"Bush's budget speech was more than a manifestation of right-wing politics, catering to the crass self-interest of the wealthy. It demonstrated the disorientation of a government and a ruling elite that are poorly prepared for the inevitable emergence of a sharp economic, social and political crisis. An important factor in this crisis—although concealed by the fawning press coverage of Bush's first month in office—is the intellectual and political vacuity of the man who occupies the White House. As in his two press conferences, the first in Mexico and the second last week in Washington, the speech to Congress provided an embarrassing glimpse of the inner Bush.

"His language was banal in the extreme, crafted by speech writers intent not so much in talking down to the American people as in keeping the argument on a plane commensurate with the intellectual abilities and knowledge of the speaker. Any and all phrases that might have led to a repetition of the verbal stumbles of the election campaign were avoided. Hence the short, simple, declarative sentences, the quotes from Yogi Berra and the echoes of the children's tale about Goldilocks—a tax cut not too big, not too small, but “just right.” Following Bush's press conferences, Michael Allen of the Washington Post wrote, somewhat charitably: “Throughout his first month in office, the president's remarks on substantive issues have been consistent but in every case brief, leading policy analysts and congressional leaders to question whether the pattern is more indicative of an exceptionally disciplined politician, or one with a shallow grasp of the issues at hand.”

"As bizarre as it might seem, the president of the United States appears to be a man not terribly interested in politics. A barely noted fact about Tuesday's speech is that it was the first such event which George W. Bush has ever attended personally, even though his father delivered three State of the Union addresses to joint sessions of Congress, and sat in the vice presidential chair as Ronald Reagan delivered eight more. During the four years of his father's presidency, the younger Bush indicated no real interest in politics or policy, preferring instead the fellowship of oil millionaires and baseball owners. Not until 1994, at the age of 46, did he decide on a serious political commitment, running for governor of Texas, against the advice of his parents and Republican Party professionals.

"George W. Bush enters the White House, not only as the least experienced president of the past century, but also as the least traveled. The American ruling elite likes to think of the United States as the world's only remaining superpower, but the new chief executive knows little or nothing about that world. Bush has traveled to Europe only once in his life, despite the opportunities provided by wealth and his father's political position. His one visit was a brief stopover in Italy to visit his daughter while she was studying there. He has never visited Britain, France, Germany, Japan or Russia. His only long overseas trip was to China, while his father was US envoy there, and he has been to Mexico, mainly brief trips across the Rio Grande from his home state of Texas. He has never been to South America, Africa, India or Australia.

"The new president not only does not like to travel, he does not like to read—reportedly preferring executive summaries to the texts of documents, and avoiding books unless they concern sports. (During the Florida election crisis he was engrossed in a biography of baseball player Joe DiMaggio.) His weekends resting at the ranch, his abbreviated office hours and frequent naps—despite apparently excellent health—suggest that President George W. Bush does not like to work very hard. These facts are largely concealed by the press. The New York Times, for instance, in its editorial on the budget speech, called it a “poised, focused and warmly received address ... with some eloquent flourishes that showcased Mr. Bush's likability [and] self-confidence.” CBS news anchor Dan Rather said the speech demonstrated Bush's “political growth” in the brief period since his inauguration." --Patrick Martin, 3/4/01

Listed in order of occurrence in CNN transcript.

