- History is not famous for being kind,
but it has shown its mercy in allowing the Founding Fathers not to be witnesses
to the Senate's dishonor. The Senate has demanded and will find its rightful
place in the bowels of ignominy. Its members were charged with determining
whether two hundred pounds of out-of-control erectile tissue should continue
to degrade the office of the Presidency. Only among this gaggle is this
a matter with nuances. One finds it reasonable the designation "Senate"
derives from the Latin word "senility." Being a Senator is a
kind of on-the-job-retirement, a category for which the AARP has printed
no brochure.
-
- If the Clinton trial were a mystery movie,
Americans would already have walked out. The entire nation knows "who
dunnit?" but the Senate is still going through the motions of trying
not to find out. (Now you know why film smells that way when they burn
it.) With the verdict not yet in, Clinton has promised the Senate he will
not gloat. It is an insult so gross, we can only expect the Senate will
do everything within its authority to deserve it.
-
- It is admirable to have the courage of
your convictions. Lamentably, this Senate has the convictions of its courage.
It is a white O.J. jury bent on Constitution-nullification. The question
is no longer, do Clinton's crimes rise to the level of impeachment, but
why can't the Senate rise to it. The sham trial of William Jefferson Clinton
will be remembered as "The Cop Out at the O.K. Corral."
-
- Fear is the crazy glue that binds these
solons together. You know there is some inner fortitude lacking when the
Senate starts each session by reciting "The Cringe of Allegiance."
The legend above the Senate chamber's door should read, "Through these
portals pass the most pompous mice in the world." This is a Senate
that would be congenial to the politics of ancient Rome at its most decadent,
and they are ready to treat the nation to an epic convulsion of conscience.
In a supposedly open society this Senate wheels and deals behind closed
doors more than Mafia; just one of the many devices it uses to exhaust
Americans beyond caring. If the Senators do not act with integrity it's
because he have none to act with.
-
- The U.S. Senate likes to call itself
"the world's greatest deliberative body." Apparently, it does
not discern a disparity between "deliberative" and "hesitant."
The Senate is a Home for the Chronically Indecisive, Incontinent, and Integrity
Bereft. It's members have a foxhole mentality, and when they saw this coming,
they jumped in and pulled the hole in after them. Their natural state is
one of intellectual vapor lock. Hence, they have never encountered a problem
it felt couldn't be "waited out."
-
- The rules of the game of cricket are
more abstruse and convoluted than Einstein's time-space continuum, but
simple pie compared to the rules of the Senate. (Characteristically, baseball
is absurd to the "Brits" because its rules do not require each
player to carry an umbrella.) Still, every Senator holds in reverence at
least Rule 1 of Senate procedure. i.e.- "A Senator must keep talking
until he thinks of something to say." The rest is embroidery. (In
floor debates, most Senators prefer to debate themselves, which they feel
gives them a "home court advantage.")
-
- These Doges of the Senate's principal
objective is to boost the chamber from a quaint talking shop to a cavernous
hangar whose echo can make small talk sound like oratory. The actual discourse
involves caressing each other with verbal peacock feathers, the extending
of cheap courtesies, and stringing the Senate chamber with mucous compliments;
in short, telling each other what a great bunch of guys they are. It's
a cheap trick but it works for them. In truth, they lack the courage and
integrity to insult each other, as properly they should, and they lack
the wit. This last is unpardonable.
-
- We are coming to the end of the Great
Integrity Scavenger Hunt, to decide if the Senate has the guts to say Clinton's
crimes reek to the level of impeachment. No one is surprised these political
hacks, who spent all that time and money to get into the Senate, are now
running for the hills. Ten seconds after they swore not to make up their
minds before hearing all the evidence, their verdict was inscribed on asbestos
and on its way to a Nevada landfill where it is sure to create an environmental
hazard. Sir Thomas More, Robert Bolt's "man for all seasons",
took a trip to the chopping black for embarrassing King and Council with
his indefectible character. As none in this clutch possesses More's qualities,
no Senator will suffer the same fate (irrespective of how much it would
improve his appearance.)
