Aquarian Weekly 3/20/02 REALITY CHECK

THE DICK CHENEY WORLD TOUR

We can all rest easy now that Egyptian President, Hosni Mubarak is on board for the long overdue house cleaning that will be stomping through an Iraqi outpost very soon. Seeing how Egypt is mostly a satellite of Israel and its plummeting tourist numbers, Mubarak’s approbation is not nearly as newsworthy as the fact that the vice president has decided to come out of his hermetically sealed hibernation tank to grace the Middle East with his notorious presence.

It’s all part of the 2002 Dick Cheney World Tour, or more to the point, Arabian tour, where he will entertain the insane jabbering of atavistic patriarchs waxing poetic on anti-Semitism and crude oil prices, which have been steadily rising over the past weeks since our president started upping the ante on these haughty catch phrases of his.

Not that anyone at the time it was uttered seemed to mind the tasty allegory found in Junior’s pithy, “axis of evil” comment. In fact, if you can find a congressman or news commentator with a modicum of pride left in Washington these days, one might even say the crazy bastard nailed it on the head.

Fuck Iraq, and any dumbasses that still find themselves trapped inside of it. How many years of this pathetic bullshit are we supposed to stomach before someone with a pair of steel rocks puts the fear of Allah in Saddam Hussein?

Fuck Iraq, and any dumbasses that still find themselves trapped inside of it. How many years of this pathetic bullshit are we supposed to stomach before someone with a pair of steel rocks puts the fear of Allah in Saddam Hussein?

Captain Shoe-in is just the man for the job. His father failed. His predecessor, the Minister of Fun obviously couldn’t hack it. He has the blessing of these outrageous approval numbers and no one appears to care about Enron ending civilization anymore.

But I am way off the path here.

There is no truth to the reports that on Dick Cheney’s last visit to these shores he begged the president’s daddy to ramrod the scud express into Baghdad as acting chairman of Desert Storm. Cheney is a man of varied foreign policy skills, and one of the reasons why the Bush people pushed the Texas governor to add the old man to the ticket two summers ago.

But some people claim Cheney never advised the first Bush to “cut the head off the wounded reptile.” That was the boastful talk of patriotic crazies who once found it necessary to report that General Patton begged Harry Truman to use the U.S. Army to plow through Poland and up into Stalin’s living room to “personally kick that son of a bitch in the ass.”

Cheney never had it in him, but that’s what Jordan’s King Abdullah would have the traveling UPI geeks believing. Except for the glaring fact that Jordan was so overwhelmed eleven years ago, they had Syria and Iran thinking they would apply for a Euro-NFL franchise.

It was nice of the king to offer his meaningless opinion on the matters of American war policy though.

Here’s what he doesn’t get: The vice president’s eleven-state Terrorpaloooza road show has two faces.

There is the diplomatic “smooth the locals and keep the fracturing coalition intact for the impending big hit”, traveling photo op. Followed closely by the more intriguing, “let’s cut the crapolla chief and get down to the Nitty Gritty” stop off.

The Nitty would be the current “second phase” of this infinite War on Terror, not including the Anaconda thing that has been unfortunately running the bills up way past the spec limit in what’s left of Afghanistan. The pussy footing with the Philippines and the impossible mess going on in Korea not withstanding, the real crux of what is left of that gaping hole in lower Manhattan and that chunk of the Pentagon missing over by the Potomac has bore a great big, juicy target on Iran and Iraq.

The Gritty would be a not-so-subtle propaganda mission to pit certain Arab nations against each other based on economic concerns and desperate security measures in the region, especially the security of the Palestinian state that is about three more car bombs from extinction if the gloves are truly off for the Israeli Defense Force.

In times of foreign military action, it is important for a nation to not spread itself too thin. I think this is best understood not by history scholars, but by those ruthless bastards from my high school days who used to sit next to me around a large kitchen table and play RISK until the last bloodied man was standing.

God, I miss that.

But once again, I cannot stay on track.

And that’s probably a good thing, considering that this column has become a bit of a dangerous mark on my permanent record in these times high paranoia. It’s important to make my comments seem random and half-baked, loaded with carefully placed expletives and wry references to board games.

Divide and conquer.

The oldest one in the book.

But make no mistake here. Dick Cheney is the perfect angel of mercy to prelude the harbinger of doom. Who that will be, is anyone’s guess. Not even my stoolie, Georgetown is coming clean on that one, and I wouldn’t be bold enough to venture a guess.