1. "When money is still left over, my plan returns it to the people who earned it in the first place." Not true. In the case of the wealthiest 1%, where Bush and the members of his cabinet are, they ended up paying in 20% to the IRS ("earned") and they're getting 43% back (a campaign gift). Further, it's generally agreed that under the Bush plan, a larger share of our nation's future tax burden is shifted from the rich, where it belongs because the rich always take more out of the government, to the middle class. Also, since Bush is eliminating various forms of tax rebates to the middle class, any money obtained through his tax cuts will promptly be given back to the government through increased taxation elsewhere. (This, by the way, is exactly what happened in Texas, which is presently in a financial crisis because of Bush's campaign-influenced tax cuts.) Finally, the so called "death tax," which is really an "estate tax" on the very rich, is only levied against the very rich. If anyone doubts this, it would be easy to raise the maximum allowance accordingly, rather than totally eliminating it for Bush's corporate friends. Oh, and about the surplus, itself. One of the reasons we have a surplus is to hold on to it to meet increasing Social Security and Medicare needs that will come up around the corner with the baby boomers. Yet, Bush lies about lock-boxing the $2.6 trillion in Social Security, because he plans to use $.6 trillion of that for his tax cuts, and he has not promised a lock box on any Medicare reserves, planning to use $1 trillion in Medicare funds for the remaining part of his tax cut. And all of this assumes that the surplus estimate is right, and it has never been right in the past. Why should we gamble our future for the benefit of Bush and his wealthy friends?

2. "Values are important, so we triple funding for character education to teach our children not only reading and writing, but right from wrong." Few really understand what Bush means by this because he's never explained it. While governor of Texas, he set up an all-grade voluntary curriculum for the schools and it was pretty much a disaster because too many teachers ended up teaching their version of Christianity, and in Texas you know what that means. This is just another excuse for religious indoctrination most acceptable to the majority opinion in a given school district. As usual, Bush sets up these programs with little oversight. He wants it that way for obvious reasons. Read our page on it.

3. "We've increased funding to train and recruit teachers, because we know a good education starts with a good teacher. And I have a wonderful partner in this effort. I like teachers so much, I married one. When it comes to our schools, dollars alone do not always make the difference." He's got that right as far as his past treatment of teachers is concerned, and he's saying the same things today that he's said in the past. Bush was unpopular with teachers in Texas because he saw them as opponents, siding with the adminstrators against them, while not consulting them and keeping their pay as low as he possibly could. While Gore and the Dems said they wanted to raise teachers' pay to attract the best, you'll never hear Bush saying that. And he sure didn't marry Laura because she was a librarian, since he and the other males in his family seldom read. He married her because they grew up together in the same sheltered privileged society in racist Midland, Texas, with streets named after Eastern Ivy League schools. Like his mother before her, Laura was seen by Bush as the personal educational caregiver that he so obviously needs. Read our page on Midland.

4. "And my budget adopts a hopeful new approach to help the poor and the disadvantaged. We must encourage and support the work of charities and faith-based and community groups that offer help and love one person at a time. These groups are working in every neighborhood in America to fight homelessness and addiction and domestic violence, to provide a hot meal or a mentor or a safe haven for our children. Government should welcome these groups to apply for funds, not discriminate against them. Government cannot be replaced by charities or volunteers. Government should not fund religious activities." Notice how Bush buys into the cant of the rabid right by implying that not giving money to religious groups for welfare work is "discrimintion." Further, while he says government should not fund religious activities, how will the government NOT fund religious activities by giving religious groups money for welfare programs? He has previously said the religious groups will keep the money separate; yet, one of his first presidential orders was to stop government funding of overseas family health groups on the grounds that it is only logical that they would be unable not keep abortion and other forms of family health separate. Why does he think religious groups can do it and family health groups can't? Further, for the past two years on the campaign trail, Bush has made it clear to religious groups that they will be able to get funding for welfare activities and engage in religious activities as part of their welfare program.

Although he has made comments to that effect on the campaign trail as recently as last fall, a '99 statement he made in relation to Gore's visit to a private welfare group is the most cogent. "Vice President Al Gore, who recently visited a Salvation Army cafeteria in Atlanta, also has proposed helping faith-based organizations provide welfare services, but says he doesn't want recipients to be required to attend religious services in order to receive help. 'We have a little bit of a difference there,' Bush said. 'Basically what he's saying is, `Sure, you can receive federal aid, and you can go to a program, but don't listen to the message.' I believe we ought to fund the individual or the program, and if it's a Christian message or a Jewish message, we ought to understand the power of the message.'" (AAS, 8/28/99) Here's our page on the subject.

