The Top Ten Conservative
Idiots (No. 141)
February
2, 2004
Weapons of Mass... Oh, Forget It Edition
Weapons of Mass Destruction? Don't blame us. At the top of the list
we've got the Bush Administration, which was proven wrong once again on the
whole Iraq WMD thing. But of course they're more than happy to foist the blame
on the CIA or anywhere else but themselves. But even after the truth came out,
there was Dick Cheney (2) once again trying to claim against all reason that
the WMDs still exist. Further down the list, Georgia school superintendent Kathy
Cox (3) wants to keep her students ignorant. David Duke (6) wants to take another
shot at elected office. And don't miss The Traditional Values Coalition (10)
who have a complaint about this very website! As usual, don't forget
the key!
The
Bush Administration
So the cat is finally out of the bag. America's chief weapons inspector, David
Kay, quit his job and returned from Iraq last week, bringing with him the news
that - guess what? - there are no
weapons of mass destruction. Despite this devastating news for the Bush
administration, Kay managed to get a bit of bootlicking in and blamed the CIA
for misleading everybody. Let the backtracking
begin! Funny how seven months before 9/11, George Tenet testified before Congress
that Iraq posed no
immediate threat to the United States, and during a visit to Cairo around
the same time, Colin Powell stated:
"He [Saddam Hussein] has not developed any significant capability with
respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional
power against his neighbors." So, what - between the start of 2001 and
the end of 2002 the CIA suddenly freaked out and convinced the Bush administration
that Iraq did, in fact, have tons and tons of weapons of mass destruction which
they'd previously overlooked? Of course, it only takes a quick look back through
the Idiot archive to find multiple examples of members of the Bush administration
playing with intelligence data and pushing the intelligence community into drawing
conclusions that the administration wanted to hear. Like when Condoleezza Rice
ignored George Tenet's warning that the "uranium from Africa" claim
was false (Idiots 119), or when Dick Cheney
made sure that the lie went into the State of the Union Address (Idiots
117), not to mention all those times that Cheney visited the CIA and "created
an environment in which some analysts felt they were being pressured to make
their assessments on Iraq fit with Bush Administration policy objectives," (Idiots
113). Yup, if only the CIA hadn't fooled everyone with their phony intelligence,
you can bet that Bush would have done everything in his power to ensure
that we didn't rush to invade. But sadly, they were all completely hoodwinked.
Of course the fact that Bush's cronies have been planning the invasion of Iraq
since the end of the last Gulf War has nothing to do with it.
Dick
Cheney
Speaking of Halliburton, somebody needs to send a memo to yellow-belly boy.
Hey Dick! There aren't any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, got it? Despite
all the evidence to the contrary, Vice President Crashcart has been out and
about merrily spreading the lie that Saddam Hussein was about to sneak onto
America's rooftops and drop VX stink bombs down our chimneys. Appearing on NPR
recently, Dick claimed that, "In terms of the question what is there now,
we know prior to our going in, that he spent time and effort acquiring mobile
biological weapons labs." For goodness sake, can somebody please bring this
man up to speed? He's only the vice president of the United States after all.
I guess it's easy to lose track of time down in the bunker (when you're not
out shooting
ducks with the Supreme Court Justice who's about to hear your case that
is).
Kathy
Cox
If Kathy Cox has her way, science education in Georgia schools could soon be
going the way of the dinosaurs - if you're dumb enough to believe in dinosaurs
that is. Ms. Cox, the state schools superintendent, wants Georgia schools to
remove
all references to "evolution" and replace them with the phrase
"biological changes over time." The purpose of this is, of course,
to undermine the concept of evolution and promote creationism. Tell you what,
while we're at it why don't we just reintroduce the concept of bleeding as a
legitimate medical procedure? Or perhaps we could wave flowers around to protect
ourselves from the 'flu while we're on our way to the local witch-burning. I
dunno, if this keeps up pretty soon we'll be back to the educational level of
cavemen. Oh, I'm sorry - cavemen didn't exist. My bad.
Dennis
Miller
In Idiots 140 that CNBC have given Dennis Miller a
show, and that Miller has promised that the show, "however political, will not
be partisan." Funny that, because last week Dennis announced
that he won't be making any jokes about George W. Bush. "I like him," Miller
said. "I'm going to give him a pass. I take care of my friends." All right Dennis,
cut the brown-nosing. So you're going to have a political, nonpartisan show,
without mentioning the president of the United States, eh? That should be interesting.
Gee, I can't wait for yet another cable news TV show that spends an hour a night
shitting on Democrats and ass-kissing Republicans. God damn liberal media.
Peter
Shoomaker
Believe it or not, there's actually some good news coming out of Iraq. According
to General Peter Shoomaker, the head of the US Army, "There is a huge silver
lining in this cloud." Oh yeah? Yeah. Apparently the fact that the Army is actually
at war is a "tremendous focus" for those in the military. "There's got to be
a certain appetite for what the hell we exist for," said Shoomaker. Uh, okay.
See, according to Shoomaker, "War is a tremendous focus... Now we have this
focusing opportunity, and we have the fact that [terrorists] have actually attacked
our homeland, which gives it some oomph." Oomph? Oomph? Well I'm glad somebody's
enjoying this. I do hope the families of the 500+ dead American soldiers are
just as happy that their sons and daughters gave their lives for General Shoomakers
ultra-realistic training exercise. Oomph, indeed.
