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FORD
02-02-2004, 09:02 AM
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The Top Ten Conservative Idiots (No. 141)
February 2, 2004
Weapons of Mass... Oh, Forget It Edition

Weapons of Mass Destruction? Don't blame us. At the top of the list we've got the Bush Administration, which was proven wrong once again on the whole Iraq WMD thing. But of course they're more than happy to foist the blame on the CIA or anywhere else but themselves. But even after the truth came out, there was Dick Cheney (2) once again trying to claim against all reason that the WMDs still exist. Further down the list, Georgia school superintendent Kathy Cox (3) wants to keep her students ignorant. David Duke (6) wants to take another shot at elected office. And don't miss The Traditional Values Coalition (10) who have a complaint about this very website!

1) The Bush Administration
So the cat is finally out of the bag. America's chief weapons inspector, David Kay, quit his job and returned from Iraq last week, bringing with him the news that - guess what? - there are no weapons of mass destruction. Despite this devastating news for the Bush administration, Kay managed to get a bit of bootlicking in and blamed the CIA for misleading everybody. Let the backtracking begin! Funny how seven months before 9/11, George Tenet testified before Congress that Iraq posed no immediate threat to the United States, and during a visit to Cairo around the same time, Colin Powell stated: "He [Saddam Hussein] has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors."

So, what - between the start of 2001 and the end of 2002 the CIA suddenly freaked out and convinced the Bush administration that Iraq did, in fact, have tons and tons of weapons of mass destruction which they'd previously overlooked? Of course, it only takes a quick look back through the Idiot archive to find multiple examples of members of the Bush administration playing with intelligence data and pushing the intelligence community into drawing conclusions that the administration wanted to hear. Like when Condoleezza Rice ignored George Tenet's warning that the "uranium from Africa" claim was false (Idiots 119), or when Dick Cheney made sure that the lie went into the State of the Union Address (Idiots 117), not to mention all those times that Cheney visited the CIA and "created an environment in which some analysts felt they were being pressured to make their assessments on Iraq fit with Bush Administration policy objectives," (Idiots 113). Yup, if only the CIA hadn't fooled everyone with their phony intelligence, you can bet that Bush would have done everything in his power to ensure that we didn't rush to invade. But sadly, they were all completely hoodwinked. Of course the fact that Bush's cronies have been planning the invasion of Iraq since the end of the last Gulf War has nothing to do with it. :rolleyes:

2) Dick Cheney
Speaking of Halliburton, somebody needs to send a memo to yellow-belly boy. Hey Dick! There aren't any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, got it? Despite all the evidence to the contrary, Vice President Crashcart has been out and about merrily spreading the lie that Saddam Hussein was about to sneak onto America's rooftops and drop VX stink bombs down our chimneys. Appearing on NPR recently, Dick claimed that, "In terms of the question what is there now, we know prior to our going in, that he spent time and effort acquiring mobile biological weapons labs." For goodness sake, can somebody please bring this man up to speed? He's only the vice president of the United States after all. I guess it's easy to lose track of time down in the bunker (when you're not out shooting ducks with the Supreme Court Justice who's about to hear your case that is).

3) Kathy Cox
If Kathy Cox has her way, science education in Georgia schools could soon be going the way of the dinosaurs - if you're dumb enough to believe in dinosaurs that is. Ms. Cox, the state schools superintendent, wants Georgia schools to remove all references to "evolution" and replace them with the phrase "biological changes over time." The purpose of this is, of course, to undermine the concept of evolution and promote creationism. Tell you what, while we're at it why don't we just reintroduce the concept of bleeding as a legitimate medical procedure? Or perhaps we could wave flowers around to protect ourselves from the 'flu while we're on our way to the local witch-burning. I dunno, if this keeps up pretty soon we'll be back to the educational level of cavemen. Oh, I'm sorry - cavemen didn't exist. My bad.

4) Dennis Miller
In Idiots 140 that CNBC have given Dennis Miller a show, and that Miller has promised that the show, "however political, will not be partisan." Funny that, because last week Dennis announced that he won't be making any jokes about George W. Bush. "I like him," Miller said. "I'm going to give him a pass. I take care of my friends." All right Dennis, cut the brown-nosing. So you're going to have a political, nonpartisan show, without mentioning the president of the United States, eh? That should be interesting. Gee, I can't wait for yet another cable news TV show that spends an hour a night shitting on Democrats and ass-kissing Republicans. God damn liberal media. :mad:

5) Peter Shoomaker
Believe it or not, there's actually some good news coming out of Iraq. According to General Peter Shoomaker, the head of the US Army, "There is a huge silver lining in this cloud." Oh yeah? Yeah. Apparently the fact that the Army is actually at war is a "tremendous focus" for those in the military. "There's got to be a certain appetite for what the hell we exist for," said Shoomaker. Uh, okay. See, according to Shoomaker, "War is a tremendous focus... Now we have this focusing opportunity, and we have the fact that [terrorists] have actually attacked our homeland, which gives it some oomph."

Oomph? Oomph? Well I'm glad somebody's enjoying this. I do hope the families of the 500+ dead American soldiers are just as happy that their sons and daughters gave their lives for General Shoomakers ultra-realistic training exercise. Oomph, indeed.

6) David Duke
David Duke wants to run for office again - just as soon as he gets out of federal prison for mail and tax fraud. The former Ku Klux Klan leader is considering running for the seat of Republican Rep. David Vitter, and presumably stands a great chance considering he's a convicted felon and the former leader of one of the world's most famous hate organizations. Uh... but seriously, what is David Duke thinking? Does he seriously believe that a man who was sent to prison for bilking his supporters the last time he ran for office, not to mention a man who headed a group which is most closely associated with lynching black people, can really win a seat in the House representing Louisiana? Ah, wait a minute...

