©2005 UrbisMedia
Like Whigs and Tories, No-Nothings and Free Silverites and other anachronisms it’s time for some more up-to-date and accurate rubrics for our political parties. I have a proposal, but, first, to get you in the proper frame of mind, I want to tell you a joke I heard many years ago, but today it seems to have the ring of a parable. It goes like this.
Back in the Dark Ages a village was attacked by a band of barbarians. They robbed the livestock, burned the granaries, and worse. One of the barbarians stormed into one of the huts where a couple is cowering. He grabs the woman and throws her on the bed, turns to the husband and says “I’m gonna rape your wife.” Then, with his sword he scores a line across the dirt floor front of the husband. “You’re gonna watch from behind this line; but if you even take one step over it I’ll run this sword through you.”
Then the barbarian commences raping the man’s wife, glancing occasionally over his shoulder at the husband standing meekly behind the line. The wife protests and fights back, but the barbarian has his way with her and, after a few minutes, gets up and leaves.
The husband rushes to his wife’s side. She sobs to him “Why didn’t you do something? You just stood there and watched while that filthy beast was raping me!”
“But I did, I did,” replied the husband.
“What do you mean? You just stood there are watched him rape me,” she sobs angrily.
“I did not. Didn’t you see?” The husband gets a satisfied look on his face. “When he wasn’t looking I stepped over that line three times !”
Today I wonder whether this is a joke, or an allegory for the state of our two-party political system. It seems not too much of a stretch that we have evolved a political system that consists of a party of pillaging barbarians \and wimpy victims lacking the courage to fight them. We need to rename the Republicans and Democrats; they are (respectively, of course) “Scumbags” and “Weenies”.
Getting overrun by barbarians is the metaphorical equivalent of America getting the government it deserves. Is it the kind of government that the Scumbags grabbed off with their sucker-punch tactics in Florida in 2000, with the assistance of the greaseball of the Supreme Court?[1] Or, you could say that it is the kind of government you get when a Weenie like Al Gore, as they say, “bends over.” Take your pick. The amazing thing is that the Weenies apparently didn’t get enough of a working over the first time and still think that they can abide by the Marquis de Queensbury when those Scumbags have tire irons and baseball bats.
So we now have the following political strategies: the Scumbags have been given an additional four years to pillage everything that isn’t nailed down and some things that are. A putative “war on terror” and a couple of natural disasters provide sufficient cover for unprecedented government expenditures, financed by debt, [2] much of which ends up in the pockets of their fellow Scumbags who, in turn, are given a pass when it comes to tax time. No wonder that the number of lobbyists in Washington have more than doubled to nearly 35,000 during the Scumbag years. It’s a reveille for Scumbags. And while our pockets are being picked our freedoms to control our own lives are classified as immoral and legislated against. The Scumbags snuck into the village in the guise of supposed “conservatives” with frugal and non-intrusive government among their commandments, then changed all that, but still have the support of the American Taliban and Red State “useful idiots.”
The strategy of the Weenies seems to be like spectators at a gang rape and let the Scumbags rob the national store in the hopes that somebody will call 911 and the country will wake up and throw the rascals out. Weenies want to follow the rules nicely, believing and wanting to teach the world to sing the anthem that “nice makes right.” But Scumbags don’t play nice; nice is a sign of weakness, a sign that Weenies will stay on their side of the line. Nice is another word for loser to a Scumbag. They are not even nice with their own; go ask Colin Powell. And the only 911 they respond to is how 9-11 can fatten the military budget and Halliburton’s profits. If you are nice you can’t make preemptive wars that result in the deaths of tens of thousands of innocents (let God sort them out from the insurgents), or set up foreign gulags so they can engage in torture, or commit what amounts to treason when they go after people like Valerie Plame.
Maybe letting these arrogant bastards self-destruct is a strategy of a sort, but the Weenies might be laying a sucker bet that the new American two-party system will consist of extreme Scumbags and moderate Scumbags and Weenies will be relegated to permanent seats in the bleachers. The Weenies have largely stood by as the Scumbags have flaunted campaign financing laws, had minions in high places (like brother Jeb and Mr. Black in Ohio) to mess with elections, have gerrymandered loads of electoral districts, and unleashed slandering hit squads like the Swiftboat Veterans, among other banana republic practices they have engaged in.
Now, it looks like the Weenies, who have lost control of the Executive and Legislative branches of the federal government are about to surrender the third and last branch to the Scumbags pretty much without a fight. Will they will wimper and waddle back to their comfy sinecures with sore butts once again, or will they rise and fight? If they do, they might find that the people, or enough of them, are ready to rally behind them.
It’s a hope that dims by the day. The Las Vegas money is that the Scumbags will continue their rapacious ways and the Weenies will wait until nobody is looking and, courageously, gingerly dance over that line in the sand for the third time .
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©2005, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 11.6.2005)
[1] Yes, the “greasball” crack does refer to Antonin Scalia. In invoke the privilege of using ethnic epithets on my own ethnic group.
[2] The debt will be paid off by generations of Weenies; Scumbags will be getting a permanent tax break.