Episode 16: The Enemy Of Our Enemy Is Our Enemy

If you can't quite make them out, that's Rummy on the left pressing the flesh
of his good buddy Saddam back when Iraq was in the middle of an eight-year war with Iran.
He's such a flirt.

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"We could slow the aging process if it had to work its way through Congress."
- Will Rogers

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Faith In Our Fathers
*Monsignor John G. Woolsey, a popular priest on Manhattan's Upper East Side, was convicted for stealing from his parish's funds for at least seven years. No, not that priest in Bridgeport. This one admitted to taking over $50,000, but the total amount may have exceeded $800,000. The judge said he considered probation, but wound up sentencing Woolsey to one to four years. Monsignor Woolsey apparently missed a salient point of the experience, saying, "I have felt the sting of comments when I was down," adding that he would be more conscious of the pain of others in difficulty. He then compared himself to Moses.

*Retired pastor John Skehan of the St. Vincent Ferrer Catholic Church in Delray Beach was arrested and charged with grand theft in excess of $100,000. His replacement, Father Francis Guinan, was similarly charged, but he's skipped town. No, these aren't the guys from Bridgeport or Manhattan. These are alleged to have swiped the cash from collections at the church and spent it in casinos in The Bahamas and Vegas. Guinan also gave his girlfriend school tuition money for her son, while Skehan owned a condo and a pub in Kilkenny, Ireland. Who knew the priesthood could be so fun?

*In September, the Vatican excommunicated Archbishop Emmanuel Milingo after he installed four married men as bishops. The cleric was already under observation, given that he had married a Korean acupuncturist in a ceremony conducted by the Reverend Sun Myung Moon. He had earlier complained about "intolerable restrictions" placed upon him by the Vatican and its "lack of appreciation" for his gifts as an exorcist. Not that the Church has anything against exorcism - it just didn't like the way Milingo incorporated African beliefs into the ritual.

*Speaking of fathers, Mel Gibson walked his daughter down the aisle in a private church he had built on his Malibu estate. Then he went to Oklahoma for a preview showing of his new movie about the collapse of the Maya Empire. He wore a mask and a wig so he "wouldn't be a distraction." The ABC News website reported that Mel fell off the wagon shortly after leaving rehab, when he was seen drinking beer at a barbeque joint with a couple of adoring blondes. Apparently ABC News was short of things to investigate.

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What Were They Thinking?
*In their white-hot promotion of Katie Couric as their evening news anchor, CBS circulated their promotional magazine Watch with a photo of their ascendent star. While certainly attractive, Couric is of understandably maternal proportions at 49, but the doctored picture whittled her down to something between a size 2 and zero.
*For the latest season of the reality show Survivor, the producers decided to form their "tribes" on the basis of race - white, black, Asian, and Hispanic. Way to promote understanding in a troubled time, CBS!
*The makers of a new Red Bull-type energy drink had a lightning bolt of inspiration when it came time to name it. It is marketed as Cocaine. The company's website, drinkcocaine.com, states that they don't advocate drug use, and provides recipes for cocktails with such names as Cocaine Snort and Cocaine Blast.
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Was It Good For You?
The New York Times reported that "Three masked men robbed a suburban Atlanta sex shop after restraining the employees with black fur handcuffs and silver leg irons taken from the store shelves. No one was hurt." Not even a little spanking?

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Moving Right Along
*The trumpeted "compromise" agreement with the Bush administration over legislation governing the interrogation of terrorism detainees proved to be less than wobbly. Let's be very clear: Dubya wanted the absolute right to transport suspected terrorists to secret prisons, to subject those suspected terrorists to any abuse dark ingenuity might devise, to deny those suspects access to families and legal representation, and to keep those suspects in captivity until they are forgotten.
It shouldn't be difficult to understand how wrong that is. But however principled Senators McCain, Warner, and Graham may have been in mounting their objections, they caved. By any meaningful standard, Bush got exactly what he wanted, as anyone who read far enough into the details of the news stories could see. In the end, Bush was given leave to stipulate by executive order which interrogation techniques are acceptable, and , by extension, which provisions of the Geneva Convention may or may not apply, according to the Boy-King George.

Perhaps it doesn't matter. Politicians will continue their playing-to-the-balcony jibber-jabber to constituents who move their lips when they listen and hear only code words. The Christians of the Right will continue to ignore the anti-Christian horrors being perpetuated in their names. The C.I.A. will continue to follow the right-wing agenda it has pursued throughout sixty years of both Democratic and Republic administrations, employing abuse, torture, abduction, rendition, and assassination as it always has. And, as Senator McCain has reason to know, the existence of the Geneva Convention won't stop members of the world's armies from their eternal violations of humanity.