7) Billy Tauzin
Would you like to earn $1 million dollars a year? Sound tempting? Well that's what Billy Tauzin will be making if he accepts a job offered to him recently by the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturing Association, one of Washington's most powerful lobbying organizations. The PhRMA wants Tauzin as their new boss, and they clearly have impeccable timing. See, Tauzin is currently chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee which oversees the Food and Drug Administration and the pharmaceutical industry. And funnily enough, he just had a major hand in the very recent Medicare bill which only just scraped through Congress after Democrats complained that it would seriously damage Medicare and provide massive handouts to pharmaceutical companies. And now the bill has passed, the biggest pharmaceutical lobbyists in Washington want to give him a million dollars a year to be their new boss. Kinda makes you wonder when they started hashing out the details of this job offer, doesn't it?

8) Halliburton
You've probably all seen it by now - the gag-inducing Halliburton commercial in which a soldier on the telephone bravely fights back tears before jumping up and announcing "It's a girl!" (And just think - if he weren't stuck in Iraq guarding Halliburton's newly-acquired oilfields the poor bastard might have been at home when his baby was born.) Halliburton's new push to promote themselves as the loving, caring benefactors of our troops in the field somewhat flies in the face of previous reports that Halliburton subsidiary KB&R provided "blood all over the floor" of kitchens, "dirty pans," "dirty grills," "dirty salad bars" and "rotting meats ... and vegetables" in some military messes they operated. But it doesn't matter because Halliburton may soon be out of this world - you'll be absolutely astonished to discover that George W. Bush's plan to put a man on Mars will benefit Dick Cheney's former company enormously. Here's what "veteran Halliburton scientific adviser" Steve Streich had to say in Oil & Gas Journal back in 2000 - "[Mars exploration is] an unprecedented opportunity for both investigating the possibility of life on Mars and for improving our abilities to support oil and gas demands on Earth." Yup, it's yet another taxpayer-funded multi-billion-dollar handout for the vice president's favorite former company. Oh, and by the way, according to the Washington Post, "Administration officials scoffed at the idea that Halliburton had anything to do with the development of the space policy." Got that? Scoffed.

9) Welfare Republicans
This is interesting: according to a recent op-ed in the New York Times, "Each year, the Tax Foundation, a nonprofit research group, crunches numbers from the Census Bureau to produce an intriguing figure: how much each state receives in federal spending for every dollar it pays in federal taxes." These states are then classified as "Giver" or "Taker" states. If on average a state's population pays more in federal taxes than it receives in federal spending, it's a "Giver" state. If the opposite is true, it's a "Taker" state (for example, for every dollar the average North Dakotan paid in federal taxes last year, he received $2.07 in federal benefits - North Dakota is a "Taker" state. The average Minnesotan, on the other hand, received 77c for every dollar he spent - so Minnesota is a "Giver" state). But here's the kicker: the vast majority of "Taker" states are - you guessed it - states that went for George W. Bush in 2000. (Bush got 78% of his electoral votes from "Taker" states.) And the vast majority of "Giver" states went for Al Gore. (Gore got 76% of his electoral votes from "Giver" states.) So what does this mean? Well, it means that despite what Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly and the rest of the right-wing spin machine tells you, Republicans are not constantly under attack from the federal government which wants to take their money and distribute it to lazy shiftless liberals. In fact the opposite is true - the constituents of the red states are living off the tax dollars of those who live in the blue states. But since the Republican Congress decides where all that tax money goes, there's not much we can do about it. Bummer eh?

10) Traditional Values Coalition
And finally: ha ha, we annoyed the nutjobs! Meet the Traditional Values Coalition, who are either a) too cheap to hire a proper polling company or b) too scared that if they DO hire a proper polling company they won't get the results they want. So instead they made the foolish mistake of resorting to the thoroughly unreliable online poll method, only to be surprised when their poll was horrendously skewed against them. But guess what - Democratic Underground is to blame! According to the TVC, "Radical Democrats are bragging on the DemocraticUnderground.com web site that they've been skewing the results of TVC's marriage poll by voting more than once." Hilariously, the TVC's poll "Would you vote for a presidential candidate who supports same-sex marriage or civil unions?" ended up with a "Yes" vote of 34,537 and a "No" vote of 26,550. According to the TVC, this means that DUers have a "disturbing, flexible morality" (of course, holding a poll which you know beforehand is going to produce a particular result in your favor is entirely moral behavior). Hypocrisy also appears to be a "Traditional Value" - despite accusing us of a "rather paranoid view of the world," the TVC is apparently worried that messing with their stupid online poll is comparable to voting in a real election, suggesting that "it appears that we can expect widespread voter fraud this November from Clintonoid activists." Man, these guys are dumb. :dork:

Mind you, while we're on the subject of paranoia, bear in mind that the Traditional Values Coalition are also responsible for the Homosexual Urban Legends series. So I guess bigotry and hate are "Traditional Values" too! (Incidentally the TVC also says that "One would hope that individuals voting in an online poll would have the personal integrity to vote only once - not multiple times." Well gee, I dunno - they should ask the experts.) See you next week!

Cathedral
02-02-2004, 09:10 AM
Here's my top 10 list of Liberal Idiots...

1-10 Liberals, almost all of them.........

I'm finished, and i didn't need a ton of fluffy lies to get it done.