Hello, I'm mejeffdorchen, and this is THE MOMENT OF TRUTH, the bullethole in the forehead of extreme capitalist media.Did you all hear about how President Clinton was humiliated the other day? Yeah, the Republican controlled Senate defeated the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. And that somehow humiliated Clinton. It was a big embarrassment. That's what the capitalist media said. Over and over. Clinton was humiliated. It was the biggest humiliation for a President since Woodrow Wilson failed to pass the Treaty of Versailles. Because somewhere there's this Presidential humiliation gauge, I think it's called the Bobbit scale, and Woodrow Wilson scored a 65 on it and Clinton scored a 66. They all said, "He's humiliated, it's an embarrassment." The chief editor of Newsweek magazine said, "He looked like an idiot." So I guess it was a big embarrassment for Clinton. Somehow he just had egg all over his face.
But why? Why was it a humiliation?
Did you ever see the Simpsons where Homer goes to the bank and pretends to be Mr Burns?
"Hello, I'm Mr Burns, and I would like to take out all my money, please."
Okay. What's your first name, Mr Burns?
"I don't know."
That's what the capitalist media sounded like. "Mr Clinton was extremely embarrassed."
Why's that?
"I don't know."
Clinton was humiliated in the same way as someone who asks for change and is tricked into bending down to try and pick up a quarter that's glued to the sidewalk. What humiliation! But, y'know, this might be just my opinion, because maybe the people I hang out with are simply more mature or more sophisticated than the friends of the head editor of Newsweek magazine or the circle of people around most of the journalistic geniuses of extreme capitalist media, but I somehow feel that when someone glues a quarter to the pavement and then laughs triumphantly when some sap tries to pick it up, I tend to feel that the prankster is, in fact, way more of an asshole than the victim of the prank. I see the guy laughing, like, "Ah ha! That guy tried to pick up the quarter!" And I think, god, get a life. And if there are a bunch of reporters around him going, "Man tries to pick up glued down quarter, suffers biggest humiliation since Woodrow Wilson," I think, Jesus, what dumbasses.
And the fact that the Republicans glued not something trivial like a quarter nor even something just domestically symbolic like some do-nothing health care bill but rather an internationally symbolic treaty that could affect the political, military and environmental future of the planet, well, for them and the journalists to crow and point at the humiliation of the supporter of such a treaty is just ill, mentally and spiritually ill. And that the journalists saw this as some kind of black eye for Clinton just reveals how detached they are from the substance of any discourse. They don't even know how to pretend to care about the substance of an issue anymore. The thing that matters to them is how the upshot of any public debate is reflected in what they suppose to be the public perception of the figures involved. Which allows people like Cokey Roberts and Sam Donaldson to exist, so-called "news analysts" who analyze how decisions should affect the popularity of politicians rather than how they actually affect the human beings the government is supposedly of, by and for.
And let me stress SHOULD affect public opinion. Because Clinton's humiliation was announced to the public. It wasn't like people started saying what a dope he looked like and then the press caught the buzz off the street. No. The press considered Clinton's being tripped up by Senate procedure a humiliation, and they decided to tell us all how humiliated we should think he was.
The fact is that no one but government players, including the most highly paid, hence out of touch, US journalists, saw the defeat of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty as some kind of humiliation for Clinton and the Democrats. Most of the world wasn't paying attention to Clinton's supposed 2-year badgering of the Senate to bring up the treaty, and thus they didn't consider the rushed, debateless defeat of the treaty as the Senate "calling Clinton's bluff." What the public saw was a treaty on nuclear weapons, which are considered by simple folk to be very dangerous, brought up and rushed through without enough time for reasonable debate, and certainly without time for public debate or even the consideration that the public might be INTERESTED in the treaty -- the public saw this treaty railroaded through and defeated by the same idiots who shut down the government and forced us to pay millions of dollars to sit through Monicagate. They saw Clinton anything but humiliated at his press conference the next day, beating the Senate with their own stick, the rest of the civilized world vocally condemning the moronic Senate's decision.