Some of the right people will tell you these latest skewed ravings coming from the woefully out of touch U.N. Security Council about a resolution that “affirms a vision” of an official Palestinian state in the borders of Israel, where the Jews and Palestinians will live in beatific harmony, is a sign that something concrete in the way of missile tonnage is coming soon.

Now even Cheney himself is forced to consider this lunacy out on the front lines, while his boss riles up the American citizenry with talk of nuclear bombardment and Wrath of God 101.

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Aquarian Weekly 3/6/02 REALITY CHECK

BATTLE LINE AMERICA

I think it’s important to point out that Donald Rumsfeld has gone insane. His Meet the Press, 2/24/02 appearance frightened me in ways that is hard to discern at the moment, but suffice it to suggest that he is clinically mad and currently has the power of two Caesars and Benito Mussolini thrown in for good measure.

No American citizen should have to suffer through anything like that without a network banner warning or a scrolling marquee underneath. Jesus, I felt like those crazed farmers after the “War of the Worlds” broadcast for most of the morning before a phone call from Georgetown jerked me back to reality.

“See that beautiful maniac, Rumsfeld?” he said with preternatural glee. “Goddamnit he’s good.”

I only broach this because my concern is always with national interest and not with the radical impulses of the foreign press. Rumor of the Pentagon leaking false stories doesn’t alarm my journalistic sensibilities, mainly because I sold them not long after college for a case of Genesee Cream Ale and a moped. On the contrary, I believe the more unstable the voice, the better.

It is apparently not bothering enough Americans that the events of 9/11 has given the government a free reign to slowly turn this country into subtle forms of marshal law, an Orwellian spectacle of never ending military missions and infinite wars.

There were times when the loose-cannon approach served Ronald Reagan well. The Soviets viewed the Reagan people as capable of anything, and that’s how Ronnie liked it. UN officials were sure the president would burn the planet to cinder on what they dubbed his more severe “incontinent days”. And by 1986, Muammar Kadafi found himself waking up in the middle of the night soaked with sweat and screaming about John Wayne gremlins gnawing on his testicles with nightmarishly penetrating fangs.

Ordinarily appearing on a network news program as a jabbering lunatic would be advantageous during times of global crisis, but it appears that Rumsfeld is making major decisions on restructuring civil liberties under the auspices that we are perpetually under attack. With the preponderance of this latest blind national acceptance of anything that comes down from the Pentagon or the FBI or the CIA these days, we had better be damn sure those signing off on them aren’t frothing at the mouth.

I don’t believe Rumsfeld is aware that he is loosing his mind, and he doesn’t appear to be merely a blubbering ass like Jesse Helms or Ted Kennedy. Normally, I would blame his behavior on “interview stress”, caffeine overload or bad briefing, like someone forgetting to remind the Secretary of Defense that the Pentagon has been bilking the American people since its inception, and it probably isn’t a good idea to try and sell mercenaries as choir boys on holiday when the red light is on over the camera.

The truth is there is a quagmire in Washington now that will be hard to siphon with one session of congress or one election, and since the secretary of defense is appointed, and not elected, and the current commander and chief is going nowhere, we are confronted with serious issues.

Some congressmen have already begun running for reelection by blaming the slag economy on the millions a day we’re spending on super jets cruising New York Harbor and the circumference of the Beltway. Others take credit for riding the wave of sudden hysteria into what will no doubt mean the kind of military spending that drove the national debt into NASA proportions during the 80s’.

But it will be hard for Democrats to get a sniff while this near untouchable Texan cowboy is mucking up the oval office with letters to the parents of kids who keep getting charred on senseless military missions or the pink slips for “special agents” who were pulling down six figures a year not to find Osama bin Laden.

It is apparently not bothering enough Americans that the events of 9/11 has given the government a free reign to slowly turn this country into subtle forms of marshal law, an Orwellian spectacle of never ending military missions and infinite wars.

Anyone whose career is dependant on the outcome of the next phase of this “war on terrorism” have to believe that if there is no concrete move on Iraq by summer’s end it becomes an ever harder to sell to the American people, the crumbling Arab coalition and the Pentagon itself.