5. "As government promotes compassion, it also must promote justice. Too many of our citizens have cause to doubt our nation's justice when the law points a finger of suspicion at groups instead of individuals. All our citizens are created equal and must be treated equally." Here, Bush's huge and blind ego is manifest. How can he honestly appeal to blacks by saying no more racial profiling in the name of American justice when that very same justice disenfranchised them of hundreds of thousands of votes in Florida? Where was justice, then, asks the Democratic Black Caucus to this day. And where was justice when the majority of the voters voted for Gore over Bush by over a half million and were told by a politicized and conservative Supreme Court that Florida had to stop its hand recount of the entire state, which was ongoing at the time, because it would be harmful to Bush. Of cours it would be harmful to Bush because, as we'll soon learn, he would have lost. Where's the justice when the Supreme Court continues to flip-flop on its states rights vs. federal rights decision, not on the basis of law, but on the basis of its own corporate conservative leanings. And to have Bush throw a sop to blacks in the name of justice is just one more insult that, hopefully, will be remembered. --Politex, 3/1/01 (To be continued...)

Bush Senior Advisor Karl "Rove can't show too many cards right now, but it's easy to imagine Bush's next few moves. With a little skill, Bush can work his way around the most unpopular parts of the Republican agenda, as Clinton was able to do with the most unpopular parts of the Democratic agenda. Bush can signal the right-to-life movement, through language and appointments and minor initiatives, that he is on its side, without having to speak personally on the subject or propose anything significant. Education vouchers, which, according to polls, are not popular in the all-important big-city suburbs, where almost all kids go to public school, are contained in Bush's education proposal, but members of the Administration, including Bush himself, in his first Saturday radio address, have been signalling that they might be willing to drop vouchers in the negotiations over the bill. I've heard that Bush has also said this privately to Democrats in Congress. Without vouchers, yearly testing in the basic subjects would be left as the most obvious feature of the bill, which will alienate teachers (but they're Democrats anyway) and may win over suburban parents. On Social Security, Bush can put off--at least until after the tax cut--another potentially explosive issue by appointing a commission to draft a plan for individual private accounts, rather than immediately proposing legislation. (Rove put this forward as a likely scenario.)

"Bush can try to provide the one new government service that the public most wants, a prescription-drug benefit, through private insurance companies rather than through Medicare, thus preventing that program from growing or becoming more popular. Then he might plausibly claim to have delivered important new programs in education and health, taking away the Democrats' exclusive claim to those issues in the way Clinton took reducing crime away from the Republicans. Bush's initiative to promote faith-based social programs takes away the Democrats' monopoly on caring about helping the poor while also, by creating a tax credit for donations to such programs, redirecting money from the government to evangelicals. Bush can also try to diminish the influence of some of the main Democratic interest groups by pushing "tort reform" (hurts trial lawyers) and "paycheck protection" (cuts union dues), and by resisting campaign-finance reform of the kind John McCain wants (reduces the power of individual contributors in politics more than that of organized labor). In each of these cases, Bush can try to find a Democratic co-sponsor for his legislation, to create an aura of bipartisanship. And has anybody noticed that Bush's Cabinet includes former elected officials from four big states--Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, and New Jersey--that usually vote Republican but went for Gore in 2000?

