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   The Top Ten Conservative Idiots (No. 161)
   June 28, 2004
   "F--- Yourself" Edition
   So, if you think some of the comments on this website are
   inappropriate or indecent, well... at least you can take comfort from
   the fact that we don't hold any high office in the government of the
   United States, unlike a certain person (1) who was caught changing the
   tone in Washington last week. But Dick Cheney wasn't the only idiot
   last week. There were also People Who Can't Handle The Truth (2) who
   are still pooping their collective pants over Michael Moore's new
   movie. And speaking of pants - or the lack thereof - check out former
   Republican Senate Candidate Jack Ryan (3) and conservative talk-show
   host Jon Matthews (10). Enjoy!

   1 Dick Cheney F-bomb
   There's an exciting new level of political discourse in town, and it's
   all thanks to Vice President Dick Cheney! For years, partisan
   activists such as ourselves have remained on the fringes of legitimate
   political debate partly due to our use of coarse and colorful
   language. But now it appears that Dick Cheney has blown down the
   barriers by dropping an F-bomb on the floor of the Senate. At a photo
   session last week Crashcart got into a heated debate with Sen. Patrick
   Leahy (D-VT) over the Democrats' investigations into Halliburton war
   profiteering. When Leahy retorted that Cheney was standing by
   Republicans who accused Democrats of being anti-Catholic, Cheney
   replied, "Fuck yourself." Yay! Fuck yourself! Fuck yourself! Go fuck
   yourself! Thank you, Dick Cheney, for lowering the bar for all of us
   partisan outsiders. Because if it's okay for the vice president to
   tell a senator to fuck himself on the floor of the Senate, it should
   be perfectly okay for a bunch of political hacks on a website to say
   it. Fuck yourself! (In an added comic twist, I should mention that the
   incident occurred on the same day the Senate passed the so-called
   "Defense of Decency" act. Ha ha.)

   2 People Who Can't Handle The Truth excessive spin excessive spin
   covering your ass hypocrisy
   Citizens United made the list last week for their appalling
   anti-Clinton ad which blamed the former president for terrorism. This
   time, along with Move America Forward (who also made the list last
   week), they're launching a campaign to get Michael Moore's Fahrenheit
   9/11 banned from cinemas. Not only that but Citizens United has
   complained to the FEC in an attempt to get the movie's advertising
   blocked under campaign finance laws. My, my. They're making an awful
   lot of fuss over something which they claim is nothing but lies. I
   mean, if it's such a blatant crock of shit, why don't they want people
   to go see it? Do they think that people aren't smart enough to make up
   their own minds, so Citizens United have to do it for them? Sounds to
   me like exactly the kind of intellectual elitism that Rush Limbaugh
   bemoans on a daily basis. And clearly the Bush administration has
   learned from the Richard Clarke incident and was trying to give
   Fahrenheit 9/11 as little publicity as possible last week - but one or
   two poisonous comments still oozed from various White House
   mouthpieces. Take Communications Director Dan Bartlett for example,
   who said, "I can speak for myself and I can speak for the President,
   and I can assure you that neither of us have seen ['Fahrenheit']...
   This is a film that doesn't require us to actually view it to know
   it's filled with factual inaccuracies." Oh really? What a shame they
   didn't have the same remarkable foresight when it came to Ahmed
   Chalabi's information on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

   3 Jack Ryan and Friends sex
   Poor Jack Ryan. The Republican running for Senate in Illinois has
   boldly gone where several other politicians have unfortunately gone
   before - into the dumpster of history after a sordid sex scandal. His
   wife, ex-Star Trek actress Jeri Ryan, claimed in divorce papers that
   Jack had taken her to at least three sex clubs, one "a bizarre club
   with cages, whips and other apparatus hanging from the ceiling."
   Sounds like Ken Starr's basement. According to Ryan, her husband
   "wanted me to have sex with him there, with another couple watching. I
   refused. [He] asked me to perform a sexual activity upon him, and he
   specifically asked other people to watch." Jack, for his part, first
   denied the charges, then came up with a variety of excuses which
   included blaming the vast left-wing conspiracy, hiding behind his
   "special needs" son, and - this is my favorite - saying, "I think my
   character has been proven by this. There's no breaking of any laws.
   There's no breaking of any marriage laws. There's no breaking of the
   Ten Commandments anywhere." I guess God forgot to add the one about
   "Thou Shalt Not Take Thy Wife To Sex Clubs Against Her Will And Then
   Lie About It When She Brings It Up During Thy Divorce." But whatever -
   if Jack Ryan wants to risk wining and dining his good lady wife in a
   BDSM parlor, that's his business. What's surprising, however, is the
   Clinton-bashing conservatives from Dennis Hastert to Bill O'Reilly who
   came forward to defend Mr. Ryan's similar sidestepping of the truth.
   I'm sorry, did I say surprising? I meant "entirely predictable."