Rumsfeld’s Sunday morning television stint notwithstanding, there is a certain air of John Mitchell bluster to his press conferences that set off alarms here at The Desk. This “holier than thou” Vince Lombari shtick has gone from wonderfully eccentric to annoyingly pedantic. His snide remarks broke up press row when Afghani caves were being smoked daily for two months, but in the glare of this latest military hiatus they sound like juvenile smoke screens.

Meanwhile Muslim women are being molested at airports and any protest against racial profiling is suddenly a hint of un-American activity.

Tom Ridge, director of the Office of Homeland Security, has taken that title to filter every possible panic the FBI sniffs to the point of hysteria. Of course there will be threats at major events, the Super Bowl, the Winter Olympics, a Britney Spears afternoon jog. But what Americans don’t know is that this has been happening for decades, and because your government failed to protect us initially, we are stumbling toward a third world police state.

What September has done is raise the level of terror, its exact directive. Now we may be living in terror of our own government.

And this is a government currently being run domestically by attorney general, John Ashcroft, Ridge and Rumsfeld and Pentagon officials who have been on an unnatural level of readiness for six months. This is apparently too much pressure of for these boys, and if not, they really ought to prepare their spokesmen better.

The press cannot be trusted to uncover the truth on any of this. The news channels have been reduced to beauty pageants and piss fights between the left and right, and the New York Times is now soliciting unmarried freelancers to cover Middle East events since the video slaughter of Wall Street Journal reporter, Daniel Pearl.

It is not a safe time to be an editor and chief when the good reporters are asked to stand down and wear flag pins and the freelance warriors are taking their lives in their hands just showing up for work.

For me it will be a comfortable ride, and I will not be swayed. I’ve fortified Fort Vernon and put the cats on full alert. And thank the gods of journalism I cloak myself in this weekly column so I don’t have to work press conferences or damned piker leads any longer.

Oh yeah, and my wife’s bullhorn privileges have been suspended until further notice.

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Aquarian Weekly 2/20/02 REALITY CHECK

INSIDE THE ENRON FIASCOA Special Report From The Desk

“This ain’t about this that what where or how This is about the freaks doing everything they wanna do Now.” – Prince Rogers Nelson

With very little funds and even less disposable time, the Reality Check New & Information staff was able to track down several reliable sources in an ongoing investigation into the wildly popular Enron fiasco. The subjects, ranging from low-level insiders with the beleaguered corporation to peripheral clients of the dubious Arthur Anderson Accounting Firm, relayed the following details under their own volition. No one was paid, drugged or coerced into coming forth nor were they necessarily direct victims of any presently discussed alleged corporate and accounting malfeasance.

As is the ritual around here, the bulk of the information was edited for content by myself and sent to each individual contributor to either reject or qualify. It is important to note that all interested parties stood by the following story.

Late in the winter of 2000 the Enron Corporation purchased huge tracks of land in the Alaskan wildlife area to ostensibly build an amusement park to be run by current vice president, Dick Chaney under the supervision of Greenpeace. But it was merely a front for illegal drilling and gun running to be overseen by Chinese naval captains who were using kickbacks from prominent investors to torture Tibetan monks and fund forced abortions.

Whitman was on a private Enron jet with our Zippy Smith the day a cub reporter from the Fort Worth Telegram called Enron executives to rebut a rumor that the company never existed and the CEO of a multi-billion dollar energy concern was nothing more than a Liza Minelli impersonator from South Florida.

A gentleman, whom we shall dub, Zippy Smith handled the clandestine negotiations and claims that one of the key investors was a high-ranking government official whose main responsibility was the recruitment of Serbian refugees to act as a diversion at the Russian border.

It was during this time, according to Smith’s estimation, that nearly a third of Enron’s donations to the Clinton administration were used to develop specific levels of germ warfare in the basement of a Pizza Hut outside the city of Khobar in Saudi Arabia.

Another source, known to us as Dark Horse, confirmed much of Smith’s allegations, but made it clear that Enron was never officially registered as a corporation at all. From the start, former CEO Kenneth Lay, recently in the news for pleading the fifth during congressional hearings, was implemented at the helm as a patsy.

According to Dark Horse, Lay was a notorious cross-dresser and charter member of Divas Key West; a Florida based female impersonator entertainment company. During the Gulf War, Lay worked as an assistant to Dick Chaney and was expected to barter deals with every rogue element in OPEC, including the overtly effeminate stepfather of Osama bin Laden. But a third source close to the operation tells us that Lay was never there, and that his name was being used unbeknownst to him while working feverishly on his award-winning Liza Minelli routine.