"If all this happened, Bush not only would have passed a popular tax cut but would have made it difficult for the Democrats to offer voters more government services; instead, they'd have to be the party of fiscal restraint, because all the money for services would have been removed from the federal budget for at least the next ten years. The tax code would be left looking more the way Jim DeMint wants it to look. Under Bush's campaign tax-cut proposal, the share of the federal-tax burden borne by almost everyone would rise slightly, and the share borne by those in the top one per cent would fall significantly. But this wouldn't be obvious to the middle class, because people's actual tax payments would go down. (A family whose income is in the middle fifth would pay $453 a year less in federal taxes; a family in the top one per cent would pay $46,072 less.) Bush can return to the partial privatization of Social Security, Medicare, and public schools in the fall, or next year. Alternatively, he can remind us of his often-repeated campaign line--"I want to do a few things and do them well"--and, after the tax cut passes, start spending a lot of time at his ranch." --Nicholas Lemann, 2/25/01

"The presidential press conference has traditionally played a distinctive role in the workings of American democracy. It represents, at least in theory, one of the few occasions when the proverbial “most powerful man in the world” can be challenged or questioned in a way that is not completely scripted. This assumes, however, that the representatives of the media adopt a critical stance, or at least maintain some degree of independence in relation to the political elite in general, and the occupant of the White House in particular. President George W. Bush's initial news conference underscored the fact that any such assumption is today wholly false. Bush met the press on February 22, more than a month after his inauguration. It is difficult to decide, after viewing this 30-minute interchange, whether Bush or his media questioners gave a more pathetic performance. The press hurled one softball question after another, addressed in friendly, even fawning tones. Bush replied haltingly, barely able to articulate an intelligible response on the few occasions where he had to go beyond the lines prepared by his White House handlers.

"As is generally the case in such affairs, what was not asked was far more revealing of the state of political affairs than the questions actually posed to the president. Two weeks after a consortium of major newspapers began a survey of disputed Florida ballots—with results expected by early April—there was not a single question about the presidential election and the dramatic events that followed it. It is hardly to be expected that members of the journalistic upper crust in the service of media monopolies like CNN or NBC, or pillars of the establishment like the New York Times or the Washington Post, would stand up and directly challenge Bush's legitimacy, or suggest that he only occupied the White House thanks to the suppression of votes in Florida and a Supreme Court ruling that made a travesty of democracy. But it is remarkable that not one of the dozens of reporters who clamored for Bush's attention and shouted questions chose to raise the subject even indirectly. Bush was not asked if he had any message for the majority of American voters who cast ballots for his opponents, or to acknowledge that nearly 600,000 more people voted for Democrat Al Gore than for him, or even whether the contested election had affected his ability to govern. There were no questions about reports of ballot rechecks in Florida counties, which indicate that Gore would have won a full recount of disputed votes, or about proposed legislation to provide more uniform balloting times and procedures. Nor was there a single question about Bush's relations with the Democratic Party, which holds half the seats in the Senate and nearly that number in the House of Representatives. This media silence demonstrates that in the press corps itself, and especially among the well-heeled television personalities and pundits, corrupted by the giant conglomerates they serve, there is little, if any, concern for the fundamental issues of democratic rights posed by the de facto political coup carried out by the Supreme Court in behalf of the Republican right.

"There was only one question that sounded a critical note. The lone iconoclast in the White House press corps, [a] veteran freelance journalist..., challenged Bush's support for “faith-based” social programs run by religious groups, asking him whether he was a secular official or a missionary. Naturally, ...press colleagues regard her as something of a crank. The press lovefest with Bush is in the sharpest contrast to the media frenzy over the affairs of the departed Bill Clinton. This was on display at the press conference itself, where considerable time was devoted to Clinton's pardons of billionaire Marc Rich and assorted drug dealers, swindlers and con men who hired Clinton relatives and cronies to gain the outgoing president's ear. The Clinton pardons were the subject of five of the seventeen questions at the press conference, more than Bush's tax cut plan (four), his bombing of Iraq (three), the FBI spy case (two) or any other subject. Any politically serious observer would feel compelled to ask: Which is more important, whether the Clintons stole the silverware as they left the White House, or whether the Republican Party and the Supreme Court stole the election? Which has greater significance for the democratic rights and social interests of the American people?

