Zell, Mike, Condi and the Bush Machine

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Zell, Mike, Condi and the Bush Machine

Just when you think that the Bush machine is ready to implode, along come the crazed enginemeisters to change the oil and get it cranked up again.

First to bloviate into the carburetor was Sen. Zell Miller (D-GA), the dixiecratically elected representative of crackerhood in Georgia. Miller, who clings to his Democratic “roots” like a leech sucking blood out of someone with a bad case of the catarrh, recently proclaimed that he was backing Dubya to the hilt, since his beloved Democrats have lost their way.

Just what Democrats Miller aligns himself with these days his hard to say, though one gets the impression that he would dearly love to return to the days when segregationist Democrats ruled the South, and the Republicans were considered liberals. In other words, what’s wrong with the Democrats these days is that they’re not contemporary Republicans. Or that they didn’t listen to Strom Thurmond when that old crusty mustard was still a Democrat.

Obsequious right-wing harlot that he is, Miller now claims that the Democrats, like Bush, should be heavily into tax cutting. And, like Bush, they should be canoodling their way into wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Bosnia, North Korea, Iran, or just about anywhere else that “trrrists” hang out.

Cooing and twanging the Bush mantra that only Republicans can save the country, boost the economy and prevent some religious nut from blowing up the D train in a New York subway tunnel, Miller has taken the bull by the horns and uncorked his vision for America. He calls it “Democrats for Bush.”

That this would result in a one party system seems not to faze old Zell. All he knows is that we’re on a collision course with disaster if the Democrats don’t soon wake up and become Republicans.

Not far behind Zell in the Land of Loons is one Mike DeWine, a Republican senator from Ohio who leads the anti-abortion crowd. In yet another attempt to substitute potentiality for reality, DeWine and others of his ilk have concocted and gotten passed yet another bill that will grant substantiality to a process that may or may not lead to the birth of a child. This he calls the Unborn Victims of Violence Act.

Essentially what DeWine says is that you can’t kill something that’s not born and get away with it. That the bill never defines what “unborn” means seems not to be an intellectual or logical problem for its sponsors.

In fact, it may refer to a fetus, or it may not. Or perhaps it’s the embryo. Or an egg. Or sperm. No one seems to know just how far back the unborn really go. All we get from this bill is that you can’t kill them or it or him or her or whatever. The point is that whatever IT is, it now has legal status. And if it has legal status, you certainly shouldn’t be able to abort it.

Senator Diane Feinstein foolishly tried to introduce reason into this bubbleheaded legislation by proposing an amendment that would up the punishment for killing a “pregnant woman.” That, however, was such a gross clarification of the issue that it was immediately voted down by the Republicans, who, if nothing else, are totally dedicated to mucky-mindedness when it comes to passing legislation that can be interpreted in so many ways as to be undecipherable by anyone but Zell Miller. And he, like the muddle-headed DeWine, thought the bill was just the epitome of legislative clarity.

But perhaps the most effective spinmeister the Bushies have is Condoleezza Rice, who’s been one busy bee of late.

While Dubya himself has been out on the hustings, making jokes about looking for WMD, his former employee, Richard Clarke, has been treating the president like some Haitian voodoo doll, into which he’s thrusting one needle after another.

In addition to his book, which trashes Bush & Co. for their ineptitude in the months prior to 9/11, Clarke himself appeared before the commission investigating the whole mess and, in a moment of high drama, apologized to the committee and the survivors of the victims of 9/11 for his failures and those of the Bush administration.

And then he was trashed. Trashed by the president, trashed by the vice-president, trashed by Bush’s press secretary, and finally trashed by Condi Rice, who rotated like a top through all the network news stations – with special emphasis on those, like Fox, owned by Rupert Murdoch - where she gave birth to her trumped up tales of what really happened.

What really happened, of course, is that the Clinton administration screwed up royally, since they didn’t capture Osama bin-Laden when the chance presented itself. Never mind that the Clintons were bogged down in a right-wing led impeachment procedure that obviated attention to just about everything else. Nope, it was Clinton’s fault that he didn’t whack the whistle out of Iraq when bin-Laden was in Afghanistan.

Hello? Was it Clinton’s fault that the incoming Bush administration treated the terrorist information the Clinton’s gave them like something emanating from a leper colony? Or that Bush and his cronies decided that anything Clinton did was automatically unpatriotic?

Furthermore, said Condi, the Bush administration was focused on the terror issue before 9/11 like a deerslayer sighting a buck. Truth is, of course, that the anti-terrorist commission set up by Bush and Cheney in May of 2001 never convened. “I just didn’t see much urgency in the terrorist issue,” claimed Bush.

But what is most interesting relative to the Clarke-trashing process is that Condi, while she passes her inedible gummy fudge of fiction around the network table, refuses to testify under oath before the 9/11 commission. Executive privilege, she says. Can’t do it. Won’t do it. But I’ll answer any questions the network guys ask me. Spin the wheel and let the story unfold.

Well, despite what Zell says, the story that’s unfolding is not a pleasant one. In fact, it’s damned tawdry, if not totally inexcusable.

Yet neither Zell nor anyone else but Richard Clarke are apologizing to the American people for the ineptitude of this administration.

Bush is cracking jokes about it, Zell is laughing, and Condi is the talk of the town. And in the midst of all this, John Kerry seems to have gone into hiding somewhere on the ski slopes of Idaho.

So the machine rolls on.

March 28, 2004