This source, to whom we must refer to as Chunky, claims to have been present at several meetings in which Chaney ordered around a diminutive Arab boy whom he routinely called Kenny. It was this kid’s job to answer any phone calls regarding “the Alaskan thing.”

The plot thickens from here.

Zippy Smith explicitly confirms the Dark Horse tale and told us that around this time the Bush sr. administration was trying to outfox Saddam Hussein by creating fictitious energy concerns. The historically squeaky clean, Arthur Anderson accounting firm was hired with obscene defense monies to create the phony corporations from thin air under the guise of national security.

It turns out that one of the surviving names was Enron, and during the Internet boom of the mid-90s’ several recently indicted accountants in the employ of Arthur Anderson began creating a solvent company from five-year old fabricated books.

Our Arthur Anderson source echoed the story while adding that all of the documents originally drawn up included the names of deceased land barons from the late 1800s’. These are the papers key AA accountants shredded during the final days of Enron.

It was around this time that Kenneth Lay darted back into the picture after his alleged incarceration on trumped up charges of public nudity and male prostitution. Both Smith and Dark Horse agree that Lay’s subsequent suit against the Monroe County police was mysteriously dismissed. Apparently an unnamed character witness later identified as Cliffy Boy revealed that Lay had been merely working undercover as a correspondent for 60 Minutes.

CBS executives could not be reached for comment. It was getting late and we were hungry.

Dark Horse intimates that the mysterious Cliffy Boy was the late J. Clifford Baxter, former vice chairman of Enron who was found dead of an apparent suicide outside his home in Sugar Land, Texas, but is vehement in his claim that “this was no suicide, Bub.”

The question raised several times throughout the investigation was how were the employees involved in the decade-long scam?

Dark Horse told us that the original employees were in on the scheme, but left soon after unloading their phony stocks at record highs. Many of the original members of the Enron Project used the fast cash to buy shares in the Houston Astros and named the stadium after the bogus company for laughs.

The governor of Texas at the time, now president, George W. Bush, former owner of the Texas Rangers and a known Astros hater, threatened to blow the whistle on Enron, but the project had been his father’s puppy and continued to rake in billions for the state. So Bush decided instead to use blackmail to procure ridiculous campaign funds in exchange for announcing Dick Chaney as his running mate.

The new employees were merely on a need to know basis, which didn’t seem like trouble until the NASDAQ collapse in July of 2000.

By September of that year Enron needed new blood and started working with the CIA, pillaged by budget cuts and mostly bored stiff, to deal with underground real estate groups in the purchasing of land throughout the US and Canada. Zippy tells us the plan was to drill for oil beneath the radar of the soon to be doomed Environmental Protection Agency.

Come fall, all that mattered little when G.W. outspent John McCain in the GOP primaries and squeaked by the general election to become President of the United States and appoint party lackey, Christie Todd Whitman to head of the EPA.

Whitman was on a private Enron jet with our Zippy Smith the day a cub reporter from the Fort Worth Telegram called Enron executives to rebut a rumor that the company never existed and the CEO of a multi-billion dollar energy concern was nothing more than a Liza Minelli impersonator from South Florida.

This prompted a frenzied mass selling off of all phony stock and a cover-up worthy of Wall Street, throwing thousands of innocents into sudden poverty and a cadre of boring pundits from the drone of actuary hell into our living rooms nightly. Not to mention the millions that will be spent trying these freaks in several and varied courts.

With apologies to that drunken fossil, Paul Harvey, now you know the rest of the story.

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Aquarian Weekly 1/23/02 REALITY CHECK

WHAT NOW?

“Regiments are costly articles everywhere, and more so in this country than any other under the sun.” – John Adams

There is the assumption among the literary set that most people sit when attempting to read. If for some reason you find you are the exception to this, it is time you grabbed a squat.

The United States is prepared to take $42 billion of your money to rebuild a country they just spent an estimated $4 billion destroying. By all measures, this is a whopping bill for dismantling an Arab mafia.

Sorry, I’m wrong.

Afghani women can now wear lipstick, Tora Bora bars can restock their jukeboxes with Elvis records and the US Army has successfully proven once again that without the help of a global power behind rebel factions, most Arab nations fold like cheaply tailored Boy Scout tents.