-
- At this writing the Senate is considering
a "bi-furcated verdict." Nobody knew what a bi-furcated verdict
was until Barney Frank explained, it's someone who "furcates"
both ways. (The White House considers Frank their "stand up guy",
because it hurts whenever he sits down.) The Senate's selective reading
of the Constitution tells them, crimes and misdemeanors have to be high
and that it doesn't say anything about them being plentiful. If Bill Clinton's
removal is not in order because "it's just about sex", the appropriate
punishment is not censure, but castration. After conducting a trial without
witnesses, there is not much more contempt the Senate can bring down on
itself. Presently, it wallows in a moral bog and finds the ooze congenial.
-
- Here are a few of the principal characters
that bring dishonor to that institution as it fumbles to a finish:
-
- SENATOR ORRIN HATCH Senator Hatch brings
to mind the words of that world-class neurotic, Oscar Levant, who said,
"Once I make up my mind, I'm full of indecision." Hatch made
up his mind about Clinton impeachment a long time ago, but he can't remember
which way. A tower of uncertainty, he has taken more positions than are
shown in the Kama Sutra. Hatch exercises the kind of exquisite caution
employed by Edward Scissorhands when he's trying to masturbate.
-
- SENATOR TRENT LOTT Lott is Bill Clinton's
pigeon. Democrats love Lott the same way gamblers love a bookmaker who
can't win a bet. It was their Majority Leader who convinced the Republicans
they would have a better chance in the game of politics if they were not
dealt any cards. Lott's cowardice has spread through the Senate like a
pox. By his laxity and disconnected handling of Janet Reno's cover up and
collusion with the criminal activities of the White House, Lott segued
from derelict to complicit. He has allowed the personification of Justice,
the lady with the blindfold and the scales, to be run back in time to when
it was a fat cop stealing apples off a pushcart. A radarscope picked up
a basic truth in the approach pattern of the Senate, but Lott hastily scaled
the Capitol Dome in time to give it a wave-off. If Lott has any future
in Republican politics it is as a cuspidor. The Democrats are asking the
Senate to vote on whether or not the Republican Party should be disbanded.
The Washington media is betting Lott will vote "Present."
-
- SENATOR JOSEPH LIEBERMAN People as far
as North Carolina can tell the Senate has gone into session when they hear
the sound of Senator Lieberman's knees buckling.
-
- SENATOR JOHN KERRY Had they been exposed
to Kerry's political philosophy, the Minutemen of Lexington and Concord
would claim they were mercenaries from Puerto Rico. Kerry married well,
and that remains the only thing he is ever likely to do well.
-
- SENATOR DANIEL PATRICK MOYNIHAN Moynihan
saves his more profound irrelevancies for Meet the Press, as Tim Russert
is his creature. In the last episode of Dan and Tim Go to Washington, Moynihan
revealed, he did not know whether Bubba is guilty but he's sure Buddha
was Irish. Russert, NBC's altar boy-in-residence, works at being likeable,
knowing, should he ask anything pertinent, he will be choked off from the
sources of his misinformation. His emasculated approach to newsgathering
has made the Meet the Press interview akin to being wheedled by Little
Goody Two Shoes on Quaaludes. The interview invariably begins with Moynihan
saying, "Ask me whatever you like, Tim - just as long as it isn't
about anything", and then they go on to discuss whatever it is leprechauns
like to talk about.
-
- SENATOR TOM HARKIN Harkin made a big
"to do" about whether he should be called a juror or a judge,
ignoring the real question; Is trying Bill Clinton a job for a Senator
or a janitor? Harkin lacks the integrity or intellect to be either.
-
- SENATOR ARLEN SPECTOR Specter has passed
not knowing what he's doing, having lost sight of what it was it was he
was trying to do.
-
- SENATOR CHARLES SCHUMER Charles Schumer,
anti-gun fanatic, has all the self-preservation instincts of a trustee
in a concentration camp. He would have disarmed the Jews to make sure they
couldn't sneak out of Buchenwald at night and "knock over" a
liquor store. What a shmuck.
-
- SENATOR ROBERT TORRICELLI The weaseling
and furtive Torricelli keeps gnawing away at the roots of the Constitution.
Having him represent your interests in Washington is approximate to trusting
Fredo Corleone to keep an eye on your wallet.
-
- SENATOR FRANK R. LAUTENBERG Lautenberg
is Torricelli's New Jersey accomplice, His officious manner suggests he
would have made a great sidewalk kibitzer at the building of the Tower
of Babel. Asked by a gawking apostate, "Do you think it will offend
God?" he would reply, "Gonna need more mortar."
