Get out the barf bags: Time names GW Bush "Person of the Year"
 By Bev Conover

December 18, 2000 | The fix was in. The election was stolen with the
blessing of the Supreme Court that appointed George W. Bush
puppet-select. And of the media spinners who say we should make
nice-nice about it, Time magazine has delivered the supreme affront in
naming the thief "Person of the Year."

To William Bennett, that perverse purveyor of poppycock, who asks,
"Where is the outrage?" here is the OUTRAGE!

For eight years, this country has suffered the terrorist tactics of the
right wing. Nay, make that 20 years. First, it was the criminality of
the Reagan-Bush administration that went unpunished for Iran-contra,
while the half out of it Uncle Ronnie smilingly flushed the economy down
the toilet with his voodoo economics and by racking up more debt that
all previous administrations combined. Then it was the criminality of
the GHW Bush administration that went unpunished for Iraqgate (we can't
add Vice President Dan Quayle, who while a lot smarter than the current
puppet-select, to the equation, because he barely knew which end was
up). To spare himself an orange jump suit, Poppy Bush, after losing the
1992 election to Bill Clinton, on Christmas Eve - when the people's
attention was elsewhere - pardoned all the accomplices who might have
blown the whistle on him to save their sorry asses.

In the twisted minds of the rabid right, it was Clinton who stole the
1992 election. So for eight years they waged a terror campaign, with the
help of Richard Mellon Scaife, Judicial Watch, the Federalist Society,
the Council for National Policy, the Christian Coalition and every other
wingnut group to overthrow the not once but twice duly elected
president. And the corporatist media did everything in its power to aid
and abet them, as they salivated over every unfounded rumor Independent
Counsel Kenneth Starr and his elves delivered up. Never mind that after
spending some $60 million of our tax dollars, and financially ruining
innocent people scooped up in his net, that all Kenny proved was there
was no there there.

And now, Kenny's successor, Robert Ray, goes on spending our money in an
effort to get a federal grand jury to indict Clinton, after he leaves
office on Jan. 20, for perjury in the Paula Jones civil case that was
thrown out of court for lack of merit.

You were expecting howls from the corporatist media, which spent this
presidential election cycle spreading and making up lies about Vice
President Al Gore, while giving George W. Bush a free pass on his sordid
past? Hell, they wouldn't even tell the people the truth about the mess
Texas is in, as the junior Bush rambled on about his ability to "lead"
and be a "uniter not a divider." You thought they would make a big deal
out of the facts that this worthless son of privilege, whose greatest
accomplishment was losing other people's money and making his own on
dubious stock transactions - while sticking Texas taxpayers with the
bill for a stadium that sent the value of his ball team soaring - was a
drunk until at least age 40, appears to have skipped out on his military
service, may have used illegal drugs, and may have had a hand in helping
at least one woman obtain an abortion when abortions were illegal in
Texas - not to mention all the funny deals he's been involved in while
governor of Texas? None of that matters, says the media, most of it
occurred such a long time ago. Yeah, right.

It's funny not how it mattered whether Bill Clinton was a draft dodger
and that Clinton owned up to trying marijuana. It was an eight-year
running joke, when Clinton said he didn't inhale. It's okay to call
Clinton a rapist on the word of a woman trotted out by the rabid right.
It's okay to call Clinton a perjurer when a judge instructs him to
answer a question that even she admitted she didn't understand. It's
okay to let the rabid right go on frothing about that Clinton had Vince
Foster murdered, when all evidence points to suicide.

It was okay to make unending fun of Dan Quayle for "potatoe," and
telling Latin Americans he doesn't speak Latin, but it's not okay to point out
what an ignoramus the media's tongue-twisted golden boy, George W., is.

The Dallas Morning News even had a hissy-fit over the British
newspapers, with the exception of those owned by Rupert Murdoch, telling
it like it is about the puppet-select. Wrote the News' Gregory Katz:

"To some degree the attacks on Mr. Bush in the last two days have been
part of a long tradition of Yank-bashing in the British press. But there
has been an unusually personal tone to the insults, with columnists
warning that 'big hair and barbecues' are returning to the White House
now that a Texan is in charge again.

"The mocking tone, emphasizing Mr. Bush's relative lack of overseas
travel experience, was evident in Friday's edition of The Independent, a
left-of-center newspaper that ran a map of the world 'according to
George W. Bush' on the front page of its feature section.

"The map showed Texas containing nothing but oil wells and an electric
chair for executions. Europe was misspelled, Iceland was confused with
Ireland, Spain was identified as 'Kinda Mexico' and Britain was 'Another Island.'

"The glossary to the map listed a number of misstatements by Mr. Bush
during the campaign, including his comment that Nigeria is an important
continent and his description of Greeks as Grecians. There was also a memo
from Mr. Bush to Colin Powell asking if Canada was part of the United States."

Is this Wonderland or what? At least the Brits got it right, when they
said the puppet-select has no clothes, no experience and no smarts.

The U.S. media that barely told the public anything of substance about
either major party candidate, opting instead for commercials that filled
their coffers over real reporting, also showed no outrage over the way
the election was stolen. There was no clamor for allowing all the votes
in Florida to be hand counted. There was no anger over the treatment
received by thousands of black voters in Florida and elsewhere, who were
denied the right to vote. There were no questions about how
vote-tabulating machines can be rigged. There was no concern over how
Florida law was broken in letting political operatives to illegally
distribute absentee ballot applications, then Republican operatives
being allowed to fix those missing required information.

