March 24, 2005

Cluck Cluck Cluck… Heads Up
Chickens Coming Home to Roost.

At the darkest moments I find comfort in the sure knowledge that the universe always comes back into balance. Call it what you want, Karma, Yin/Yang, or comeuppance, but in all my 60 years I have never seen it fail.

Of course it takes a while sometimes, so the hard part is the waiting. Some of that waiting ended yesterday.

Oh yes people, the time arrived. Prepare to gloat.

Barry Bonds
Did you catch Barry Bonds doing his Michael Jackson routine yesterday? I love it when blowhard, lying, cheaters get smothered in their own web of deceit. Michael Jackson hoped that he was so famous that just denying he molests little boys would get everyone off his back so he could go back to molesting little boys.

Likewise Barry Bonds believed that just denying he took steroids would let him get back to the business of taking steroids and breaking records. And, for a while, it looked like he might pull it off. In fact Bonds must have been sure it was working when he was not among those called before Congress last week.

But those hearings have proved to be his undoing anyway. Anyone who watched the hearings had to know that no longer would the ball player’s union or management be able to shield cheating players. Bonds knew he was going to get tested, and regularly. He also knew that without steroids he could not come close to matching is previous performance. And that that, even more than being caught with a hypo in his ass-check, would tell the whole tale.

So, like Michael Jackson, Bonds got “hurt.” The same week we watched Jackson pulling the old “mom I’m sick, can I stay home from school today?” gambit in court, we see Bonds limping around on crutches.

Jackson blames the moneygrubbers and media for his troubles. Bonds blames the media for repeating rumors.

Before he was indicted Jackson used a child in a documentary to try to gain sympathy. Yesterday Bonds dragged his own kid in front of TV cameras while he whined that his kids were tired of crying. Well, could it be Barry that your kids are not crying about your steroid troubles but rather that that their mother just dumped daddy after discovering daddy had been keeping a girlfriend on the side? Could be.

Jackson’s career was over even before he got charged with child molestation because he just wasn’t that good any more.

Bond’s career is over now too because, without steroids, he can’t be that good any more.

Both men will go to their graves in denial. Both will blame everyone but themselves and their own cheatin’, lyin’, toxically self-indulgent behavior for their misery. And miserable they both shall be.

I found one move by Bonds yesterday particularly pathetic. After whining that the media had “gotten him,” he threatened to sit out the entire season. I was reminded of that wonderful scene in Mel Brook’s western movie satire, Blazing Saddles where the black sheriff, surrounded by a crowd of angry white town folk, pulls his gun, points it at his head and declares, “Okay, no one move or the n----r gets it.”

It was funny in the movie. Not so funny yesterday.


Republicans in Congress
The Terri Schiavo case was gut wrenching for those on both sides before Republicans in Congress decided to jump in and tie those guts into a few more knots.

Why did they do it? The Schiavo case was getting so much TV and press the conniving little bastards started to calculate like the little boy found digging in a pile of horse manure. Asked why he was digging so hard he said, “With this much manure there must be a pony in here someplace.”

With Republicans the pony they were sure was in there was the love, affection, money and votes of their Christian Right to Life supporters.

So, the same Congress that can’t seem to find the will to provide health insurance to nearly a third of Americans, or fund Medicaid and Medicare, tripped over themselves to pass legislation to save one brain-dead woman in Florida.

Oh, and they were in rare form… pontificating on the sanctity of life and all that. Never mind that on that very day a kid in Minnesota shot dead. They had nothing to offer there. And, if you asked them if they might at least rethink their refusal to renew the assault weapons ban, they would scoff that there was any connection, or contradiction.

No, they had work to do. There were crazy-people votes just laying out there to harvest among the same suckers who bought their “culture of life” shtick during the last campaign. This Schiavo story had real legs that would carry them through the next election cycle without having to do anything real. All they would have to do is put out mailers to their constituents telling how they voted to save Terri while their godless, liberal opponents tried to smother the poor girl with a hospital pillow.

And so they passed their law stripping the voiceless Schiavo of her state’s rights and slamming the heavy hand Uncle Sam down on her consciousless caucus.

Ah, but then the results started coming in, and that’s when the worms turned. Apparently those Right to Lifers out there started to think. Yes, this was an issue about “life,” but this was different than abortion. They could oppose abortion because, they figure, it’s always someone else’s abortion that’s being banned. But even Right to Lifers have family members who are going to die and this one could come home in a very personal way.

Then the poll numbers started rolling in. Poll after poll showed American’s were not only unimpressed by Congress’s grandstanding on Terri’s deathbed, but opposed it, even conservatives opposed it:

Who should decide? Americans are divided — 45 percent think it is the spouse's right to make such a decision, while 38 percent believe it is up to the family's wishes. Few believe the government (2 percent) or the patient's doctor (3 percent) should make the call. (FOX )

About seven in 10 Americans say Congress inappropriately intervened in the case of a brain-damaged woman whose relatives disagree over whether she should be allowed to die, according to a new poll. (CBS News )

So, expect to hear a lot of “mitigating” and back peddling among those who voted for that craven piece of legislation. It’s already begun. It should be quite entertaining to listen to the various ways those who voted for that despicable law, and the president who signed it, worm their way out of this fix.

Then this morning it got even better when this delicious story crossed my sights.

Someone snuck a tape recorder into a private meeting yesterday between House Majority Leader Tom DeLay and a group of right wing supporters. During the meeting DeLay referred to Terri Schiavo as “a gift from God to conservatives.” This from a man who angrily denies he is simply exploiting Terri’s misfortune to further the conservative cause.

Earlier in the week a memo surfaced traced back to DeLay’s office that celebrated the Schiavo affair as a political win/win for Republicans. When it went public Tom said he would fire the staffer who wrote the memo, if he could find the person. Like O.J.’s search for the real killer of his wife, DeLay’s suspect remains at large.

I have said for months that there is no “telling” fundamentalist conservatives anything. After all, they get their direction for a higher source, or so they believe. The only way to get through to them is to show them. Show them how, if they get their way, it will only blow right back onto them.

For example, the religious right says it wants to allow religious monuments on the Capitol lawn? Okay, then let the lawn party begin.. Buddha, Shiva, prayer stones to Allah…. Go ahead, turn the whole US and State capitol lawns into “It’s a Small Small World of Religion,” theme parks.

“Ah, well, that was not exactly what we had in mind,” the holier than thou will reply.

To which I say, “Yeah, I know. But that’s exactly what you’ll get.”

And that’s what happened in the Schiavo capper. Suddenly the Right to Lifers “get” this one. Because. the last thing a real conservative – or anyone else for that matter -- would want is a government official standing between them and a loved one during their final moments on earth.

But that’s what they’d get if the Tom DeLay’s of Congress get their way.

By Stephen Pizzo

Raconteur at Large