-
- SENATOR TOM DASCHLE Daschle's abrasive
manner and dogged pushiness is said to be motivated by an inferiority complex.
It is not a complex. He is genuinely inferior.
-
- SENATOR CHRISTOPHER DODD Ssssinister....
-
- SENATRIX BARBARA BOXER As Clinton's number
one poodle in the Senate, she has been trying to characterize his exposing
his genitals as an act of "refreshing candor." Likely, Satan
knew what he was about when he sent Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein,
two viragos, to afflict California and the nation. Boxer is "Rosemary's
Senator"; though it is impractical to believe anyone would leave Hell
for a chance to impregnate her. I do not wish to imply she is unattractive,
but the last time I saw anything that looked like Boxer a dermatologist
was about to excise it.
-
- SENATRIX DIANNE FEINSTEIN Feinstein is
a meddlesome presence of Biblical proportions, even to forcing her way
aboard the space shuttle after its return to Earth, to make sure none of
the male astronauts left its toilet seat in the up position. The simple-witted
Ms. Feinstein holds that Clinton is "good on women's issues"
because he always puts a woman on a pedestal before he rapes her. She also
feels he is coming from the right place on racial issues, promoting Clinton
as a latter day Robin Hood who robs from the rich and gives to the blacks.
His quiver stuffed with welfare checks and grants, he won their political
fealty as the hero of Sherwood Ghetto. (Clinton always knows where to get
money for this purpose. As he alluded in his State of the Union message,
after he gets through looting the U.S. Treasury, he's going to get a crowbar
and "jimmy open" Switzerland.)
-
- One wonders how Boxer and Feinstein,
who are of the Hebrew faith, feel when they visit the White House, which
Clinton has made into his Berchtesgaden-on-the-Potomac. Sadly, they cannot
be confronted by the 6 million Jews who died in the Holocaust and who doubtless
would like them to explain why they are giving Clinton and his fascism
another chance.
-
- SENATOR TEDDY KENNEDY After the Chappaquidick
incident in which Mary Jo Kopechne lost her life, Teddy did not send flowers,
but just carved another notch in his steering wheel. Knowing his record,
the state troopers have reserved a parking space for him at every sobriety
checkpoints. He failed his last test when he couldn't pronounce Massachusetts.
The caretakers at Arlington Cemetery, fearing an explosion, never let Teddy
exhale anywhere near his brother's Eternal Flame.
-
- SENATOR JOSEPH BIDEN Biden, long in therapy
for delusions of oratory, suspects his condition has worsened after losing
a debate to a Republican in a coma.
-
- SENATOR JOHN GLENN Colleagues believe,
Glenn returned from his space shuttle flight having gotten some of that
outer space permanently stuck between his ears.
-
- SENATOR CARL LEVIN The follicle-impaired
Carl Levin has only four strands of hair left, three of which are in extremis.
These hirsute stragglers that run across his head to connect his ears seem
embarrassed to be there. The manner in which his barber has arranged them
to disguise his hair loss will go down in tonsorial history as "Pompadour's
Last Stand." He should ask the Justice Department to do something
about his balding pate. If Janet Reno can't cover it up, nobody can.
-
- SENATOR ROBERT BYRD Senator Byrd comes
from a small town in West Virginia, located more up the creek than down
in "the holler." He is the self-appointed Senate Historian, whose
function it is to sit on his ass in an easy chair and just let history
wash over him. It's not as easy as it sounds. It's easier. Considered an
oratorical spellbinder, the mellifluous tremolo of his voice has been explained
by doctor who diagnosed, "Senator Byrd has always had a frog in his
throat and recently the frog brought along a friend."
-
- Byrd is the hood ornament of a Senate
in which all the members are older, but not wiser than each other. Though
his rural intellect is in advancing dilapidation, he is said to be the
guy who most represents the mindset of the Senate. If there is really an
age at which people are supposed to "know better", at 81 Robert
Byrd still hasn't reached it.
-
- Byrd has stated his belief (especially
since the President already confessed to it) that Clinton is guilty, but
suspects some terrible retribution will be visited on him if he votes accordingly.
Consider the grotesquerie of being 81 years old and still insecure about
your future. Recently, his prostate won third prize at an antique show.
