Still Undecided?

In case you’re still not sure on Election Eve whom to vote for, let’s take a closer look at several of Bush’s top henchmen (or, if the ugly rumors are true, his puppetmasters).

Dick Cheney: Has there ever been a public leader (in a democracy, I mean) who’s been so secretive, so secluded, so hidden from the public view? Let’s take his secret energy meetings with those mystery guests. What is he hiding? In 4 years the public still has no clue whom he met with. It was even important enough for him to go all the way to the Supreme Court, and sweet-talk his duck-hunting pal, Justice Scalia, into ruling in Cheney’s favor. What is he hiding? It seems mighty important to him that the lowly public doesn’t find out who his co-conspirators were or what sort of energy schemes they were hatching. (Enron, anyone?)

In case you’ve seen footage of any of Cheney’s recent speeches and wondered why the entire audience was cheering in unison: everyone had to sign a loyalty oath before being admitted to the speech. No dissent, please. Seriously! (Yes, here, in the United States of America.) A loyalty oath!

Donald Rumsfeld: Henry Kissinger has said that Donald Rumsfeld was the most ruthless person he’d ever met. Out of all the third world dictators he’d met, and all the Inner Party Communist power brokers, etc., Donald Rumsfeld stood out as the most ruthless. And it figures – look how he’s handled the Iraq debacle. Democracy is certainly a pain in the butt when you’re trying to wage wars and run secret prisons without any public accountability.

John Ashcroft: How in the *#$%&* did this Bible-thumping, book-burning wackoid get any kind of job with the federal government? He was defeated in his home state of Missouri when he ran for the senate. Talk about turning lemons into some dynamite lemonade: get defeated in a run for the senate, then get appointed Attorney General. Unfortunately he keeps forgetting his job title. That’s Attorney General; not Ayatollah; not Grand Inquisitor. Poor, poor John – this pesky thing called a constitution keeps getting in his way.

So many public moralists have turned out to be the total opposite when the camera is turned away: Jimmy Swaggart, Jim Bakker, William Bennett, some of the ringleaders of the Clinton impeachment, hundreds (thousands?) of priests, etc. It almost seems like there’s some sort of formula, that the louder they thump the Bible in public, the more of a perv they are when they’re out of the limelight. If this formula applies to John Ashcroft, he must have a whole closet – no, make that a whole second home – filled with every kind of kiddie porn and snuff videos imaginable. (Just guessing here, not making any accusations.)

So, even if George W. Bush is the nicest, hardest-working person in the world (riiiight!!), he hired these three sleazebags to help run his administration. That makes three additional reasons to give Bush his walking papers tomorrow.