The
Top Ten Conservative Idiots (No. 103)
March
17, 2003
Freedom Fries And Dark Oranges Edition
Freedom
fries are back! This time, they're in the United States Congress,
thanks to Bob Ney and Walter Jones (1). Perennial Top-Ten
favorite Bill O'Reilly (2) is back on the list for some first-class
hypocrisy. Meanwhile, Dick Cheney (3) is using the upcoming
war as an excuse to funnel a little more government money
back to his buds at Halliburton. The White House (4) is slamming
on Tony Blair, Tom Ridge (5) is turning a darker shade of
orange, and Mark Sanford (7) wants to run state government
like Wal-Mart. And if you're a journalist, watch out,
because the Pentagon (8) might shoot at you, and the FBI (9)
is gonna open up your mail. Enjoy, and don't forget the key!
Bob
Ney and Walter Jones
You may be forgiven for thinking that our elected leaders
are busying themselves with important matters of state. After
all, that's what we put them there for. But the latest news
from Capitol Hill seems to indicate that rather than spending
time coming up with solutions to the nation's problems, some
congressmen would rather waste the taxpayer's money on spreading
bigotry and xenophobia. Why aren't we surprised? Step forward
Republican congressmen Bob Ney and Walter Jones, who are currently
succeeding
in their mission to turn Capitol Hill into an isolationist's
paradise. See, Jones was so impressed by Neal Rowland's recent
anti-France zealotry (see Idiots 101) that he managed to persuade
Bob Ney, chairman of the House Administration Committee, to
jump aboard the "freedom fries" bandwagon. And lo
and behold, henceforth there will be no more "french
fries" on House cafeteria menus - it's "freedom
fries" or nothing. What a wonderful use of government
resources. And now I'd like to take a moment to say: WHAT
THE HELL ARE YOU IMBECILES THINKING? THIS IS THE ONE OF THE
MOST MORONIC ATTEMPTS AT PATRIOTIC CORRECTNESS I HAVE EVER
SEEN! YOU SHOULD BE ASHAMED OF YOURSELVES, YOU IGNORANT, CONTEMPTUOUS,
XENOPHOBIC WASTRELS. Thank you.
Bill
O'Reilly
And oh, how unsurprised we were to see Bill The Hypocrite
O'Reilly flip-flopping and U-turning last week. It
just last month that the No Spin twit was trashing Mark Stinson
of TakeBackTheMedia.com for organizing a boycott of Rush Limbaugh's
advertisers (see Idiots 98) - but suddenly
boycotts seem to be all the rage in the O'Reilly household.
Bill The Shill has decided that the best way to punish France
for their refusal to rush into a pre-emptive invasion of Iraq
is to - you guessed it - boycott their products. "It's
time. It's time for the United States people, the American
people, to say, 'OK, France, you want to do this, then we
do what we can,'" barfed the fair-and-balanced one on The
O'Reilly Factor last week. Odd that O'Reilly doesn't suggest
that we punish Iraq by boycotting their products -
especially since the US is currently the biggest
buyer of Iraqi oil in the world - but I guess he must
have decided that he hates France more than he hates Iraq.
Mon dieu.
Dick
Cheney
Last week Dick Cheney got on the list for being a humorless
fool. This week he's on the list for being a humorless war
profiteer. You know, it's going to take a lot of time and
money to clean up Iraq after we blow it to smithereens, and
who do you think is going to pay the tab? That's right folks
- it's you, the taxpayer. So since you're going to be paying
the tab, you should probably know where the money's going.
Last week five companies were invited to bid for contracts
to put Iraq's infrastructure back together following a war,
and wouldn't
you know it, one of those companies is a subsidiary of
Halliburton Inc., Kellogg Brown & Root. And Halliburton
Inc.'s former CEO is Dick Cheney (they still send him a million
dollars a year). It's the mother of all surprises. Perhaps
this has something to do with the fact that Halliburton subsidiaries
were rebuilding
Iraq during the nineties (after Dick bombed them the first
time) and it was obviously very profitable. Incidentally,
Kellogg Brown & Root has already
won a contract with the government to salvage Iraq's oil
fields on the off-chance that Saddam (or someone else, wink
wink) blows them up. So here's what happens - Dick Cheney
and friends start a war, and then send in their companies
to clean up the mess they've created, making a huge profit
which is passed on to you, the taxpayer. Figuring out how
the Bush administration works yet?
The
White House
Talk about shooting yourself in the foot. When your biggest
ally is fighting tooth and nail for his political life, solely
because of his support for the US, bashing him is probably not
the best idea. But then the Bush administration isn't exactly
winning awards for diplomacy right now, is it? A White House
official said
of the British prime minister last week that, "Blair is hurting
himself by dragging this out...It's not for Americans to tell
British politicians how to behave. But what is he getting out
of this? He should just stand up and say: 'We're ready to go.'"