If Byrd were a racehorse they would have shot him twenty years ago. Byrd
also has moved for adjournment. At 81, what more does this man have to
lose? The mellifluous tremolo is over, but the sanctimony lingers on.
-
- THE ARKANSAS ADULTERER What is it the
Senators find so redeeming in Bill Clinton that they are willing to let
him dishonor his office and savage the Constitution? Is it that smug leer
of Damian as a Boy Scout winning his merit badge for Satanism? Is it his
resemblance to Dudley Do-right after taking a bribe? Is it that smirk of
a teller who has just hoodwinked the bank examiners? How do they rebuke
someone with so many winsome traits? Clinton is impossible to insult. Call
him a communist, he says, "Thank you." A woman screams "Rape!"
and he considers it as an invitation. His high school softball team voted
him The Boy Most Likely to Throw the Game. There is still much ambivalence
about Clinton, even now in his native Arkansas, where people confide, "We
didn't like him, even when we liked him." (Arkansans began to distrust
Bubba after he started showing off by wearing shoes.)
-
- For all Clinton's mawkish bleating about
"caring", he doesn't. He regards the average person with the
same detachment as an undertaker - just another client he doesn't have
to please. His crocodilian boohoo-ing about people's wellbeing is like
the media's small craft warnings. It falls into perspective after you ask
yourself whether Peter Jennings really gives a shit if you drown. As for
their "hard-sell" advertising of the Clintons' love of "the
chil'run", well - Chelsea is their only child. (Bill and Hillary ate
the others.)
-
- A compulsive hypocrite, Clinton must
cloak his crimes with mitigating circumstances and self-exonerating "spin"
- like a holdup man who levels a gun at the cashier at a box office and
says, "I didn't enjoy the movie. Give me everybody's money back."
(Hillary, of course, possesses the same streak of shifty enterprise. If
she worked in a tollbooth, the Golden Gate Bridge would be hiding its other
set of books.)
-
- Nobody actually eyeballed what transpired
between Bubba and Monica, but the circumstantial evidence was overpowering.
Each time Monica left the Oval Office, the air in it was so moist, the
Secret Service men couldn't get their knuckles to crack. Clinton still
insists what went on wasn't sexual. He was just trying to adjust the thong
of Monica's bikini, after she complained it was following her too closely.
-
- Hoping to get off the hook, the Senate
has hoped some administration insider would come forward à la John
Dean, knowing well it would never happen. If one aide in the White House
suddenly turned honest, it would be tantamount to a full-scale mutiny.
Nor did the Senate turn up "the smoking gun" even though they
knew Bubba still keeps it in the same place as he did when he showed it
to Paula Jones in a hotel room in Little Rock (small caliber, but it still
smokes.)
-
- Punishment? None. Contrition? You've
got to be kidding! Clinton is a man of pulp, capable of feigning emotion,
but incapable of feeling it. The only exception came with the news a Congressman
has proposed sculpting Ronald Reagan on Mount Rushmore, which must have
felt to Bubba like he was having his hemorrhoids removed with a grappling
hook. It was an unexpected jolt in light of a reliable prediction he would
be next. (His legacy Czar, Sid Blumenthal, is said to have received a fax
from Nostradamus.) If Bill Clinton is added to Mount Rushmore he will be
the President wearing a ski mask.)
-
- In the Catholic faith it is said, "Act
as if you have faith, and faith will be given to you." The Senate's
contortion of that is - act as if Clinton is beyond retribution and that's
how he'll beat the rap. This misplaced clemency over the last six year
confirms - crime pays! And when the Ken Starr and his bloodhounds get too
close, Bubba hops aboard Air Force One to do mischief abroad, or slithers
into a helicopter to take his ease at Camp Judas.
-
- This Senate has found it necessary to
function as a rubberstamp Reichstag. Hitler couldn't get the German Reichstag
to be as compliant as Bill Clinton has made the Senate - so he burned it.
The dispossessed representatives met one last time in an open field and
voted a resolution saying the torching of their assembly hall did not rise
to the level of high flames and conflagrations. The rest is history. So
it is with this clique in the upper chamber. Had they been in Parliament
instead of the Senate, we'd be viewing films of Hitler in an open car tooling
around Trafalgar Square, and dropping his lederhosen for young secretaries
on their way to Whitehall. This Senate apparently does not remember the
fifty million who lost their lives, a continent devastated and only the
Marshall Plan preventing Europe from becoming another Arkansas - the fallout
from exonerating a tyrant.
