The Democrats’ Gift Horse

The games congressmen play. These days it’s High Horse (AKA High Horse, High Horse, Now Who’s On Their High Horse?)

I have long enjoyed games myself. Growing up as an only child in a sick, sick, sick, (pretend I wrote it 13 times), family, often living in isolation, I became adept at what you could call the Meta-Game Game, also known as Now What Might I Want to Do? The idea of this game is to invent a game, then another game, then another game, until a death in the family occurs, hopefully not your own. At no time is it necessary to play the games invented. In fact, if you play one of them, you automatically lose at the meta level, and have to start all over.

Some of the best games I came up with had no rules or instructions. For example, Figure Out How To Walk On Air pretty much says it all in the name. The game consists in spending hour after hour trying to figure out how to walk on air. One day I made the mistake of actually playing a spinoff game called Figure Out How To Bounce A Ball Off Air, and broke a window.

Having become so good at entertaining myself in isolation, I tend to take that skill for granted. So I’m always a little surprised when I discover people who are incapable of ever playing quietly by themselves. People like ex-Congressman Mark Foley, for instance. This is a guy who will never be satisfied with an imaginary friend.

Foley was playing a fantastic game of High Horse. High Horse isn’t as sophisticated a game as the Meta-Game Game, but that doesn’t mean that great play isn’t possible. Foley’s move of chairing the congressional Missing and Exploited Children’s Caucus, in between exploiting underaged former pages for minor real-time titillations and jollies on the internet, was extraordinary, and will surely go down in High Horse history. For anything even close you have to go back to Dan Quayle and Murphy Brown in 1992.

Of course we’ve all been watching the entire Republican Party consistently win at High Horse for the past quarter century, ever since Reagan got even for that time Nixon fell off his. Their capture and ownership of the phrase “Family Values” continues to impress all of us, all the more so as their economic policies crush poor families.

Now the party that tried to force Clinton out of office for having extra-marital sex in the Oval Office and trying to keep it a secret is faced with charges of having a pedophile in their midst and trying to keep it a secret.

Now, I don’t know if you can necessarily say that Mark Foley is a pedophile. I mean, Jerry Lee Lewis married a thirteen-year-old girl. That was certainly something, wasn’t it? Did anyone call him a pedophile? Well, OK. But still, sixteen is practically ‘round the bend, when it comes to boys.

Anyway, for Hastert and Company to be aware that Foley was sending inappropriate emails to former pages and not call for an investigation, all the while trumpeting Family Values, that should earn them big points, and I think they deserve a lot of credit for staying on their game.

But the Republicans aren’t the only ones playing. We also have Democrats jumping onto their own Horses, pretending that if you vote Democrat next month it will be a vote for decency.

The Democrats are missing an opportunity to raise the game of High Horse to a whole new higher level. What they need to do is come right out and tell the truth, that the behavior of the Republican leadership was typical of all political leaderships in the face of such scandal, and that they, the Democrats, would have probably reacted the same way, because it isn’t the Republicans that are broke, it’s the whole system.

Then they could say, “Ha, ha, we told the truth and you didn’t.” And they’d be the new winners.

The Public Interest

Let’s talk about something important! I have right here in front of me a 44-page decision by Judge Anna Diggs that says that Bush’s unwarranted wiretapping of Americans’ calls out of the country violates the Administrative Procedures Act, the Separation of Powers Doctrine, the First Amendment to the Constitution, the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, and “the statutory law.” I need to read this thing and do all the other important analysis that an analysizer guy like me needs to do in order to talk about this judge’s momentous decision to grant a permanent injunction against this violation of your and my civil rights.

But first, how about that John Mark Karr freak? Did you hear how he got prawns and champagne on his flight from Bangkok to the U.S., even though all he deserves is dog food? He is a reprehensible pedophile who may or may not have killed a 6-year-old beauty queen, but regardless, he is a sick reprehensible pedophile who only deserves dog food. Did I just write the words “6-year-old beauty queen”? Well, be that as it may, it could not possibly be that the public’s interest in this case has anything to do with the fact that JonBenet Ramsey is the only 6-year-old girl most of us have ever seen competently wearing bright red lipstick, eye makeup, earrings, rouge, and high-heels, while showing off her thighs. We’re not the pedophiles, John Mark Karr is. And he only deserves dog food until proven guilty, at which point we’ll think of something worse to feed him.

So, where was I? Oh yeah, violation of civil rights, separation of powers, statutory something something.…

“This just in: Ernesto has been downgraded from a hurricane to a tropical storm! More details at the top of the hour!” The downgrading of Ernesto Saturday threatened to destroy the entire hurricane reporting industry. Fortunately for the public interest, several experts were quickly found to remind us that the weakened hurricane could re-strengthen and become news again, if we get lucky.

