Ashcroft to Ashcroft
Dust to Dust
By Bryan Zepp Jamieson
7/26/02
htttp://www.zeppscommentaries.com/Humor/dust.htm
George is going on vacation, which means Wall Street can heave a sigh of relief. Their problems aren't over, not by a long shot, but every time George gives a speech about how he's going to solve the problems the market is having, the market drops like a butterfly in a flame thrower.
It's got to be embarrassing, for those Republicans capable of embarrassment. Here they are, they are supposed to be the party that is friendly to big business and capitalism, and very supportive. Remember all the self-congratulatory caws from the White House about how now we had a guy in charge who was a CEO (really clawed his way up the corporate ladder to get there, you understand) and understood the needs of businessmen. "The adults have returned to Washington" was the refrain.
Now, Wall Street looks at George and says, "He's one of us. We are SO screwed..."
Remember, George promised to run America like a business. It would be just our luck that this would be the one campaign promise that he kept.
Want the market to climb 2,000 points in one day? Just have George stand up and say he's sorry he stole the election, and that he wants to have Al Gore take over from here on out.
Someone ran an analysis of market performance during the first 18 months of a Presidency, going back to Hoover. The worst four were all Republicans, the best four all Democrats. FDR was the best, with a 55% improvement in the market in his first eighteen months. Granted, it didn't have anywhere to go but up. LBJ was a distant second, followed by Clinton.
Hoover was a distant second on the down side, what with the crash of 29 and the subsequent Great Depression. Those sorts of things would put a dent in anyone's economic track record.
The worst, by a two to one margin, is....
Oh, boy. Say, do you think we could get Al Gore in later today? I know it's eight o'clock at night, but maybe we want to beat the opening bell on the market tomorrow. Before something else happens.
Fortunately, there is an amusing distraction available, to get everyone's mind off the fact that as an economic powerhouse under the tutelage of the adult CEOs, we'll soon rival Chad.
John Ashcroft, who may well be the only incumbent in the US Senate to lose a re-election bid to a dead guy, came up with an exciting new volunteer work program called TIPS.
Now TIPS, for anyone who has been living in a cave, is a patriotic plan that will make America more secure and safer in this age of terrorism. Ashcroft wants 10 million patriots – roughly one in 28 Americans – to step forward and selflessly volunteer, or be volunteered by their employers, to snitch.
He wants postal workers, cable tv repairmen, plumbers, meter readers to all take note of anything unusual or suspicious, and report it in.
Ashcroft assures us that these would not be government-run secret police. Anyone thinking of the Gestapo, or East Germany's Stasi, can forget all that; that isn't what Crisco Ashcroft has in mind.
Ashcroft today assured one and all that the TIPS headquarters would not be keeping a database on people whose names were submitted for "special handling." No, nothing big brotherish or fascistic like that. What TIPS would do is gather the names and reports, and turn them over to the FBI, NSA and Homeland Security, and THEY would put them in databases. That's a lot better, isn't it?
No, Ashcroft's thinking of volunteers, members of the party who would monitor the activities of their neighbors and make sure they aren't doing anything disloyal, like criticizing capitalism, or praising German technology. They would watch to see who didn't applaud during the state of the union addresses in local bars, who didn't put out their flag on flag day, even who looked unimpressed at mention of the mayor's name.
Russia had something like that. It was called "The Party", and if you were a member, you were part of a privileged elite that was accountable to nobody. You could destroy careers and even lives on the slightest whim, with no more effort than wearing an expression of doubt when mentioning a name to your commissar.
One oddity is that the religious right and the libertarians are coming out against this idea. The religious right you can sort of see, since they don't like government programs. Libertarians are a bit of a surprise, because they believed that the government had been taken over by businessmen like themselves, and libertarians are incapable of thinking that businessmen could be oppressive or step on peoples' rights. That just isn't the free market, darn it.
Telling a libertarian that corporations are generally not inclined toward rights and freedoms for the consumers because it might impact profits is a bit like telling some dewy-eyed young missionary that if you read the bible, you discover that god not only created the earth and the universe, but he also created satan and all the evil in the earth and the universe. Both will have the same expression of hurt disbelief on their faces for a half second before they decide that you are crazy, a communist, and most likely dangerous to yourself, and report you to TIPS.
If you happen to be a seething mass of futile passive/aggressive anger, the type who hoards all slights, real and imagined, and fantasizes a lot about payback, then you will be perfect for TIPS. Make all those jerks who jacked you around CRAWL!!
You can see where people who like Ashcroft would be enthralled with the idea. People like that have lots of scores to settle, and are determined to make others live up to their patriotic ideal. Ashcroft will have no shortage of volunteers. And Ashcroft will love you, because every name you turn in validates his suspicions that the United States is crawling with spies and traitors.
Just to top it off, it seems there's an asteroid, 2 kilometers in diameter, that scientists think could hit the earth on February 1st, 2019. Two kilometers in diameter striking the earth at a combined speed of some 100,000 kilometers an hour translates roughly to, "don't bother painting the house." In fact, don't even bother cleaning it. You are dog food. Of course, all the dogs would be, as well...
Except, the scientists add, there's only a single chance in 250,000 that it will actually hit the earth.
Oh. So I sat down, and did some calculations. The chances of this thing – NT-7 is the sexy, sexy name they gave it – turning the planet into one big colostomy bag is roughly the same as that of George W reciting all of Lucky's soliloquy (Waiting for Godot) without stuttering or stammering once, from memory.
But it occurs to me that if George were to announce that he would be launched on a one way trip with a thermonuclear bomb and set it off to deflect NT-7 so it wouldn't even threaten earth that much, I bet the stock market would go up 2,000 points. In a day.
In the meantime, I'm calling TIPS tomorrow and reporting NT-7. Anything that threatens to turn the whole United States into a bowl of Alpo gravy slop should be brought to the attention of the authorities. And besides, it means I won't get blamed, seeing as how, just the day before the existence of NT-7 was announced, I spoke publically about an asteroid hitting the earth.
Coincidence? I think NOT? Obviously, it is my patriotic duty to turn myself in.
On things for sure: if Putsch and Ashcroft are our nation's future, I'm going to be rooting for NT-7. |