   4 Team Bush hypocrisy hypocrisy excessive spin
   When MoveOn.org solicited entries for an anti-Bush ad competition and
   some random guy submitted an ad which compared Bush to Hitler, the
   right-wing had an absolute fit. Ed Gillespie called it "the worst and
   most vile form of political hate speech." Never mind that the ad was
   created by a private citizen, MoveOn had no intention of using it, and
   deleted it from their website. But now it seems that Team Bush are -
   in an extremely sneaky fashion - doing the exact same thing they
   lambasted MoveOn for doing. The official Bush/Cheney 2004 website put
   up a web ad last week that used part of the never-screened MoveOn ad
   in an effort to compare Democrats to Hitler. The ad begins with the
   teaser, "The Faces of John Kerry's Democratic Party" and shows, in
   sequence, Al Gore, Adolf Hitler, Howard Dean, Michael Moore, Dick
   Gephardt, Adolf Hitler (again), Al Gore (again), and finally, John
   Kerry. (I guess we can deduce from this that Al Gore is as bad as
   Hitler, whereas the others are only half as bad.) Presumably Team
   Bush's excuse is that they are trying to show how mean and nasty
   MoveOn is. And in that context it's perfectly okay to run an official
   ad on their official campaign website labeling Hitler as one of the
   "Faces of John Kerry's Democratic Party." Gee, whatever happened to
   "the worst and most vile form of political hate speech?"

   5 John Rowland dumb
   Connecticut governor John Rowland made the Top Ten list six months ago
   (see Idiots 139) after he came under investigation by federal
   prosecutors in a freebies-for-favors scandal. Among other things,
   Rowland had improvements made to his vacation cottage which were paid
   for by "politically appointed state employees, friends and a state
   contractor," and subsequently lied about it. The good news is that
   last week Rowland saw the writing on the wall and resigned before he
   could be impeached. As well as the improvements to his cottage, the
   Associated Press reported that "Rowland received cigars, champagne, a
   vintage Ford Mustang convertible, a canoe and free or discounted
   vacations from employees and friends - including some with state
   contracts." And so the once-rising star of the Republican party has
   sadly come crashing down to earth. After announcing his resignation,
   Rowland said, "I hope there have been times when I made you all
   proud." Well, yeah - there was that time you resigned, you corrupt
   bastard.

   6 Senate Republicans election stealing partisanship
   It seems that the Senate Republicans are getting a little worried that
   their boy in the White House might go down hard this November, so
   they're doing what they can to prop him up. Last week John Kerry was
   forced to interrupt his campaign and return to Washington in order to
   cast an important vote on funding health care benefits for veterans.
   But guess what? As soon as he got there, Republican leaders postponed
   the vote. Way to play politics with veterans' health care benefits,
   guys! But this isn't the first time Republicans have played politics
   with Senate business in an attempt to hobble John Kerry - the Bush
   Administration bashed the Democratic nominee recently for failing to
   return to Washington to vote on a proposal to extend unemployment
   benefits to jobless Americans. The bill missed passage by one vote,
   which sounds bad - until you learn that according to CNN, "one of the
   11 GOP senators who voted for the measure would have switched sides to
   defeat it if [Kerry] had been there to vote for it." Well, you know
   what that old conservative maxim says: If you can't beat 'em... cheat
   'em.