"The media focus on the latest round of Clinton scandals serves as a political diversion in two senses. The incessant coverage distracts attention from the sordid and anti-democratic pedigree of the new administration, as well as the extreme-right policies being pushed by Bush and the Republican congressional leadership. And it allows Bush to posture as a moderate, conciliatory figure, urging that it is “time to move on,” even while his allies on Capitol Hill and in the media stoke up the anti-Clinton sentiments of the ultra-right. But even the most compliant media cannot disguise the intellectual feebleness of the new commander-in-chief. There were the usual verbal gaffes—Bush proclaimed his determination to eradicate “cocoa leaves” in Colombia, suggesting a war to the death against chocolate. (The official White House transcript corrected Bush, inserting “coca leaves” in the appropriate place). The president repeated his rehearsed lines: “It's time to go forward ... the [Iraq] sanctions regime is like Swiss cheese ... this administration will have the highest ethical standards,” and, of his tax plan, “Some are saying it's too small, some are saying it's too large, and I'm saying it's just right.”

"Then there were the non-answers, such as this response to a question about the proposed European rapid-reaction force:
QUESTION: There are some concerns in this country about the European plan for what they call a rapid-reaction force, their own military capability. What will you tell Prime Minister Blair about the American attitude to this rapid-reaction force?
BUSH: I first look forward to the visit. I'm anxious to meet the prime minister. We've had a couple of good conversations on the telephone. I'm thankful that he's coming across the—actually, coming down from Canada, but coming across the sea to visit us. Laura and I are looking forward to having a private dinner with he and Mrs. Blair Friday night.
Bush's performance, to put it mildly, will do nothing to reassure people in high places both at home and abroad who are concerned over the competence of the American head of state. The Washington Post, using the language of diplomatic understatement, noted in its news analysis, 'Many of Bush's answers were tentative and repetitive, and he did not put to rest questions about his command of policy and his ability to forcefully articulate his views on a variety of complex issues.'" --Patrick Martin, 2/24/01

One reason I like to highlight reading is, reading is the beginnings of the ability to be a good student. And if you can't read, it's going to be hard to realize dreams; it's going to be hard to go to college. So when your teachers say, read-you ought to listen to her."-Nalle Elementary School, Washington, D.C., Feb 9, 2001. Here, facing challenging crowds of Elementary School children, our Great Leader is promoting his "edjicashun" plan. It would have been much too taxing to deliver his address before professional educators. Instead, one of the idiots on Bush's staff suggested he "get down" with people on his level and appear "more human" (a stretch), so he selected first and second graders for his audience. His family-purchased Yale degree withstanding, it all seems so fitting. I suspect there's no provision for withdrawing degrees (a-la, we made a huge mistake) but hope continues that conscience will catch up with the Yale administration. Here, the Imbecile In Chief makes a rambling, yet vital association between reading, dreaming and college. This flow of semi consciousness deserves some examination as it represents one of the most complex, unscripted set of disjointed ideas to flow from The Brain since these Bushisms have been collected.

"One reason I like to highlight reading is, reading is the beginnings of the ability to be a good student." All manner of apology is due the students, teachers, parents, friends and deceased of those subjected to the Mind of Bush. This is nothing less than Poisoned English, a dilapidation of expression, a mangling of grammar. Something really bad happened on the way to Bush's English class (like, he never arrived), or perhaps he did some really bad drugs, or his brain is pickled from all the drinking. Whatever the reason, he is totally unqualified to speak to a group of first and second graders. After this he marched off to host a cabinet meeting.

"And if you can't read, it's going to be hard to realize dreams; it's going to be hard to go to college." The last time I checked, it was impossible to pass through the Admissions office sans reading skill. However, this may have been waived by Yale University during the precious "Bush years". Being born on campus has to count for something.

"So when your teachers say, read-you ought to listen to her." There's nothing quite like a Bush lesson in the appropriate use of tense, especially delivered with the smirk and tone combination of The Executioner. Likely to be scarred for life, should my child have been subjected to this, I would have immediately sued in advance of the expected later harm. I certainly don't want my child to believe that one can become the most important spokesperson for the somewhat free world and speak/act like a complete idiot. The lesson of Bush is this - truly, anyone can become President. But do we really want an anyone?

