The Conservative Manifesto

The freaks are swirling high in the Big House this week. Dubya - at relentless maneuverings of unspecified party constituencies - has performed the extreme and ritualistic act of nacht der langen, his demented Night of the Long Knives, which should impose a more ideologically pure cabinet and an intelligence community hellbent on defining an atavistic second term of overseas aggression and domestic tyranny.

There are few details available as of yet, but that is no longer the point of a November putsch that has filleted or hacked several government institutions already. As far as impartial observers can tell, it's been the cultural equivalent of putting a Hooters in the Guggenheim.

Neither the media nor the opposition party is sure whether the compassionate conservatives or hardline neo-cons are going to row this boat for the forseeable future. But some have detected a rising tide of sludge wafting from the rose garden, which may be a harbinger of some truly bad news indeed. The Senate upper chamber has the look and feel of a sadistic coterie - armed with pitchforks, torches and chainsaws to feed the basement blast furnace with non-believers by the chunk - where they are mainlining that good old time religion and will soon turn their pious gaze toward the pagans and heathens among us.

The freakish nightmares of our discontent are gathering, my friends, and get out while you still can. The right-wing sump pumps have lost their grip. They vaulted the shark and went psycho on mountain man moonshine or Afghan opium. Run now, before your papers need checking or your relatives suddenly disappear.

It will be a terminally ugly scene and it will be shown on cable TV. The heretics will be marched along the rotunda before being eunuchized by pudgy cardinals and preachers with garden shears for love offerings of a first born son to the military mob. The broadcast will be hosted by Michelle Malkin and Ann Coulter - along with Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage for in-depth profiles on the accused - because an exercise such as this requires the intellectual vanity of Klaus Barbie on ritalin. You gotta stay focused when a shock to the system is needed for the good of the State, and a cathartic event like this will blow off the ratings of American Idol and Last Comic Standing combined.

For guys like Klaus Barbie, a mere association with extreme political parties is never enough; they want to pick a fight with someone - anyone - and like the National Socialist Party before them, developing a special hatred in any form is an elixir for brutal efficiency. As an SD (Sicherheitsdienst) undercover agent, Barbie infiltrated whorehouses and homosexual nightclubs, an experience that left him a rabid misogynist and homophobe even forty years later. "Of course I am proud of what I did during the war," he remarked in Bolivian exile. "If it hadn't been for me, France would be a Soviet Socialist Republic by now."

Being a dedicated sadist, he would often pluck random civilians off the street and whisk them away to Hotel Terminus, his headquarters, and torture these hapless people until one of them revealed something of interest or he got bored. Barbie was awarded his first Iron Cross for bludgeoning to death an "enemy of the Reich" (actually a German-Jewish ice cream peddler) in full public view because the man refused salute him properly.

The high court's treatment of such proceedings should be priceless. By the time that the 5 to 4 vote in-favor comes down, the hypocrite murmur of wingnut banshees will have released the free thought death squads upon our nation's finer institutions of higher learning - these measures will, of course, be different in different states; nevertheless, in many of the more liberal areas, the following will be generally applicable.

1. Abolition of natural resources in all forms through the leasing of national parks for corporate purposes.
2. Tax free status to corporations and no more tax-deductions for the masses.
3. Abolition of capital gains taxes.
4. Confiscation of the property of all rebels and heathens, thereby recognizing that Jesus is the only way to power.
5. Centralization of credit by means of a national corporate banking system with no state capital and an exclusive monopoly to the federal government. 
6. Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of privatized military corporations. 
7. Equal mandates for everyone to work. Establishment of extended military forces and penal colonies for the purpose of forced labor.  
8. Mergers of corporate agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all distinctions between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country. 
9. Free education for all children in public schools as long as the parent pays taxes. In lieu of this provision, the government will institute children's labor as an alternative, combining education with industrial production, etc. 
10. Labor unions and guilds will be abolished for the advancement of democracy in all areas of the country, in accordance with a common plan.

In short, Christians and Conservatives everywhere will support this revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things.  Messy examples will be made of a few, for sure, and some pesky erudites will test the limits of moral contempt and religious tolerance. But there is no boil on the American flesh that cannot be lanced. There is strength in numbers and the creeps are long in the patience department, dedicating themselves to a personal hubris the likes of which we have never seen.

It hasn't been since the years when South American dictators used soccer stadiums as human butchery clinics that we have witnessed an assault on liberalism this energized. Screams of jeffe and beloved junta will echo from the belly of the six humped beast until its leaders have been reduced to eternal ambiguity. The manifesto openly declares that their end can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of everything weak, disturbed and enlightened. All believers in the cause have nothing to lose but their chains.

Nobody in the Big House seems to know exactly what happens next, except that Arlen Specter was beaten down like hooker on crack for daring to intervene. At a press conference soon thereafter, the hideous, stinking, half-terrorized, mind shattered animal had to pass between two new Senators-elect who were pecking at his heels as a reminder, paying little or no attention to this thing that they didn't even recognize as Candy Crowley of CNN.

The next time Arlen jumps the fence for a sneak peak, he will be covered in festering hatchet wounds and two armed Secret Service agents will be prepared to take him into the food chain for good. But rats never die.

The rest of us are going to learn that lesson the hard way.