Yes, and the transport of the 50 Taliban and al Qaeda detainees, currently being held at the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, could not have been cheap.

The stockholders of this republic needed to be consulted on this.

We’re funding 12-hour airplane trips with two guards per man, jail cells furnished with handy Korans, televisions and exercise bikes? That’s got to run in the high six figures for each guy. And this does not include a lengthy trial vehemently protested by Ed Asner.

I think a public vote was in order: High six figures for transport and lodging or $45 per man to put a bullet in their heads where they stood. This price could have been negotiated down, if they were to dig their own graves for easy dumping.

Sure the options range from disturbing to brutal, but this is a damaged economy and we were told that survival is the order of the day.

I’m referring to domestic survival here.

Now that the rabid purchasing of American flags has subsided, the US economy is on a record roll of futility. Last year, for the first time since I began sucking air, the rate of inflation reversed upon itself. This is the economic equivalent of “Planet of the Apes”. It just doesn’t happen.

This Enron fiasco is so patently evil and corrupt it threatens the future of corporate embezzlement, inside trading, or anything that dupes the middle class into droned mediocrity for the remainder of this century.

There is a web of lies and financial indiscretions, and then there is Armageddon. The good people at Enron careened into the latter. And there is very solid evidence suggesting its malfeasance is not unique.

After all, this is a country fueled by corporate greed.

What shall we do without it?

Things are so bad right now by the time you finish reading this sentence another thousand people will be out of work. Apparently not even K-Mart will survive this, which will adversely affect the wardrobes of millions of mid-westerners.

Lord Almighty, even the executive producer of ESPN Radio New York is hounding me with poetic e-mails about $100 worth of Miami Dolphins paraphernalia I’ve owed him for two years of bad gambling, even though that wretched team mistook the first round of the play-offs for a goddamn bye week.

Wars are supposed to be good for economies.

What the hell is going on?

So now that the tears have dried and people can stand on planks above Ground Zero and see the results of the New War, and Osama bin Laden’s corpse is making its way across the Mediterranean Sea on a motorized dingy, or whatever wildly misguided intelligence you’d like to believe, it is becoming apparent that our president is about to be in the same spot his father found himself a decade ago.

The CIA allegedly has plenty of evidence that the Iraqi government, or regime, or madman dictator, aided and bankrolled the attack on this nation. This is not a subject of debate. It is a given. What is before the current administration is that if the United States actually continues this War on Terrorism it will have to do so in Baghdad or it will be waltzing toward failure.

Either that or the state department can start taking requests for Dublin and a house cleaning of the IRA or perhaps a raid on Manila’s transcontinental drug cartel. But that seems even less likely than a chief executive with the last name Bush doing anything to upset the massive oil concerns in Saudi Arabia or inconveniencing the other nations of this precarious alliance currently thriving in terror central.

And if I can borrow the tired holiday advertising campaign that THE TERRORISTS HAVE ALREADY WON IF you don’t spend your money like a drunken sailor on doomsday, despite the stock market looking like a Dickensian workhouse…

THE TERRORISTS HAVE ALREADY WON IF…We continue to chase dead men around the Middle East. As covered extensively in this space, al Qaeda will not allow figureheads to fall into enemy hands to be humiliated by the Western Satan. They have long since assassinated them for the love of Allah. The remedy is to call their bluff by claiming we’ve already captured bin Laden and Mohammad Omar and have sentenced them to clean toilets in the Pentagon unto death.

THE TERRORISTS HAVE ALREADY WON IF… We spend five seconds listening to Senator Joseph Biden, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. His money-pit scheme to continue raiding caves and craters in Afghanistan with American troops is insanity. Get those kids out of there or face another Somalia farce, adding to the astronomical costs of lunatics idly waiting to form governments with third century BC, chieftain/war lord civic methods.

THE TERRORISTS HAVE ALREADY WON IF… We don’t completely abandon military presence in Pakistan before the impending nuclear piss fight with India turns the region into a smoking sinkhole. Its government is barely in control, and a war with a rabid neighboring enemy will cause American causalities and diplomatic troubles. Not to mention the costs.

At the current rate, we’ll be giving back that $400 a head in order to pay for this JohnWayne, macho hoedown.

Hey, vengeance is an expensive ride.

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