And then what did the press say? "Republican Senate suffers worst humiliation since Clinton did yesterday?" Nope. Why not? Who knows? Maybe taking a beating in the world press and in public opinion isn't as embarrassing as being tricked by a legislative procedure and having some rich reporters find out about it.
Well, it doesn't matter anyway, cuz the Pentagon just came out with a study that says nuclear tests are perfectly safe. Yep, see, a long time ago, just after hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians were sacrificed on the altar of "victory through technological superiority," the military, thinking that it might want to use nuclear weapons in future wars, decided to test the effects of nuclear explosions on human beings by having US soldiers hunkered down during nuclear bomb tests and then immediately marching them through the wasted terrain. This week the Pentagon announced that it has found no link between participation in those early tests and increased likelihood of cancer or early death. Now, we should certainly trust the Pentagon on this. After all, the press isn't questioning it. And maybe the tests were safe. I mean, the military probably kept them secret for so long because the tests revealed that nuclear weapons really don't hurt you. They wouldn't even release the exposed soldiers' medical records to their next of kin, so afraid were they that the world would find out that having a nuclear bomb explode near you is no more of a health hazard than being splashed with cream soda.
That's why the Pentagon hasn't used nuclear weapons since WWII. Not because the public wouldn't stand for it. Not because the resulting contamination would make it unweildy for capitalists to redevelop the leveled property. Not because of the danger to US troops. The Pentagon didn't use nuclear weapons in Korea, Indochina, Iraq, Libya, Grenada, Panama, Nicaragua, Chile, Afganistan or Sudan because nuclear weapons are just too safe. They actually leave the enemy in better health than before. In fact, the deaths of the Japanese civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were actually due to an epidemic of sushi contamination that just happened to strike at the same time as the bombs were dropped.
The Pentagon has kept this terrible secret for the last 55 years. But now they've come clean. They've been lying to us up to this point, but now they're telling us the truth. So we should trust them. Because they are now suddenly trustworthy. I don't know why. Everything just suddenly changed one day.
And it was one weird day. It must have been the same day Senator John McCain turned into a socialist. Yeah, when fellow Republican presidential campaigner Elizabeth Dole announced she was dropping out of the race because she couldn't raise enough money, McCain, a big proponent of campaign finance reform, decried the injustice of it all, saying that lack of money was "the wrong reason" to have to abandon one's campaign to be President.
At last, another person who has read the same great work of socialist literature I have, the one that says all are created equal and endowed with the inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. McCain thinks that anyone, regardless of how much money he or she has, should have an equal opportunity to run for President. And surely he must feel the same way about people who want educations, who want to be doctors, who want to live in decent houses, who want medical attention. It's only logical for me to assume that McCain would hold that something as sacred as medical care should be at least as accessible as airtime for political advertisements. Surely Mr McCain agrees. I think his plan goes like this. Every year, all wealth in the US would be put into a big bucket, and then distributed evenly to all citizens. Then everyone, whether it was Steve Forbes or Joe Sixpack, could use that money on his or her own campaign for office. No one could give anyone else any of their money for the purpose of financing a campaign. You could use it for any other purpose, though. You could even open an IRA, or invest in the stock market. You could start your own business! A little mom and pop oil company to compete with the merged Exxon and Mobil corporations. But anyone running for office could use only his or her own money, and since all would have been given an equal amount, everyone would be financially equal, and no one would have to drop out because of lack of funds. It's egalitarian economics John McCain style, and I like it. In fact, I'll certainly be examining McCain's red white and blue version of socialism as Campaign 2000 progresses.
In the meantime, remember: a Saturday morning without the truth is like a day without your healthy daily dose of Pentagon-approved nuclear radiation. This has been mejeffdorchen with THE MOMENT OF TRUTH.
Notice: The copyright on these essays will only be invoked if someone besides Jeff Dorchen tries to make a profit with them or uses them without giving Jeff credit.
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