BURNING THE OLD BUSH

Guess who's become a tool of the establishment?

There's a line used in old gangster movies--If your morals are too strong to accept a bribe, then it just means that your price is a little higher than everybody else's. So it goes with John McCain, angling to be the Vice Presidential nominee for someone he recently derided as an establishment insider. I wonder what they gave him to sell out his reformist ideals? Maybe he's really banking on the Zero-Year Curse I mentioned last month and expecting George Dubya to go to Box City sometime in the next four years.

Wait a second.

I can't use this material anymore! John McCain managed to avoid the Veep nomination after all and Dubya's nominee will be his dad's Secretary of Defense, Dick Cheney. I thought we could count on at least a little suspense in the upcoming Republican Convention, but oh well! Dubya's supposedly fond of spicy Tex-Mex cuisine but this Philadelphia pageant is turning out to be as bland as cream cheese.

And you thought I used up all the cheese puns last month!

The only question left for the convention will certainly be answered by the time you read this: Will George Bush the Elder show up?

The Republicans are really high on Bush's son this year, but for no great accomplishment I've ever detected. The only explanation is they must be really fond of all those wonderful years between 1989 and 1993, when George Herbert Walker Bush was President.

Remember the Bush administration? It was mostly about WAR. Sure everybody remembers that little scrape we had taking out Saddam Hussein. We did it so we wouldn't ever have to fight him again and he's hardly bothered us since then! Hold it... he's still there, isn't he? In fact, this month is the tenth anniversary of his taking over the friendly feudal state of Kuwait. So? Who cares if we didn't exactly remove him? The Gulf War was really SO successful, wasn't it? Just ask the Kuwaiti nobility. Don't ask any Kurdish folks though--they have this crazy idea that Bush screwed them. Surely they realize that after the Storm stopped, Bush was asking only for ambitious Iraqi generals to topple Saddam, not some ethnic minority that's been without a country for generations. Anyway, their opinion doesn't matter. That war was so good and so successful they've got Colin Powell and Norman Schwartzkoff lined up to deliver a little Gulf War nostalgia at the Republican Convention. Precision munitions re-runs tonight! Whoo-hoo!

But that wasn't George Senior's only war. Remember how George spent billions on a war on drugs because his agents found some coke in the park across from the White House? Gee, now exactly where did all that money go anyway? Wherever it went, it didn't do any good. The only thing that happened was that crack got cheaper.

And wasn't there another little drug war? A little police action in Panama or something? Yeah, that sounds right. Pretty clean operation, that. Only 500 innocent Panamanians died in the assault on the Panamanian Defense Force HQ. Or was it TWO THOUSAND? So what, the stealth fighters were brand new back then; it was their first action, give 'em a break. They got their collateral damage averages way down by the Gulf War! Anyway it happened really fast and I forget what it was all for. Didn't some other CIA Dictator School graduate like Hussein start his own business or something? And they just had to bring him back to the US? What was his name? All I can remember is that he met with Bush a bunch of times in the late 70's when the DEA already knew he was dealing with the big drug cartels. The name I remember is something like out of a Dick Tracy comic--Pineapple Face. Oh yeah, it was Manuel Noriega! One of those guys who had a bit role in Iran-Contra along with Ollie North and John Poindexter and Richard Secord and John Hull and William Casey and Eugene Hasenfuss and Donald Gregg and George Bush and The Cowardly Lion and the Tin Woodsman and--ouch! Have I got a headache!

Okay, okay, I'll give up on that. It's a moot point because George Senior pardoned all the biggest Iran-Contra guys on a slow news day late in December 1992, just a few weeks before he left office. Nobody can touch them now. Maybe it was his idea of being Santa Claus. What a thoughtful gift!

That must be why they like his son then, because George Senior is such a wonderful, thoughtful guy and they are certain his son will bring back the exciting Read My Lips Era and the all wonderful, thoughtful big money greedheads, special interest lobbyists, evangelical fanatics, dictator school graduates, and other fellow travelers that made the Bush years such a great time to be alive. Or dead, if you lived in the wrong section of Panama City. Or Baghdad.

I'm so looking forward to George Senior's capital gains tax cut package finally being approved that I just have to go back in the Closet right now to find all those establishment tool options I've been hoarding for the last eight years. Looks like I might finally be able to unload them at a good price and at a favorable tax rate too! Thanks for reading and until next month the Closet is closed.


© 2000 - Rusty Pipes