Instead, in the endless hours of on air babbling, it was more fun to
make jokes about hanging chad, an illegal butterfly ballot and "stupid"
Jewish voters in Palm Beach County, and "dumb" Floridians (a more
politically correct way for the pundits to refer to both black and white
voters) who couldn't punch out chad or, in the case of Duval County,
voted twice for president, because the presidential candidates spilled
over onto two pages and the instructions said to vote for a candidate on
every page. Also, there was nary a word about the paid Republican thugs
who traveled to Miami for the express purpose of shutting down the
recount in that county and did so by storming the building, kicking and
punching a man in possession of a sample ballot, and banging on the
walls and doors to the room where the recount was taking place.

It mattered not that the governor of Florida, Jeb Bush, had promised to
deliver the state to his big brother, George W., and was pulling the
strings from behind the curtain after he recused himself when the manure
hit the fan. It mattered not that Katherine Harris, the co-chairman of
GW's Florida campaign, happened to be the secretary of state. It
bothered them not that Harris sought at ever turn to thwart manual
recounts of the votes.

And, as for Jeb and Harris, who are plotting a reform of the election
system that may make it impossible to prove the theft of all future
elections, let not our pristine pundits, who had no compunction against
wallowing in filth when it came to Bill Clinton, breathe a word about
what little brother and Harris may be up to, even though newsrooms
across the country are abuzz about their relationship. How cozy: Gov.
Jeb, First Smuggler Columbia and Secretary Harris. Hey, it's all in the
family and they're only helping big brother, GW.

With some exceptions, the media also prefer to forget how Chief Justice
William Rehnquist, Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Sandra Day
O'Connor and Anthony Kennedy trashed what is left of the Constitution to
seal the coup. You, the voter, are nothing. Only state legislators have
a right to vote for presidents. If it ain't written in the Constitution,
a right doesn't exist. And don't go pulling out the Ninth Amendment,
because their good buddy Robert Bork declared that to merely be an
inkblot on the Constitution. Rule by the consent of the governed is dead.

Shame on the high court's dissenters, wrote Dan K. Thomasson, a former
editor of Scripps Howard News Service, in the Saturday, Dec. 16, edition
of the Ocala (Florida) Star-Banner. Criticizing Justice John Paul Stevens for
writing, ""Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity
of the winner of this year's presidential election, the identity of the loser is
perfectly clear. It is the nation's confidence in the judge as an impartial
guardian of the law," Thomasson said:

"While Stevens' opinion alone provides ample ammunition for Bush's
political opponents, his fellow dissenters, Justices Ruth Bader
Ginsberg, David Souter and Stephen Breyer also added to the impending
controversy by strongly intimating that what the majority accomplished
was tantamount to stealing the election for the Republicans."

Tantamount to stealing? It wasn't tantamount at all. It was outright theft by
judicial fiat. It was the near fatal death blow to the representative democratic
republic that has served us well for 224 years - and it will go down as the
death blow unless we fight the usurpers to regain our nation.

If Thomasson's words aren't enough to make you sick, Time delivers the
coup de maître by naming the puppet-select Person of the Year:

"For a proud son of a one-term President, could there be a more humbling
path to power than this? The candidate with the perfect bloodlines comes
to office amid charges that his is a bastard presidency, sired not by the voters
but by the courts. You could almost see the weight of it, the regret and relief
and resolve, when Bush rose last Wednesday night with tears in his eyes and
promised, "I will work to earn your respect," all but admitting it does not just
come with the job when you win this way. But could anyone possibly use this
to greater advantage than George W. Bush?"

Are you tossing your cookies yet? It gets better - make that worse:

"Bush staged the most inclusive Republican Convention in memory,
surrounded himself at every chance with poor schoolchildren whom he
promised he would not leave behind - and in the end won a smaller
percentage of the African-American vote than any Republican since Barry
Goldwater. The comics joked that he won 100% of the black vote where it
mattered most - on the Supreme Court - but Bush himself admits that the
greatest misconception about him is that he is not racially sensitive.
He can staple Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice to his side, but it
won't change the fact that 40% of the African Americans who went to the
polls in Florida were new voters, and many wonder whether their votes
were even counted."

>From what we know about Condoleeza and her abilities, she definitely is
a child of affirmative action, not to mention the Hoover Institution. As for
Powell, who is about as fit as Dan Quayle to be the puppet's secretary of
state, has their ever been a pair of white men's shoes he has not seen fit to lick?
But the puppet has his tokens, so that makes him inclusive in the eyes of that
liberal bastion not, Time.

And it gets still worse:

"Even some Democrats now say privately that Bush and his soft serums may
be better suited to cure the disease that afflicts the capital. With a
Congress almost perfectly bisected, Republicans thirsty for power and
Democrats for revenge, Bush is the one holding the needle and thread. He
always said he would reach across party lines, and now he has no choice:
what began as a campaign promise has become a precondition for his
presidency. He must go hunting for Democrats to put in his Cabinet and
for issues with broad support, in hopes that some quick successes on the
easy problems will yield the capital for the harder ones."

Talk about boot licking, Time is right down there with Powell. And Time
and its other corporatist media cohorts want to pull us down there with
them. Well, we aren't going to do it. Nice-nice is out.

Democrats have made nice-nice for far too long. They grew fat, lazy and
complacent in the 40 years they controlled both houses of Congress. Many
even swilled at the corporate trough with the Republicans. If they had
done their jobs in dealing with Reagan and Poppy Bush, we wouldn't be in
the mess we are today. Now it's time for them to shape up or we ship them out.

Our opponents can call it whining all they wish, but here is the message
we must deliver to the Democrats and the media:

No appeasement. No accommodation. No bipartisanship. And woe be to any
Democrat who does the bidding of the puppet or his masters.
 
 

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