Now that's what I call brilliant diplomacy! "Come
on Tony, we know that less than 20 percent of Britain supports
this invasion, and we know that your party is starting to grumble
about replacing you, but jeez, can't you just pull your finger
out already? Fer chrissakes man, you're either with us or against
us!" Yes folks, it looks like we're just one small step
away from Freedom Muffins.
Tom
Ridge
Hats off to the Department of Homeland Security! Apparently
there aren't enough levels in Tom's ridiculous color-coded
alert system to describe the amount of fear we should all
be living in, so he's going to add one more. Yup, when the
bombs start dropping on Iraq we will be officially at terror
level "dark orange," and you will be instructed
to poop your pants accordingly. "Dark orange" apparently
falls between orange and red, so it's a bit like saying, "Okay,
you're not completely screwed, and you're not almost
screwed - you're almost completely screwed." Well
frankly Tom Ridge can stick his color chart up his backside
as far as I'm concerned. Brown alert, Tom. Here it comes...
Arlon
Lindner
Minnesota state Rep. Arlon Lindner seems to have a knack for
pissing off just about everybody he comes into contact with
- and it's hardly surprising. Linder is a Holocaust denier
who used to claim that gays and lesbians were never persecuted
by the Nazis during World War II. But now he has an even
better explanation - gays and lesbians were actually responsible
for the Holocaust! After reading the loony-right-wing propaganda
tract The Pink Swastika, which claims that gays were
responsible for the rise of Hitler, Lindner said that "the
main gay participants in the Holocaust were Nazi concentration
camp guards." In defense of his comments, Lindner said that
he was merely trying to prevent an American Holocaust caused
by sexually transmitted diseases (all the fault of gays, obviously)
and "if you want to sit around and wait until America
becomes another African continent, you do that, but I'm going
to do something." Somewhat predictably, Lindner's African
American colleagues were also offended
by this. So what's next for Arlon Lindner? Suggesting that
women should be in the kitchen where they belong? Or that
immigrants should go back where they came from? We wait with
bated breath...
Mark
Sanford
Governor Mark Sanford of South Carolina has come up with a
great new idea - he wants to run the state like Wal-Mart.
"When you think about Wal-Mart, you think about value and
the lowest possible price. When you think of state government,
do you think of value?" said
Sanford last week. Well, not usually. But then when you think
about Wal-Mart you also think of other things, like low wages,
high turnover, crappy benefits, badly-treated workers... I
dunno, maybe this is what Sanford has in mind for South Carolina.
Sounds like a typically Republican idea don't you think?
The
Pentagon
Well now we know what the Pentagon is planning to do with
independent news journalists working in Iraq if there is a
war - blow the snot out of them. Last week, veteran British
journalist Kate Adie appeared on Ireland�s RTE1 Radio "Sunday
Show" and told Tom McGurk that the Pentagon would "target
down" telephone and television signals coming out of
Baghdad. "I was told by a senior officer in the Pentagon,
that if uplinks - that is the television signals out of...
Baghdad, for example-- were detected by any planes... electronic
media... mediums, of the military above Baghdad... they'd
be fired down on. Even if they were journalists..." said
Adie. I mean, it's understandable. We don't want any of
those pesky non-Pentagon approved independent news stories
getting out, do we.
The
FBI
More exciting news from the war on civil liberties - the government
can now open and seize your mail without even requiring a
warrant.
Well, they're not supposed to - but they will anyway. According
to the Associated Press last week, "Government agencies
opened a package mailed between two Associated Press reporters
last September and seized a copy of an eight-year-old unclassified
FBI lab report without obtaining a warrant or notifying the
news agency. The Customs Service intercepted a package sent
via Federal Express from the Associated Press bureau in Manila
to the AP office in Washington, and turned the contents over
to the FBI." See, while the package contained an unclassified
1995 FBI report that had been discussed in open court in two
legal cases, the FBI thought that it contained "sensitive
information that should not be made public." So they
took it upon themselves to intercept the package and confiscate
it. Ah, America, the land of the free. Well, it used
to be.
The
Food and Drug Administration
And finally: last week the FDA decided
to stop senior citizens from shafting big drug companies by
abandoning its relaxed view of Americans going to Canada for
cheaper medications, going so far as to threaten legal action.
Drugs can be up to 80% cheaper in Canada than in America and
the FDA is clearly upset about all those anti-American seniors
who prefer to be able to buy drugs and food. "Hey,
you like it so much in Canada? Why not move there, grandma!
If you're not going to help us get of this rotten economic
situation by spending your dwindling pension on American products,
we don't need you! Come on, it's patriotic to give
American drug companies five times as much money for the same
products you can get in Canada!" See you next week...
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