago, "so as to be ready to rebuild the bomb program at some time in the future." Now, I don't want to be contrarian here, but if the parts were still buried under the bush, doesn't this just prove that Iraq hadn't restarted it's nuclear weapons program? Not only that, but shortly after the White House had a near-orgasm at the DISCOVERY OF parts of a centrifuge which, along with about 2,500 other centrifuges could one day be used to build A NUCLEAR DEVICE under a rosebush IN BAGHDAD where they'd been for the last 12 years, the International Atomic Energy Agency announced that this was not "evidence of a smoking gun" and in fact "the findings refer to material and documents of the pre-1991 Iraqi nuclear weapons program that have been well-known to [the CIA]." Stay tuned for next week's episode: WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION are still nowhere to be FOUND. In other news, two more American soldiers were killed today IN IRAQ.

Sonny Perdue
Maynard Jackson, the first black mayor of Atlanta, Georgia, died last Monday at the age of 65. And to recognize the great work of this civil rights pioneer, Gov. Sonny Perdue did... absolutely nothing. Despite pleas from the public to commemorate Jackson's passing by lowering the state flags to half staff, Perdue announced that he would only lower the flags on the following Saturday, for the funeral service. But the very next day, Perdue couldn't get those flags down to half staff fast enough. A sudden change of heart? Hardly. Perdue was memorializing Lester Maddox, a former governor of Georgia who died two days after Maynard Jackson. Maddox is fondly remembered as a die-hard segregationist who chased black people away from his restaurant with a hand gun and a mob armed with axe handles the day after the Civil Rights Act was signed into law (he later sold the restaurant rather than serve blacks.) So thanks, Sonny Perdue, for demonstrating where your priorities lie.

Darrell Issa
What do you do when you don't like election results? Well, if your daddy's friends aren't on the Supreme Court you could do what Rep. Darrell Issa (R) is doing in California, and spend $800,000 on a recall effort. Issa wants to see Gov. Gray Davis replaced - but who could possibly replace him? Step forward... Darrell Issa. Unfortunately for the lowly congressman it was revealed last week that Issa hassa criminal record which he didn't make public. Apparently back in 1980 he was prosecuted along with his brother for "allegedly faking the theft of Issa's Mercedes Benz sedan and selling it to a car dealer for $16,000" according to the San Francisco Chronicle. Oh dear. But like any good Republican, Issa is taking full personal responsibilty for his misdemeanors: "Issa, in a phone interview with The Chronicle Tuesday, blamed his brother for the car theft ... 'I do not steal,' Issa said ... He blamed his brother for the San Jose arrest." Funnily enough, that wasn't the first time that Issa had been involved in a car theft prosecution. Apparently back in 1972 he was "indicted with his brother William on a charge of felony grand theft for allegedly stealing a red Maserati sports car from a car dealership in Cleveland." Again, Issa took full responsibilty, claiming "he had been wrongly implicated because his brother William had an arrest record ... 'I was exonerated of all wrongdoing. My brother went on to have a long and sordid career' ... 'I am not my brother. I am not my brother's keeper.'" Yes, it's another excellent demonstration of conservative personal responsibility. Oh brother.

Tom Scully
Let's just take a look at this quote from last week's UK Guardian, shall we: "The Bush administration's top Medicare accountant has calculated how millions of senior citizens would be affected by bringing private managed care into the program, but the administration won't release the information." Hmm. And why is that? Because "an earlier analysis suggested that a Republican plan to inject market forces into Medicare could increase premiums for those who stay in traditional programs by as much as 25 percent." Not only that, but Medicare chief Tom Scully threatened to fire anyone who released the calculations, and said that he would release the report "if I feel like it." See, the next time someone tells you that George W. Bush is taking such traditional Democratic issues as education and medicare and making them his own, tell them that he's not making them his own, he's flushing them down the toilet behind our backs. I mean, commissioning a study on the impact of Medicare changes and then not releasing it because you don't like the results? Must this admistration do EVERYTHING in secret? I guess so - otherwise the public might actually realize just how badly they're going to get screwed.