--Mark Richards, 2/23/01

I went to the hearing held yesterday (2/16) in Miami by the US Commission on Civil Rights -- very interesting to hear what people say under oath. The hearing included testimony from voters in South Florida, poll workers in Miami Dade, Palm Beach and Broward, and officials from all three counties (including Theresa LePore, Our Lady of the Butterfly Ballot). Not a lot of news there -- all the same elements of voting fraud that have been reported in the press. However, there was one new player on the hot seat: the vice president of Database Technologies, a Boca Raton subsidiary of ChoicePoint, which produced the list used to carry out the purging of names of supposed felons from the list of Florida Voters. This is the first time Database/ChoicePoint has ever divulged its methology, which effectively removed 174,000 names from Florida's active voting file, 85,000 of them supposed felons. The implications are staggering when one considers that this election was won by less than 500 votes in Florida and that thousands upon thousands of people were incorrectly identified as felons by this bogus list. Some of these would-be voters were there yesterday: middle-class moms, young black women, an elderly Cuban woman who was practically in tears at the indignities she had had to endure at the polls. She kept shaking and saying she was very nervous. The Miami-Dade office of elections had informed her that she was removed from the list because she was dead.

The testimony from Database's vice president, George Bruder, teemed with statistical double-speak that threatened to completely obscure any clear sense of what, exactly, the State had asked Database/ChoicePoint to accomplish. But the US Commissioners asked probing questions and managed to wrangle some of the truth from this guy. Again and again the Commission returned to the issue of the list's "accuracy." Bruder admitted that his company was instructed by the State of Florida "to cast as wide a net as possible" to catch possible or probable felons. Names did not have to match exactly (a "Susan Collier" would be a match for "Susan Collar," say); social security numbers were not a factor, etc. Bruder testified that when DataBase told the State of Florida that the "broad perameters" could and would result in many voters being listed as "false positives" (people incorrectly identified as felons), the State said to go ahead with the methodology. A more accurate list could have been compiled, but the State wasn't interested in accuracy.

Database also provided incriminating evidence that the State of Florida requested that voters be purged from the voting lists by race. This evidence was in the form of a letter written by Bruder to Florida Supervisors of Elections. (I was given a copy of this letter by a Commission worker.) It begins: "In an effort to ensure the accuracy of the Florida Centralized Voter File, DBT conducted a review of the records. The process included matching the information on the voter rolls to felony conviction records to purge the rolls of those whose right to vote had been revoked. The information used for the matching process included first, middle and last name, date of birth, race and gender, but not social security number...."

When a US Commissioner presented Bruder with the letter, he looked at like he was seeing if for the first time and claimed that he had "inaccurately" written that race was a criterion. "So you did not include "race' as a factor in your methodology," the Commissioner said.
"No, we did not," Bruder replied.
"Did you write a letter to the State of Florida informing them that you were no longer including race?"
"No, I did not."
"Do you ever plan to tell the State?"
"I guess I should," the man said, in an idiotic tone of voice.
Bruder also went on to assert that his company had no resposibily to check that the people on the list were felons. "That was up to the client,"he said.
"You mean the state of Florida paid you $4.2 million for a list that you couldn't even verify was accurate?" one Commissioner asked, incredulously. (Note that Bruder's letter begins, "In an effort to ensure the accuracy....")

