And may neither man miss
By Mark Drolette
So this is what it’s come to, eh? The world’s number two terrorist, Osama bin Laden, getting verbally bitch-slapped by the world’s number one terrorist.
All together now: Ooooohhhhhh!
No, the rhetorical dueling glove (the labeling of bin Laden as “virtually impotent”) wasn’t manfully snapped by George W. Bush himself (who, in a weird coincidence, considers himself virtually important). Instead, it was done for him on Fox News and CNN by yet another in an endless slimy line of administration toadies, this one Bush’s “homeland security adviser,” some woman by the name of Frances Frog-o’s, check it, Fragos, Townsend.
In other words, someone who ranks higher than Bush on the testosterone scale. (Although, really, dear Uncle Elmo Drolette still has more of the stuff than Dubya -- and ol’ El’s been dead for twenty years.)
As much as I hate to say it, however, Bush may actually be on to something: perhaps he and al-Qaida’s leader could simply trade emasculating affronts in their respective bids to be named the World’s Most Annoying Creature and just leave the rest of us out of it.
Nah…too sensible.
Argghh! It’s so damn confusing. I mean, are we safer now since 9/11 or aren’t we? I’ve still got all this duct tape and plastic sheeting I’ve been itchin’ to use but I don’t wanna break it out too early lest I appear foolish (as opposed to appearing foolish for having bought it in the first place to protect myself from biochemical agents. Government agents? Now, that’s a different matter: there, with proper application, the stuff could come in handy.)
Another thing: Isn’t bin Laden the same guy Bush so he-manly declared he wanted dead or alive? But now we’re supposed to believe the bearded one -- sporting a more rakish look lately thanks to a spiffy dye job -- is merely a flaccid powder-puff? Or could the story really be Dubya’s simian, sorry, simmering jealously of bin Laden’s obvious play for the youth demographic? Truly, what gives?
Let’s see what Ben Feller of the Associated Press has to say about the matter:
“The consensus of the nation’s top intelligence analysts is that bin Laden’s terrorist network is anything but impotent.
“Terrorism experts say the network is regrouping in the lawless Pakistan-Afghanistan border region. The latest National Intelligence Estimate says al-Qaida is growing in strength, intensifying its efforts to put operatives in the United States and plotting against U.S. targets that will cause massive casualties. The U.S. is in a ‘heightened threat environment’ and al-Qaida is the most serious threat, the analysts found.”
OK, personal gripe time: I consider myself a pretty decent satirist. But how does one send up insanity like this? Hourly, it seems, things just keep getting absurder and absurder. (With apologies to Lewis Carroll who, by the way, with his “fondness” for little girls, would’ve made a great Republican. Yes, that’s a cheap shot. Then again, they’re a cheap party.)
And talk about absurd: Dick Cheney and Bush and the rest of the neocon nutballs are preparing for an all-out assault on Iran which very likely will include the use of nuclear weapons and rather than non-stop outrage voiced in every newspaper and on every TV channel and on every radio station across the land about this planned genocidal lunacy even the Nazis would have envied, what we get instead is Dubya -- of all people -- nyeah, nyeah, nyeah-nyeah, nyeahing bin Laden’s alleged un-studliness.
But -- of course there’s no reported uproar. That’s something one could only expect to see in a country with a free press, and here in America that poor puppy was taken out and shot a long time ago. What we have today and have had for many a moon are rightwing-controlled, utterly complicit media that are, well, utterly complicit. So much for all those sniffly crocodile tears from the New York Times and all her other wretched whoreporate inky and electronic kin begging forgiveness for their cheerleading America into war, hollow mea culpas that weren’t offered anyway until long after even your lifelong to-the-core Republican Auntie Zelda from Manhattan, Kansas, was totally hip that the whole media-led charge to Iraq’s obliteration was one concerted, trumped-up lie.
See, war is Big Bidness, son, and don’t you forget it. ‘Cause you can bet the media owners who know the weapons manufacturers who know the administration members who know the energy men who know the reconstruction leeches who know all the other corrupt crony corporate capitalists sure don’t.
War’s also mighty phallic, what with all those big hard missiles and guns and blasts and bodily fluids and everything, thus making its imagery and macho John Wayne-isms even more irresistible to a morally, mentally and mettle-challenged mama’s boy like Dubya who couldn’t wait, once enthroned, to become a “war president” to prove he did, indeed, have more cajones than his sorry excuse of a father.
One minor hitch, though (well, billions, actually, if you count the dollars thrown away on the Afghanistan and Iraq fiascos or a million if you count the number of innocents Dubya and his fellow thugs have murdered):
Despite Bush’s pathological craving to measure up, even the shilling media can no longer hide his obvious performance problems from the American public (who, nonetheless, keep getting screwed). And so what we’re left with is the truly bizarre spectacle of listening to our own homegrown homicidal maniac telling another he’s got a better-working weenie.
Great. Just what the world needs: another idiot dictator with compensatory issues. Too bad we can’t just buy the insecure little Dick a truck with ten-foot tires and call it a day.
Copyright © 2007 Mark Drolette. All rights reserved.
