The Top Ten Conservative Idiots (No. 125)
September 8, 2003
Hands And Knees Edition

Welcome once again to another spectacular edition of the Top Ten Conservative Idiots. Well, maybe not spectacular. It's pretty good though. This week we have the Bush Adminstration in the top spot - nothing like a spot of flip-flopping and groveling to make one's leaders look like a bunch of asses. Meanwhile it's finally been confirmed that the White House (2) really did fly Osama bin Laden's family out of the country just after September 11, muscleman Arnold Schwarzenegger (3) has still got nuthin', and the Environmental "Protection" Agency (4) just plain sucks. Elsewhere, Trent Lott (5) is writing a book (yawn), George W. Bush (8) is leaving children behind (again), and Bristol-Myers Squibb (10) is going to get away with something they shouldn't. Enjoy, and don't forget the key!

The Bush Administration
Was it really only six months ago that chickenhawk Richard Perle was thanking God for the death of the UN? How times change. Last week the Bush administration officially admitted that their occupation of Iraq is failing dismally and crawled on their hands and knees to the United Nations for help. How embarrasing. Unsurprisingly the UN was not particularly impressed - and who can blame them considering the rough treatment they've received at the hands of Bush & Co. Even while groveling to France and Germany the Bush administration managed to come over as belligerent and hostile, demanding that any UN support must be placed under American command. "Uh, hi there UN. Our troops are getting killed, and it's becoming politically embarrasing. Will you give us thousands of your young men for cannon-fodder instead? Oh, by the way, you can't have any say in what happens to them." France and Germany last week rejected this plan as "insufficient," and that's probably putting it mildly. I mean, what did the Bush administration expect? "Oh, sure, here you go. Never mind that we opposed the invasion in the first place, and you've done nothing but insult us and call us irrelevant ever since. We'd much rather see our soldiers shot at than yours." Honestly, does the foreign policy incompetence of this administration know no bounds?

The White House
Any sane person would assume that the bin Laden family could have given us some really useful information about Osama immediately after 9/11 - but don't look to the Bush White House for sanity. It has long been rumored that shortly after September 11 the Bush administration put members of the bin Laden family on a plane and flew them back to Saudi Arabia - and now those rumors have been revealed to be true. According to Richard Clarke, an adviser who ran the White House crisis team after the attacks, "dozens of influential Saudis, including relatives of Osama bin Laden" were allowed to leave the country while most flights were still grounded. Yet according to the FBI, "no one was accorded any additional courtesies that wouldn't have been accorded anyone else." Funny - if I recall correctly, just after 9/11 the FBI was arresting anyone with an Arabic-sounding name and spiriting them away to military bases where they could be held indefinitely without a trial. I guess that was anyone except Saudis who might actually have some useful information - they were sensibly put on a plane back to Saudi Arabia. So let's see: Osama bin Laden is from Saudi Arabia as were fifteen of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers, and a recent Congressional report showed that the Kingdom funnels money to terrorists (see Idiots 119). Yet the Bush White House has for some reason done everything in its power to divert attention away from Saudi Arabia. I guess they were too busy drawing up plans to invade, uh, Iraq.

Arnold Schwarzenegger
Arnold Schwarzenegger seems very certain of his ability to "pump up Sacramento," but is there any substance behind the blather? It doesn't appear so. Arnold ducked the first California Recall debate last week, first claiming that he couldn't be in two places at once and then that he didn't have enough time to prepare. Yeah, right - and the dog ate his homework. The fact is that Arnold chickened out of the debate because he's running his campaign like a movie premiere - all smiles and waves, cute soundbites and catchphrases, and flashing cameras. But take that away and what do you have? Well, a groping Austrian beefcake with very little going on upstairs. And in the world of carefully-controlled political media management the last thing you want is for your unintelligible, issueless candidate to go head-to-head against a group of people who actually know what they're talking about. So Arnold has instead been popping up in campaign commercials spouting irrelevancies like, "If you want to change this state, then join me." Perhaps it would help if you told us what you were going to change it into, Arnold. Or are you still trying to figure that out?

The Environmental Protection Agency
I think I know what the word "Protection" really means in "Environmental Protection Agency." It's like the Mafia. You give them a nice kickback every couple of weeks, and they'll "protect" you from "accidents." Unfortunately it looks like the environment has forgotten to make its last three payments and has just been caught in bed with the Don's wife. The inspector general of the EPA recently released a report which slammed the agency for "systematically [misleading] New Yorkers about the risks that the resulting air pollution posed to their health," according to Paul Krugman of the New York Times. See, when the EPA told New Yorkers that air pollution and toxic dust were nothing to worry about shortly after September 11, they were telling a big fat lie. It turns out that "dioxins — which are carcinogens and can also damage the nervous system and cause birth defects — created 'likely the highest ambient concentrations that have ever been reported,' up to 1,500 times normal levels," and that "as a result, hundreds of cleaning workers and thousands of residents may be suffering chronic health problems." But believe it or not the EPA weren't the main problem - no, they just failed to stand up to the Bush administration who told them to suppress the report so Senators Phil Gramm and Don Nickles could get away with slashing Bush's promised $20 billion aid to New York. Nice to see how much the Bushites really care about the American people, ain't it.

