Osama's Politboro

Failure and shame are extremely painful jolts to the Right Wing in all of us. It's what makes sport and politics so vaguely reassuring. And the cure for this terrible Western White House disease is almost as bad as the illness itself. It's a combination of scabies and final stage typhus, a violent fever that is almost always curable and often politically fatal.

The key symptoms are open sores, cold sweats, constant weeping, delusionary tales for the corporate media outlets and old-fashioned skullduggery. It also fuels the opposition, whether it exists in the Beltway or Tora Bora. Which leads us inexorably to our favorite National Security Council advisor, Condi.

U.S. using Cold War techniques in war on terror, which at first brush is simple logic for plain folks, or what the White House terms as targeting the average "circus drunk" or "broke yokel" voter. But even the red states are starting to smarten up, and few of them are now in play for Big John.

Obviously the goal of the Rethug Committee is cooking up these strange ideas to keep the masses amused. Rove knows what the people want: freaks, idiots and extreme talking points memos to feed the media beast. Heck, the election comes once every four years, and these days are marked as sacred holidays to the glorious throngs of FOX, CNN, CBS, ABC and NBC. And like Bozo's bigtop before it: sometimes we get caught in a weak moment and actually believe that this crap is true. Heck, even a beautiful farm daughter disappeared when the circus came to town.

Which takes me back to Condi. Where exactly has she been all this time? She disappears for a number of weeks and this is the best she can come up with? Comparing the "war on terror" (notice I put this in quotes, because there isn't really a war on terror) to the Cold War is like saying that the Olympics aren't political events.

Even the Iraqi soccer team knows this much. Shit, they were kissing enough bare wires and burning cigarette butts to know what a hard boot to the solar plexus feels like. Trade in one dictatorship for a public relations effort with the single-mindedness and morality of a "snuff film." That's what four years of Bobo bought the American people, and being a good and great people we might as well share the warmth with the vanguished.

But the immediate question is that if we are fighting another Cold War, who gets to play the Soviet Union this go round? There is no end to the sordid speculation. My guess is that it's us - given that the FBI is running around the countryside KGB-like shaking down demonstrators before the convention. Christ, the Rethugs even have their own version of Pravda - FOX News - to drive the point home with the peasants who are sleep-deprived because they have to work two jobs or live with a relative to pay the bills and a disgustingly inflated national deficit. And all of this insurgent activity in Iraq only tells us one thing: Najaf is an Osama recruiting poster aimed straight at us while Baghdad is beginning to look like Bobo's Bay of Pigs. These are unusual times, kemosabe.

We have Eddie Haskell as President and Doctor Evil as his running mate. But underneath all of it there is a vast politboro of swine that has tipped us to the edge of totalitarianism. And just like the Soviet model before them, there are tank drivers and ditch diggers running the Department of Agriculture and Environmental Protection Agency.

Is it any wonder that after an internal audit that $8.8 billion turned up missing in Iraq on the day that the Najaf battle started? What's a good politboro member to do? Keep picking fights until no one notices. That's what a tank driver does in moments of diplomacy.