By the way, I’ve been wondering what we should call the movie version of Ernesto’s potential devastation of one or more as-yet-undetermined Southern or East Coast U.S. cities. Ernesto Blows Again? Ernesto Goes to Cuba? Ernesto Saves Bush from Bad Press? Ernesto Scares Us Stupid?

Back to Judge Diggs. She’s a federal district judge, whatever that means. I guess I’ll have to do some work and look that up. She says that the public interest in compelling the Bush Administration’s unwarranted wiretapping to end is clear. She says the public interest is.…

Stop the presses! Tom Cruise and Paramount have ended their relationship! They won’t be making truckloads of money hand-in-hand any more! They’ll be blocks away from each other, making completely separate mountains of change!

Fortunately for the public interest, Tom Cruise is not retiring. It’s not that we care about his acting, but we need him, like I say, for the public interest. If it weren’t for Tom Cruise, what public figure would we have to criticize or condemn? I’m sure I couldn’t think of one.

So let’s see. Judge Diggs spends about 12 pages discussing and ruling upon the Attorney General’s claim of a state secrets privilege, then about nine pages discussing and ruling upon the standing of the plaintiffs that had sued the government. I’m sure those discussions are extremely important, for the public interest, so that’s why I should be reading them carefully and discussing those discussions here.

But first, I’ll talk about whether Pluto is a planet or not. It is of the utmost importance to find out whether scientists in some dumb conference somewhere want to call a big rock six billion kilometers away a planet or not. It’s even more important to find out that the scientists don’t all agree in the matter, so their “agreement” to agree to say Pluto is not a planet isn’t worth anything.

We have a public interest in knowing that!

Legged Forces? Ha!

OK, I have a weird sense of humor. I'm not going to tell you I don't giggle during funerals. How could death not be funny? I guffaw at expressions like "hand soap" and "light bulb." Have you ever used elbow soap? No? Are your elbows filthy? What's the opposite of a light bulb? A dark bulb? A heavy bulb? How many Deadheads does it take to change a heavy bulb, man? These things occur to me the instant I hear the words, no matter how often I hear them. I laugh without warning or explanation, and then people around me slowly back away.

So I set forth topics here with considerable trepidation. I worry that the things I find hilarious may be only mildly humorous to my readers. Or worse, I think I might make some crack about some subject, and everyone might recoil in horror, and my friends might have me locked up for my own protection and emergency psychiatric care.

That might happen for example if I wrote this column about Andrea Dworkin and my thoughts on how gay pornography can only do violence to women by excluding them, and how "f*** you" is really a very nice thing to say to someone: "F*** you." "Why thank you very much, I'd enjoy that immensely. And you get f***ed, too." "Thank YOU. You are ever so gracious!"

But this week we aren't going there. We are going to the land of sure-fire universal humor. We are talking about the likes of monkeys riding Labradors, ducks wearing Groucho Marx glasses, and squirrels water-skiing. We are talking about GW Bush's iPod playlist.

What a gift this is! For those of you who were living in a bomb shelter all last week, an aide of our president has revealed GWs iPod playlist, according to a New York Times story. Mr. Blake Gottesman, Bush's personal aide, actually downloaded the songs on the list to Bush's iPod, because Mr. Bush is so busy freeing the world, but we are all certain that the list reflects Bush's tastes, or at least his tastes as understood by someone extremely close to him. So what we have here, boys and girls, is nothing short of the George Bush Rosetta Stone!

Sure, the New York Times didn't publish the whole list. They only teased us with a dozen or so titles and a general description of the rest. But that general description came through the filter of the New York Times, the most respected newspaper in the world of the 90s. If that doesn't make it golden information, it's at least really shiny information.

So what do we know about George Bush now that we didn't know before? Well, for one, he likes "My Sharona," a song about an old perv hot for a much younger girl. So Bush is a letch. We know that the list is heavy on boomer rock and short on R&B, AKA "colored music." Based on secondary sources, we are fairly confident that there is no Elton John, although we are still awaiting confirmation. There is evidently only one female artist on the list.

We are sure of this: if George weren't president he'd be an all-the-time cowboy-hat-wearing crying-in-his-milk ex-alcoholic I'll-buy-your-beer but I'm-on-the-wagon-myself kind of letch. Just like he acts!

Our final conclusion: George Bush is an ex-alcoholic, racist, mostly sexist, homophobic, wannabe pedophile. This information will be very valuable to foreign governments seeking to know how George Bush will react in a crisis. He'd react like anybody you've seen on the Jerry Springer show, only in slow motion.

Now, looking at that assessment, consider this: The US Justice Department and the Bush Administration, through things like the PATRIOT Act, wants to know what YOU read and what music YOU listen to. After their agents have found that out, what would their assessments of YOU look like?