Donald Rumsfeld
An astute observation by the Defense Secretary last week shed some light on the way the Bush administration views the electoral process and democracy in general. Referring to the transition to a democratic government in Iraq, Donald Rumsfeld said "If you think about it, Adolf Hitler was elected. So elections are not the certain judge." Well, that makes sense. Iraq should probably give up on the idea of fair elections altogether, just like we have here in the United States. Rumsfeld was, of course, referring to the difficulty of establishing a government in Iraq that wouldn't immediately a) turn into a fundamentalist nightmare, and b) get in the way of us walking off with their oil. Which begs the question... shouldn't the administration have thought about this before they went in and took Saddam out? Oh well, too late now.

Antonin Scalia
The Supreme Court ruled last week to strike down Texas' archaic and homophobic sodomy law, and Antonin Scalia was pissed. In a 21 page dissenting opinion (which was longer than the majority opinion) he ranted against the evils of gayo-Americans and the devilishness of what they get up to in private. "Many Americans do not want persons who openly engage in homosexual conduct as partners in their business, as scoutmasters for their children, as teachers in their children's schools or as boarders in their home," he wrote. Now replace the phrase "persons who openly engage in homosexual conduct" with the phrase "persons of color" and you'll see how far neanderthals like Scalia have to go. Comically, Scalia also suggested that the court was "departing from its role of assuring, as neutral observer, that the democratic rules of engagement are observed." Sorry fella, you hammered the final nail into that particular coffin on December 12, 2000. Remember?

Tyrell Tavarez and Ryan Marsh
Tyrell Tavarez and Ryan Marsh last week gagged, beat and stabbed an Indian pizza delivery man simply because they thought he was a Muslim. According to the Associated Press, "They were ... telling him he should go back to Iraq." Saurabh Bhalerao, a graduate student at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth, was beaten, bound, and put into the trunk of his own car by the two men. He managed to loosen the ropes and jumped out when the car stopped, hit one of the men with a hammer, and was stabbed before making his escape. Bhalerao is a Hindu, although that obviously mattered little to the men who attacked him, and who now face criminal charges. Wonder where they got the idea that everyone with brown skin is a terrorist? Ah, the legacy of Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity in action.

L. Brooks Patterson
Oakland County Executive L. Brooks Patterson got off lightly when his car was pulled over last week. The police stopped Patterson after witnesses reported "seeing a gray-haired man in a Cadillac driving erratically on Dixie Highway." By his own admission, Patterson was hopped up on painkillers and "a couple of glasses of wine," yet he will not be charged with DUI. Why? Because rather than give him a Breathalyzer test or a sobriety check, the police officers recognized who he was and drove him home (both officers have since been suspended). No evidence, no DUI conviction - and therefore Patterson faces simple reckless driving charges. Of course, Patterson is now "reevaluating his lifestyle" and "says he will not make excuses for his actions and plans to accept his punishment." Now will that be the nothing-punishment he'll get for reckless driving, or the harsher punishment that he should have gotten for DUI but didn't because his buddies bailed him out? I wonder...

George W. Bush
And finally, who could forget Our Great Leader's Great Post-9/11 Promise: "When I take action, I'm not going to fire a $2 million missile at a $10 empty tent and hit a camel in the butt." Well George came damn close last week when US forces destroyed a convoy of trucks which was heading out of Iraq into Syria. FOX News breathlessly reported that "intelligence that prompted the attack indicated the convoy included a number of higher-level Iraqis," and Sen. Pat Roberts (R-KS) said, "I will not be surprised at any military action that would lead to the possibility that we have now finally killed Saddam Hussein." But after wiping out the convoy and killing a bunch of civilians - not to mention Syrian border guards - it became clear that neither Saddam Hussein nor his sons were part of the convoy, which was in fact part of a sheep smuggling ring. Still, George never said anything about not hitting sheep in the butt, so I guess that's okay. See you next week!