It went on and on like this. Fascinating to see the face of corporate America, hemming and hawing, trying to get around telling the truth. (All who testified did so under oath.) Parts of his testimony were so ridiculous that people in the audience broke out in laughter. Reporters around me were shaking their heads and making wisecracks. Not that you'd read any of that in their articles, though. See the version from the Miami Herald, where the subject of profiling by race is totally left out of the report: "Since Social Security numbers weren't required on voter registration forms until recently, the matches were sometimes limited to names, gender and birth dates." If DBT/ChoicePoint's methodology can be examined further, and if it turns out that "race" was in the search/match criteria used to purge voters from the state list, then DBT lied under oath. --BD, 2/19/01

"And why shouldn't the conservatives be happy with Bush? They control the Justice Department, from top to bottom. They are running our environmental policy. They have a pro-lifer heading the Department of Health and Human Services. And of course, the oil companies are running our energy policy. Not to mention having Cheney installed as our de facto president. A pretty good deal all around for the right wing. What's more, they have seen the Bush regime act like a seasoned lion tamer, cracking his whip and forcing Democrats back into the corner of their cage. As none other than "right wing babe" Ann Coulter sardonically observes: Bush has shown ``how easy it is to hornswoggle liberals. All you have to do is go around calling yourself nice. He just treats liberals like small children having nightmares. Darn if it didn't work.''

"The Democrats are in such disarray that the Republicans feel at ease mocking and taunting them. After the Ashcroft "victory," Orrin Hatch said that the Democrats "didn't have the guts" to defeat Ashcroft. He was right, of course. But you only publicly bait your opponents like that if you're sure you are right. Even Tom "Exterminator" DeLay has started to come out of hiding, espousing his golden nuggets of wit and wisdom. BuzzFlash's favorite words from the de facto Speaker of the House include: "Conservatives have never tolerated hypocrisy and deception." Of course, Tom really meant "Conservatives have never tolerated hypocrisy and deception EXCEPT AMONG CONSERVATIVES. BUT THAT'S ALRIGHT, BECAUSE THEY ARE GOOD PEOPLE. BUT DEMOCRATS ARE GUILTY OF HYPOCRISY AND DECEPTION BECAUSE THEY ARE BORN EVIL AND DON'T ACCEPT CHRIST AS THEIR SAVIOR." So when you have Bill Daley, Secretary of Commerce under Clinton and Gore's Campaign Manager, issuing comments like the following, you know the Democrats are being routed: "It's terrible, devastating, and it's rather appalling," William M. Daley, who was Mr. Clinton's commerce secretary before he became chairman of the Gore campaign, said of the former president. "Bush ran on bringing dignity back," Mr. Daley said, "and I think the actions by Clinton of the last couple of weeks are giving him a pretty good platform."

"Nothing like Democrats who put up a good fight. The Republicans shout "boo!" and the Democrats immediately break into shuttering bouts of guilt. So Dubya has, as Coulter indicated, neutralized many of the Dems by three actions: 1) authorizing his cronies in Congress and the Justice Department to relentlessly attack Clinton through investigative persecution funded by the tax payer (and thus forcing Dems to attack Clinton); 2) calling members of Congress by nicknames (BuzzFlash's favorite is Dubya tagging Paul Wellstone as "Pablo"; and 3) using doublespeak to make it seem that he is "compassionate." Well the Democrats, being Democrats, are certainly disarmed by these tactics. But the right wing zealots, having a keener eye for cunning behavior, know what's up. "Bush has just found a different way of saying the same thing. We don't care if they call it bleu cheese," David A. Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union said approvingly. And guess what, the Democrats are the salad, tossed and ready to serve. " --Buzzflash, 2/18/01

by Jerry Politex

I drove my silver Audi down Mesa Drive, the spine of Cat Mountain, hung a left at the cat's tail, drove quickly up the hilly, winding 2222 in low gear, took a right onto Balcones Drive, and came to a stop in the rear parking lot of Chez Zee.

Another sunny, warm early spring day in Northwest Austin, Texas. The lunch crowd was pretty much thinned out by now, so I had choices of parking spaces. I got out of the car, the turbines winding down, and stood by the rear entrance to the restaurant, a pretty-good place for not very expensive Southwestern food. I didn't have long to wait.

...click here to continue the novel.

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