BuzzFlash Guest Commentary
September 26, 2002
Poll This
A BuzzFlash Guest Commentary
by John Westermann
I got a call from a pollster the other day, poor guy wanted to know if I supported the Bush war on Iraq a lot or a little.
I've been waiting for this schmuck to call.
"Pardon me," I said, "but where do I heap my scorn for the press who fall dumb-struck before this bungler-with-father-issues? Next to my pile of bile for Louis 'Goes Scott' Freeh, whom no one ever mentions except to praise his brilliant work on the critical Lewinsky investigations?"
"Say what?" said the pollster.
"Or alongside my disgust for Tim Russert? What's Tim short for, Timid? Guy can't bring himself to ask the tough questions -- about Dick Cheney's own trading-with-the-enemy issues, about Secretary of the Army White knee-deep in the Enron hoopla, or why the White House staff started taking Cipro on September 11, 2001, weeks before the first of the unsolved anthrax attacks?"
"Anything else?" he wondered. "I'm sensing some hostility."
"How about the unprecedented, un-American level of secrecy embraced by Bush/Cheney from Day One? We can't know what Double Bush did in Texas, what his cranky old staff did for Nixon or Reagan or Poppy, about Harken, his alleged military service, Enron writing the Energy Bill. All national secrets."
The pollster said, "Whoa, dude. Lighten up. It's for your own good."
"And while I have you on the phone," I said, "where do I heap my scorn for the Bush economic team, for blowing the surplus on tax breaks for rich people and crooked corporations, plus pork in the swing states, mostly Florida? Why the hell not burn the people's money -- Double Bush hit the trifecta when those towers fell, just ask him, enabling The Perfect Spending Storm."
"I was coming to the Clinton recession," said the guy.
"Yeah, I'll just bet you were," I said, "right after the Faith-Based Money for Bigots Doctrine. I swear, you'd think these former Enron advisors would remember bogus accounting strategies are bad business, but no, not in the Bush Administration."
"For the first time in our nation's history, we have a Harvard MBA at the helm."
"A guy," I said, "whose personal history of corporate 'malfeanse' and abject failure has either been 'fully vetted' or completely covered up."
"How strong do you rate Bush on national defense?" asked the pollster.
"Been to Lower Manhattan lately?"
"Surely-"
"And where do I heap my scorn for Condi Rice, who is either a marvelous liar or a total ignoramus about national security, which explains her high placement in the Bush administration. And Christie Coulter Noonan Norton? Don't get me started on the make-up and blow-dry work these supposedly smart women are giving the Bush/Cheney energy plan as it Texas-barbeques the environment -- with cosmetologists Katherine Harris and Liddy Dole on their way north to slap lipstick on more pigs. Sure glad there are women at the table. Makes a big frigging difference, doesn't it? Might as well let them join Augusta National, they're gonna act like this."
"But surely you approve of the president's character," he said.
I let him know what I thought about Double Bush, who is happy to come to New York City and cowboy-strut across the bones of the lost, but never sorry this disaster happened on his watch, at the hands of a distant cousin-by-oil, and while they were talking pipelines and stuff, just bidness, through emissaries, like Cheney did in Iraq.
"Where'd you hear that treasonous crap?" asked the pollster.
"And then he and his handlers have the gall to promote his bungling of the crisis? He looks to me and a lot of other New Yorkers like a toddler proud of a dump."
"Uh," said the pollster.
"Recall, if you will, Double Bush nodding through his August briefings on possible terrorist plots inside the United States, or as he bravely ordered the Bin Laden family airlift from America following the September 11 attacks -- Not to be confused with the CIA-sanctioned Al Qaeda air-lift from Tora-Bora, or the Amble from Anaconda. Your boy Bush no longer openly calls the Taliban a force for stability in Central Asia, but he still wants to spend American lives to separate the good folks of Iraq from their oil."
"Stubborn, you gotta give him. The boy can stay on message."
"Stubborn, he can have. He is not agile of mind."
"Last question -- How do you feel about the cowardly Democrats?"
I told him I reserved most of my scorn for the Democrats hiding in their foxholes on The Hill, afraid to battle Double Bush on anything except privatizing social security. "Because this is not the time to be Switzerland, or Joe W. Lieberman. Innocents will be slaughtered in Iraq, and maybe a lot of other places in the aftermath, because you know in your heart Bush hasn't done his homework. He never has."
"That's only because he never had to. That's not his fault."
"What-ever. Real, currently living American kids will die, but not Lay kids, or Bush kids. Bush kids will party hearty, and years from now we will wonder how this happened, how we let Double Bush make such an unprincipled mess of the world. Well, I can answer that question right now, stick it in a time-capsule. We didn't question, we didn't bitch. When push came to shove, we were woefully un-American."
"I'll put you down as Undecided."
"Fox News?" I said.
"How'd
you guess?"
* * *
John Westermann is the author of Exit Wounds, High Crimes, The Honor Farm, Sweet Deal, Ladies Of The Night, etc., and can be found at http://www.johnwestermann.com.
Remember John O'Neill of the FBI, a cop's cop
