Suffering with the left

The utter dread of seeing George W. in the White House, along with a Republican Congress and what MSNBC contributor Jill Nelson calls a "bushwhacked" Supreme Court, has pushed no small number of unhappy liberals into a frenzied state of bellyaching and victimhood, into what Kenneth Minogue in his book "The Liberal Mind" calls a "suffering situation."

Professional bellyacher Jesse Jackson, ripened into a full crack-up during the crisis of the butterflies and uncounted chads, is now upset because George W. drank for more years than Martin Luther King lived. "Bush stopped drinking at age 40," explains Jackson. "He drank longer than Dr. King lived, at age 39. I'm not sure what all this means."

What it means, Jesse, is that you've flipped your lid. What's one got to do with the other? I drank at lunch today, 33 years after Dr. King lived, 115 years after the feds nailed Geronimo, and 831 years after Thomas Becket was murdered in Canterbury Cathedral. What, I should have had tea, fallen into a guilt stupor and joined the Anti-Saloon League?

Jesse wonders "what all this means." It means that Jesse can't add. For Bush to have "drank longer," at age 40, than King lived, 39 years, he would have had to start with Bud Light in his baby bottles.

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Also slipping into fist-pounding and crazy talk is aforementioned MSNBC's Jill Nelson: "It's as if we're watching some bad national sitcom, very loosely based on Oedipus, in which the First Son tries to prove himself to his ex-commander-in-chief father. Watching Bush announce his cabinet is like the scene in 'The Wizard of Oz,' in which the Wizard is revealed as a short, impotent charlatan."

Ms. Nelson is downright "embarrassed" by Oedipus's proposed Cabinet, "an assortment of right-wing ideologues, fat cats, has-beens, wannabes, and plain ol' opportunists" -- and, to boot, racists and capitalist warmongers! Colin Powell? "White America's favorite Negro, an obedient military man who was involved in the major military debacles of the last half of the 20th century." Missouri Sen. John D. Ashcroft? "The latest Republican retread nominated for a cabinet post, a right-wing, racist, Republican senatorial candidate who lost the election to a dead Democrat."

And Donald Rumsfeld for secretary of defense? "Remember the joke that was Star Wars?" Hey Nelson, remember the joke that was the Wright Brothers -- mischievous Orville, quitting high school in his senior year to start a printing business, and brother Wilbur, forever tinkering in the backroom of his bicycle shop, heading off with that zany contraption to a remote and windy area off the coast of North Carolina named Kitty Hawk?

And New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman at EPA? Her state "is a hotbed of racial profiling," says Nelson, and she, "herself, the governor, once smiled for the cameras as she participated in a ceremonial stop-and-frisk operation." Christy, please, just a straight no-smile face the next time you pat down two Miami punks in a heavy-tint Cadillac with 50 bags of crack taped under the hood and $2.1 million in the trunk!

And Gale Norton, for secretary of the interior? "She worked under former Secretary of the Interior and environmental assassin James Watt." Worse, Ms. Norton sits on the board of the Independence Institute, a "free-market think tank" in Colorado, the kind of place where you can find a free-range woman who orders Spotted Owl Romano and jumps in bed with timber executives.

The bottom line for Ms. Nelson? A Cabinet of money grubbers, even after it's been cleansed of every gringo who ever drop-kicked an alien, with not a one who appreciates the value of Mao's vision: "Not a visionary in the bunch, and no one in sight who seems capable of imagining this nation or the world absent the status quo of corporate capitalism."

It's no less weird at The New York Times, with columnist Maureen Dowd calling the Bush family the "WASP Corleones" (ignoring the fact that it was Al Gore who put Chicago son Bill Daley in charge of getting Florida's dimples and pimples all stacked in the right column). Ms. Dowd's spin? "We are saying goodbye to a president, elected by women, who talked about What Women Want, who handed over large chunks of government to his wife." And who invited Monica over for an Easter morning service while his wife was upstairs getting ready for church. Instead: "We are saying hello to a president, elected by white men and absentee military ballots, who defended executions and guns and wants to beef up the military, and who reads about hurricanes and sports figures." In fact, a summary of the exit polls shows that most white women voted for Bush.

At The New Republic, editor in chief and chairman and chief maharishi Martin Peretz, declaring that "George W. is our first true dauphin: truly unserious," ran a truly serious quote that one of his readers said came from Nostradamus: "Come the millennium, month 12, In the home of greatest power, The village idiot will come forth, To be acclaimed the leader."

OK, here's mine: Come this year, In the city of the greatest criminals, the village hypocrites will come forth from defeat, speaking of power-sharing, compassion and bipartisanship, Hoping to do to the Son what they had done to his Father.