Now the Speaker of the House and his Majority Leader can return to such vile utterances as:
"The same terrorists who plan to harm innocent Americans would be coddled, if we followed the Democratic plan." (J. Dennis Hastert, Republican of Illinois)
"I wonder if they're more interested in protecting the terrorists than protecting the American people." (John A. Boehner, Republican of Ohio)

*All that was forgotten when fresh red meat was thrown at the feet of the ever-famished media and political operatives of every stripe with the Foley scandal. In case you've been away, Representative Mark Foley, Republican of Florida, resigned after publication of explicitly sexual e-mails he sent to young boys in the Congressional page program. In the space of 48 subsequent hours, he announced through his lawyer that he was entering alcohol rehab, that he is gay, and that he was abused by a representative of his church - not that that was an excuse, although he thought he'd mention it.

With Foley now out of touch, the spotlight swung to those members of the House leadership who, it turned out, had prior warnings of Foley's interaction with underage boys. Courageous and loyal to a fault, Majority Leader Boehner (see above) edged back into the wings as if his boss had become radioactive, saying the Foley mess was Hastert's problem. Thomas A. Reynolds, fourth in the Republican hierarchy, said "I did what most of us would have done in the workplace. I heard something. I took it to my supervisor." Striking right to the heart of the matter, Representative Ray LaHood of Illinois proclaimed that "This is a political problem and we need to step up and do something dramatic." Words like "ethics" and "morality" did not spring to his mind.

No doubt they all choose to brush aside the reminders that Foley is the third Republican congressman to leave office in scandal within the past year, and a fourth, Bob Rey of Ohio, has agreed not to seek re-election, given his guilty plea for dealings with influence-peddler Jack Abramoff.

While the Family Values Party was dealing with all this (and trying to blame it on Democrats), a rash of tragic events in rural schools across the country crashed into our consciousness. Most horrifying was the massacre of six Amish schoolgirls by a subhuman whose supplies included ropes, clamps and K-Y Jelly. He didn't get around to using them. But quickly submerged in our collective memory was the 15-year-old boy who brought two guns to a school in Cazenovia, Wisconsin a few days earlier and fatally shot the principal; the 15-year-old boy who returned to the school in North Las Vegas from which he had been expelled but fled with his AK-47 before capture; the 53-year-old man who took six girls hostage two days before that in a high school in Bailey, Colorado, sexually assaulted them, and killed one; the 27-year-old man in Vermont who shot two teachers and his ex-girlfriend's mother. And so on.

Despite this record and the many episodes preceding it, the silence from Washington was deafening. Obviously, the common elements here are men and boys and their guns. But our representatives, most of them bought and paid for by the National Rifle Association or simply terrified of their power, dare not speak the clear and past-present need: stricter gun control.

On just this evidence, our Congress can be fairly characterized as harboring a collection of blowhards, crooks, fatheads, perverts, gasbags, drunks, thugs, wimps, bullies, and religious wingnuts to rival any in our history. There are a few decent human beings of both parties sprinkled among them to provide cover, but we could do much, much better.
We probably won't.
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The End Is Near
For further evidence that the end of the American Century is nigh, consider these notes from my last visit to Faux City (I was paid to go):
"Outside the window of my no-name hotel is the Eiffel Tower, sitting atop the Paris Opera House and a fragment of Versailles. An electric sign across the street endlessly flashes, 'Titantic Sinks Nightly!'. Opposite is Lake Como, with fountains synchronized to perform a duet with recordings by that blind Italian tenor. Down the road are a Moorish palace, Monte Carlo, the Great Pyramid, an exploding volcano, the Statue of Liberty, the Chrysler Building, the Brooklyn Bridge, and a good chunk of the Piazzo San Marco, with gondolas. Last time we were in Venice, we overheard a woman say of the Grand Canal, 'This is almost like the one in Las Vegas." Why leave home? Vegas is a wide, wide world.
"Big news (that week) has been about Roy - of Seifried & - getting mangled by one of his tigers. He's been playing with 600-pound jungle cats for over 35 years and one finally bit him. What are the odds? The wailing and rending of garments is deafening.
"My job here is to eat at fabulous restaurants all week, twice a day. These are the Vegas branches of megastar chefs on the order of Wolfgang Puck, Todd English, Bobby Flay, Jean-Georges Vongwhatzit, Emeril Legrasse, and their ilk. Most of them either know I'm coming or figure it out when I'm spotted furiously scribbling notes. I'm treated like Brangelina, offered off-menu tidbits, urged to try better wines, showered with truffles and foie gras and osetra caviar. I hate when that happens. The downside is that I might explode after the next tasting menu.
"If you want to re-gain a youthful bounce in your step, visit a nursing home. If you want to feel like George Clooney or Catherine Zeta-Jones, take a stroll down The Strip at high noon. The tenth 300-pound Middle American in a tank top and shorts should do it for you.
"If, on the other hand, you care to view acres of magnificently proportioned female flesh, walk the same street at midnight. Who cares if it's surgically enhanced? And some of them aren't even hookers."