David
Duke
David Duke wants to run for office again - just as soon as he gets out of federal
prison for mail and tax fraud. The former Ku Klux Klan leader is considering
running for the seat of Republican Rep. David Vitter, and presumably stands
a great chance considering he's a convicted felon and the former leader of one
of the world's most famous hate organizations. Uh... but seriously, what is
David Duke thinking? Does he seriously believe that a man who was sent to prison
for bilking his supporters the last time he ran for office, not to mention a
man who headed a group which is most closely associated with lynching black
people, can really win a seat in the House representing Louisiana? Ah, wait
a minute...
Billy
Tauzin
Would you like to earn $1 million dollars a year? Sound tempting? Well that's
what Billy Tauzin will be making if he accepts a job offered to him recently
by the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturing Association, one of Washington's
most powerful lobbying organizations. The PhRMA wants Tauzin as their new boss,
and they clearly have impeccable
timing. See, Tauzin is currently chairman of the House Energy and Commerce
Committee which oversees the Food and Drug Administration and the pharmaceutical
industry. And funnily enough, he just had a major hand in the very recent Medicare
bill which only just scraped through Congress after Democrats complained that
it would seriously damage Medicare and provide massive handouts to pharmaceutical
companies. And now the bill has passed, the biggest pharmaceutical lobbyists
in Washington want to give him a million dollars a year to be their new boss.
Kinda makes you wonder when they started hashing out the details of this job
offer, doesn't it?
Halliburton
You've probably all seen it by now - the gag-inducing Halliburton commercial
in which a soldier on the telephone bravely fights back tears before jumping
up and announcing "It's a girl!" (And just think - if he weren't stuck
in Iraq guarding Halliburton's newly-acquired oilfields the poor bastard might
have been at home when his baby was born.) Halliburton's new push to promote
themselves as the loving, caring benefactors of our troops in the field somewhat
flies in the face of previous reports that Halliburton subsidiary KB&R provided
"blood all over the floor" of kitchens, "dirty pans," "dirty grills," "dirty
salad bars" and "rotting meats ... and vegetables" in some military messes they
operated. But it doesn't matter because Halliburton may soon be out of this
world - you'll be absolutely astonished to discover that George W. Bush's
plan to put a man on Mars will benefit
Dick Cheney's former company enormously. Here's what "veteran Halliburton
scientific adviser" Steve Streich had to say in Oil & Gas Journal
back in 2000 - "[Mars exploration is] an unprecedented opportunity for
both investigating the possibility of life on Mars and for improving our abilities
to support oil and gas demands on Earth." Yup, it's yet another taxpayer-funded
multi-billion-dollar handout for the vice president's favorite former company.
Oh, and by the way, according to the Washington Post, "Administration
officials scoffed at the idea that Halliburton had anything to do with the development
of the space policy." Got that? Scoffed.
Welfare Republicans
This is interesting: according
to a recent op-ed in the New York Times, "Each year, the Tax
Foundation, a nonprofit research group, crunches numbers from the Census Bureau
to produce an intriguing figure: how much each state receives in federal spending
for every dollar it pays in federal taxes." These states are then classified
as "Giver" or "Taker" states. If on average a state's population
pays more in federal taxes than it receives in federal spending, it's a "Giver"
state. If the opposite is true, it's a "Taker" state (for example,
for every dollar the average North Dakotan paid in federal taxes last year,
he received $2.07 in federal benefits - North Dakota is a "Taker"
state. The average Minnesotan, on the other hand, received 77c for every dollar
he spent - so Minnesota is a "Giver" state). But here's the kicker:
the vast majority of "Taker" states are - you guessed it - states
that went for George W. Bush in 2000. (Bush got 78% of his electoral votes from
"Taker" states.) And the vast majority of "Giver" states
went for Al Gore. (Gore got 76% of his electoral votes from "Giver"
states.) So what does this mean? Well, it means that despite what Sean Hannity,
Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly and the rest of the right-wing spin machine tells
you, Republicans are not constantly under attack from the federal government
which wants to take their money and distribute it to lazy shiftless liberals.
In fact the opposite is true - the constituents of the red states are living
off the tax dollars of those who live in the blue states. But since the Republican
Congress decides where all that tax money goes, there's not much we can do about
it. Bummer eh?
Traditional
Values Coalition
And finally: ha ha, we annoyed the nutjobs! Meet the Traditional Values Coalition,
who are either a) too cheap to hire a proper polling company or b) too scared
that if they DO hire a proper polling company they won't get the results they
want. So instead they made the foolish mistake of resorting to the thoroughly
unreliable online poll method, only to be surprised when their poll was horrendously
skewed against them. But guess what - Democratic Underground is to blame! According
to the TVC, "Radical Democrats are bragging on the DemocraticUnderground.com
web site that they've been skewing the results of TVC's marriage poll by voting
more than once." Hilariously, the TVC's poll "Would you vote for a
presidential candidate who supports same-sex marriage or civil unions?"
ended up with a "Yes" vote of 34,537 and a "No" vote of
26,550. According to the TVC, this means that DUers have a "disturbing,
flexible morality" (of course, holding a poll which you know beforehand
is going to produce a particular result in your favor is entirely moral behavior).
Hypocrisy also appears to be a "Traditional Value" - despite accusing
us of a "rather paranoid view of the world," the TVC is apparently
worried that messing with their stupid online poll is comparable to voting in
a real election, suggesting that "it appears that we can expect widespread
voter fraud this November from Clintonoid activists." Man, these guys are
dumb. Mind you, while we're on the subject of paranoia, bear in mind that the
Traditional Values Coalition are also responsible for the Homosexual
Urban Legends series. So I guess bigotry and hate are "Traditional
Values" too! (Incidentally the TVC also says that "One would hope
that individuals voting in an online poll would have the personal integrity
to vote only once - not multiple times." Well gee, I dunno - they should
ask the experts.)
See you next week!