   7 Zell Miller partisanship
   Not so long ago, Zell Miller proclaimed, "I'm afraid that my old
   Democratic 'ties that bind' have become unraveled." (That was around
   the same time he called John Kerry an "out-of-touch ultraliberal from
   Taxachusetts" by the way.) In fact, it seems that it's Zell-Out's mind
   that's become unraveled - for some reason he seems to think he can
   still call himself a Democrat while not only endorsing George W. Bush
   for president but now also giving a speech at the Republican National
   Convention. As Bobby Kahn, chairman of the Georgia Democratic Party,
   put it, "Maybe I'll switch to the Republican Party so I can speak at
   the Democratic Convention and bash Bush. It makes about as much
   sense." So, to clarify: thus far Zell Miller has endorsed George W.
   Bush (Idiots 133), written a book slamming Democrats (Idiots 136),
   started an organization called "Democrats for Bush" dedicated to
   bashing John Kerry (Idiots 149), wanted to stop the 9/11 investigation
   because it would "energize our enemies and demoralize our troops"
   (Idiots 150), and has now announced that he will be speaking at the
   Republican National Convention. Zell, in the words of our illustrious
   vice president, fuck yourself.

   8 The Supreme Court partisanship hypocrisy hypocrisy hypocrisy
   The Supreme Court bought Dick Cheney some time in a 7-2 ruling last
   week which prevented the Bush administration from having to release
   details of Cheney's secret energy task force meetings until after the
   November election. (Judicial Watch and the Sierra Club are suing the
   administration for details of the meetings which allegedly involved
   executives from oil and gas companies and subsequently shaped policies
   designed to help those companies.) But the Supreme Court's decision is
   not just suspiciously partisan because of Antonin Scalia's
   duck-hunting trips with Dick Cheney (see Idiots passim). You see, back
   in 1993 the courts ruled that Hillary Clinton had to reveal the
   participants of her health care task force meetings because
   non-government employees were involved, and therefore, according to
   the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit wrote, certain
   disclosures were required by law. Cheney's case deals with the exact
   same law, but with last week's ruling the Supreme Court essentially
   said that there is a different set of rules for the Bush
   administration. As the Washington Post's editors wrote last week, "The
   Clinton administration was subjected in a range of cases to intrusive
   discovery that, it frequently complained, burdened executive
   confidences. The Supreme Court okayed personal sexual harassment
   litigation against the president with blithe disregard for its
   potential impact on the presidency. Now, by contrast, the high court
   bends over backward to emphasize, even at the risk of tension with its
   own precedents, the president's special needs in fighting off
   lawsuits." But let's face it, we shouldn't expect anything less from
   the court that installed Monkey Boy in the first place.

   9 Arnold Schwarzenegger cyborg
   Governor Groping Austrian Beefcake is at long last starting to live up
   to his "Terminator" nickname, announcing last week that he wanted to
   skim a measly $14 million off California's $15 billion budget
   shortfall by overturning a law known as the Hayden Act which forces
   animal shelters to hold stray cats and dogs up to six days before
   killing them. The current law makes adoption of stray animals a
   priority over euthanasia, but I guess Arnie doesn't much care for
   pets. According to the Los Angeles Times, as well as proposing to
   overturn the Hayden Act Schwarzenegger would also "eliminate a
   requirement that people convicted of animal cruelty be prohibited from
   owning a pet for three years and be forced to pay for medical care for
   the animals they have mistreated." Great. Oh, and "Shelters no longer
   would be required to search for owners who have embedded microchips in
   their pets that store addresses and phone numbers." So if you lose
   your pet in California, don't bother going to the shelter to look for
   it. Arnie's probably already used it for target practice.

   10 Jon Matthews just plain evil
   And finally, a Republican family values update. We first took an
   interest in the Jon Matthews story back in Idiots 133 after the
   conservative talk-show host's radio program was pulled from KSEV in
   Texas when he was under investigation for indecency with a child.
   Seven months later, the results are in - Matthews pleaded guilty to
   the charges last week, and, among other things, will have to register
   as a sex offender when he is sentenced in about six weeks time. Last
   November Republican congressman John Culbertson said of the charges,
   "I just can't even imagine I refuse to believe it It must be a
   mistake..." Better believe it, pal. Your buddy likes to expose himself
   to 11-year-olds. See you next week...

   Linked cites verifying the aforementioned idiots can be found at:
          http://www.democraticunderground.com/top10/index.html            
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               "If you think Dick Cheney  is cursing today,
                wait until you hear what he says on Nov. 2."
                                                   --John Kerry
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