Trent Lott
After the success of such political blockbusters as Hillary Clinton's Living History, Al Franken's Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, and Ann Coulter's - gag - Treason, ex-Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott is jumping on the bandwagon and last week announced that he will sign a deal with an "unidentified publisher" for his memoirs. Trent Lott's memoirs? Whoo. Man, that's going to be a wild ride. I'm rushing out to preorder it immediately. Presumably Trent will have happy memories of his formative years - like that crazy time when he stupidly threw control of the Senate to the Democrats by alienating a key Republican: "Guys, I was like, so wasted!" Or the hilarious incident that occurred when he bumped into Strom Thurmond at a lynching: "I thought I recognized you under that sheet!" Yes, Trent's memoirs promise to be a barrel of laughs that will have you hooked to the very end. I hear the audiobook will be narrated by Little Richard. And while there is no official word on the name of Trent's upcoming autobiography, rumor has it that the working title is currently Living Hairpiece.

Speaking of Ann Coulter, as we must from time to time, she happened to appear recently on Saturday Final with Lawrence O'Donnell where she showed just how much she supports the troops in Iraq by comparing being killed in the line of duty to having one's hair "mussed." Attacking critics of our idiot President's idiotic invasion of Iraq, Ann said, "These are the same arguments, the precise same arguments that were being made before the war. It’s going to be a quagmire. What is the plan? When do we get out? How much is it going to cost? Someone in the military might get his hair mussed..." "Hair mussed," Ann? "Hair mussed?" How about, "sleep in a ditch in 120-degree weather, have your water and food rationed, suffer the side effects of Pentagon vaccines and innoculations, and live under the constant fear of having your ass blown off?" Yeah, sounds a little like getting your hair "mussed." Thanks for your continued support of the troops.

John Bolton
Two weeks ago the administration was suggesting that Saddam Hussein sent spies to convince them that there were WMD in Iraq when there really weren't. I thought the excuses couldn't get any more pathetic than that, but I guess I was wrong. Last week John Bolton, undersecretary of state for arms control, said, "The U.S.-led invasion of Iraq was justified in part because Saddam Hussein retained scientists capable of building nuclear weapons," according to the Associated Press. What? Are you serious? First there was supposedly bullet-proof evidence that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Then we hear that the evidence actually referred to weapons programs. And now you're telling me that the invasion was justified because Saddam retained scientists capable of building nuclear weapons? This just gets better and better. "Whether he possessed them today or four years ago isn't really the issue," said Bolton, apparently completely straight-faced. Um, pardon me, but that's bullshit. George W. Bush convinced the American people that Saddam Hussein was an imminent threat to the United States, which is why we're in this quagmire now. Our Great Leader had half the country buying duct tape and plastic sheeting because they were terrified that a weapon of mass destruction was about to come tumbling down their chimney. And now it's not the issue? Please.

George W. Bush
You've got to hand it to George W. Bush and his amazing presidential superpowers. I mean, how else can a man leave no child behind while simultaneously forcing an extra 700,000 of them into poverty? According a Census Bureau survey, the number of children living in poverty jumped from 11.5 million to 12.2 million last year, while the total number of people living in poverty jumped from 33.4 million to 34.8 million. Not that Our Great Leader's Great Economic Toilet Flush isn't working wonders for America's poor and unfortunate, you understand. It's just that poor people are shiftless and lazy, can't be bothered to pull themselves up by the bootstraps, and families of three with one child enjoy living on $14,480 a year or less. Meanwhile we do hope that Bush's fatcat friends are enjoying their multi-million dollar tax cuts. Damn lazy poor people trying to rob them of what's rightfully theirs.

The Media
A shocking poll revealed last week that almost 70 percent of Americans now believe that Saddam Hussein is linked to 9/11. Despite the lack of any evidence to make this case, the American people appear to have been led by the nose directly down George W. Bush's path, and its all thanks to the media. Why exactly do 69 percent of people think that Saddam and 9/11 are linked? Presumably because the Bush adminstration has been constantly mentioning them in the same sentence for the last two years, and the media has simply abrogated its responsibility to keep the people informed and done absolutely nothing to contradict this position. So for anyone out there who still believes that there is a liberal bias in the media, ask yourself why they have been willing participants in the farce which has allowed to Bush consistently mislead the American people and send us into an insane conflict from which there is now no obvious escape. Thanks guys.

Bristol-Myers Squibb
And finally, it appears that there are certain large corporations which were so keen to see George W. Bush elected in 2000 that they threatened their employees to donate to his campaign - or else. According to the Sydney Morning Herald, "top Bristol-Myers executives" sent messages to some employees telling them to "donate the maximum - $US1000 ($1500) in their own name and $US1000 in their spouse's - and if they failed to do so, their names would be forwarded to the company's then chief executive, Charles Heimbold." Purely coincidentally, of course, Bush's ascension to the White House has proved to be a massive boon for drug companies like Bristol-Myers Squibb, who are now able to shaft the consumer far more effectively and throughly than they would have been able to under Al Gore's prescription drug plan. However, since it is apparently illegal under federal law for companies to use "coercion to force a person to make a political contribution," I expect we'll see the Justice Department leap into action at any moment to prosecute these companies, won't we? Yeah, right - and then John Aschroft will announce that he's converting to Islam. See you next week!