-
- The thinking is, Clinton's crimes are
too heinous to be absolved by the clergy so they must be endorsed by the
Senate. Being politicians, they admire his skills of treachery and bribery,
his appetite for deference and ceremony, and the daring of his on-site
depravity. He's already been called dirty names by seafaring men and others
who can swear far more eloquently than me. So, I will just say, after a
marriage filled with drunken abuse, the birth of Bill Clinton was his father's
final insult to his mother - and the nation.
-
- The Senate hates criticism but is eerie
in its ability to provoke it. It has inspired the Internet to become an
underground, no less dedicated than the Maquis who fought the Nazis in
France, and made it as noble and as dedicated a cause. Whether in Arkansas
or the Ardennes, fascism is fascism. To believe Clinton will be gone in
two years is a naive assumption. Linda Blair will tell you evil is no respecter
of eviction notices. Clinton already has his White House Nazi moles at
work undermining the 22nd Amendment. This is sure. In two years Clinton
will be two years more ambitious and arrogant, and the Senate will be two
years more craven and enfeebled.
-
- WHY
-
- As a Senator's mind is always vulnerable
to habituation, one concludes, the Senate's affinity for Clinton is not
affection, it's addiction. They don't like him, but they need his "fix"
of demagogy and cynicism. The Senate has become a den of Clinton junkies.
He is their narcotic, their aphrodisiac, their Brylcreem. The Senators
need to inhale the fumes of his ordure, roll themselves in his sleaze of
his lies and racism, and rub his gooey socialist pomade in their hair.
The Senators want to keep his addictive charisma off the street and in
the Oval Office where it belongs. Anxiously, they raise the question, "If
we remove Clinton, who knows if we will get the same 'buzz' from his successor.
Let's face it. Gore is not methadone. He's mud."
-
- The symptoms of both cultures dovetail
neatly. Clinton has made the Senate into "Needle Park", distributing
used hypodermics with dirty needles, leaving the Senate susceptible to
infections for which The New England Journal of Medicine will have to dream
up new, soon to be dreaded Latin names.
-
- Like "druggies", the Senators
must addict the rest of America, because junkie's need corroboration -
if not the ensuing epidemic. Like all "trippers", they rationalize,
in two years their addiction to Clinton will be over and promise they will
"kick the habit" then - a promise all "hop-heads" make
over and over again. As we do with those in chemical dependency, we will
say the Senate's "Clinton- dopers" are just "sick",
and need our help, presumably in the form of anther expensive government
program which they themselves will vote to fund. (They don't care if they
have our scorn, as long as they have our money.)
-
- The Clinton narcotic will wear off and
require the Senate to take increasing doses of White House hypocrisy to
stay "high." The next step is increased dosage, a third term
for Clinton and the Betty Ford Clinic, who have no idea in the world what
they'd be in for. The Senate will no longer be Clinton junkies, but Clinton
"pushers." The Democrats long ago made Clinton corruption their
drug of choice. Those members of the House of Representatives may have
to try once again to reform a Senate in "denial."
-
- The Senate must kick the habit - now!
The time for "get-along, go-along" is over. America cannot leave
questions of war and peace, and right and wrong, to a hayseed Hitler and
a Senate strung out on expediency. Common to all addicts, dependency and
degradation have a weird kind of romance for them, and that is the cruelest
part of their addiction. We'll know that has happened the moment Clinton
"walks." If that occurs, these Senators can begin a fast that
goes on until Doomsday, and they will not atone for their sin against the
Constitution, the American people, and God.
-
- One almost hears an anguished prayer
for the Senate coming from Calvary Hill. "Forgive them, Father, for
they know not who they forgive."
-
- Norman Liebmann is a free lance political
commentator and staff writer for Ether Zone Online! Published in the February
10, 1999 issue of Ether Zone Online! Copyright © 1999 Ether Zone
Online (http://etherzone.com). Reposting permitted with this message intact.
-------------- I knew of one corrupt, gutless, despicable, and unprincipled
clod in high government places... I now know 101. DUMP the ENTIRE SENATE!
-me
-
- Mick@earthling.net The Patriot Resource
Center: http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/6627/
|
