PEST CONTROL ©

by Norman Liebmann

In his play, Camino Real, Tennessee Williams made the tactful observation that there is a time to depart even when there's no place to go. It seems beyond contradiction that American public life and culture are poxed with people who defy Williams' counsel. They are everywhere, like a huge St. Bernard dog that seems to have mastered the trick of lying across every narrow doorway in the house at the same time. These people do nothing, and having thrived, determine it is because they are good at doing nothing. Like all junkies and/or habituated people, they will kill to remain in place. They are ubiquitous, and anyone who has ever walked through a cow pasture knows what it feels like to step in a fresh pile of "ubiquitous."

Ritual behavior within this Washington infestation of elite and indolent parasites requires politicians to continue to investigate each other, while journalists continue to interview each other about why politicians continue to investigate each other. Each of their vapid observations tightens the knot of misery they have put in the nation's viscera. Politicians and journalists have made themselves America's guests, and while they abide, no hors d'oeuvre can go unmunched, no martini olive can go unspeared. Throw their hats and coats out on the front lawn and they won't take the hint. They seem inspired by the drinking song that repeats, "We're here because we're here because we're here . and so on ad nauseum." Their tendency to hang on gives the impression that Eternity will stretch out to be a lot longer and more boring than it already threatens.

Here follows a list of these people who afflict the American scene with their unremitting "everywhereness", have tainted the word "always", defamed the virtue of constancy, and whose presence saturates with deepening contempt the phrase, "the usual suspects." This is not a job for Superman. It's a job for Pest Control.

POLITICIANS

MADELEINE ALBRIGHT - despite Clinton's reputation for surrounding himself with attractive women, Albright looks like something that jumps out of a cake at a warthog's bachelor party.

ROBERT REICH - Cable TV's liberal interview-ee of last resort.

JANE FONDA - has the instinct of a natural born turncoat. Take her along on your picnic and within ten minutes she will be wearing the uniform of an ant.

JESSE JACKSON - Political hustlers who call themselves Reverend are high on the list because of the theology of recantation, disorder, and heresy they foment as "the new orthodoxy." Christians, once able to mount major campaigns like the Crusades, are unable to organize any serious opposition to Bill Clinton, the worst enemy of Christianity since Saladin. (Another irregular hierarchical tendency Jackson cannot overcome is his Southern accent, as it is not possible to determine of what country his accent is characteristic of the southern part.)

STEVEN SPIELBERG - muddies up logic with his easy and conscienceless transition from Saving Private Ryan to Saving Traitor Clinton, smoothly bridging the chasm between patriotism and "The Pit."

CHRISTOHER OFALI - is the sacrilegious artist who works in pachyderm poop. One doubts his Dung period will pass through him as easily as it passed through the elephant.

JESSE VENTURA - The question "Where are the news pests coming from?" brings the name Jesse Ventura readily to mind. He has wedged, rooted, and become a tenacious media darling, despite a popular awareness he is an entirely unimportant person whose currency is kept viable by an entirely unimportant press. The astonishment is not that a wrestler could be intelligent enough to have become the Governor of Minnesota, but that Ventura was ever intelligent enough to be a wrestler.

DONALD TRUMP - The media gave itself a creative hernia in conjuring up his sobriquet "The Donald", with whatever non-significance that term of overarching coyness carries. The studied excesses and vacuums in Trump's lifestyle would have tended author F. Scott Fitzgerald to have dealt him the more poignant appellation, "The Not-So-Great Gatsby."

WARREN BEATTY - announces himself ready to run this world just as his soigné occultist, super spook sister, Shirley MacLaine, (on a first name basis with karma and the boogey man) has tidied up the next one. It would be nice to find a corner in time or space that some member of their family has not dabbled in, or worse, threatened to improve.

PATRICIA IRELAND - the feminist who in exchange for support of "any-old-time" abortion supports a President who commits "any-old-time" rape.

NELSON MANDELA - established there is nothing more politically handy than spending nearly thirty years in the slammer to convince the world you're a saint. It's rumored, while there, Mandela developed a taste for prison cuisine (the slop de jure) and went back to visit. Clinton joined him, and behind bars the Arkansas Hustler looked as happy as a pig in its intrinsically characteristic excreta. Within ten minutes Clinton "conned" the warden into making him a Trustee, and within eleven minutes he "ratted out" the entire cellblock. Bubba told Mandela it could have been worse. The judge could have sentenced him to thirty years in Arkansas.

GEORGE W. BUSH - may turn out to be the Republican death wish made actual, its compassionate cyanide pill incarnate. With a little luck he will have the Republican Party buried in the political center where it will be comfortable, impotent, and God help us, made safe from all our traditional freedoms.

JANET RENO - an outpatient that slipped though Evolution's Quality Control has all but ended the United States as a nation of laws, as Congressmen played with their lips trying not to notice the Clinton "family values massacre" that took place in Waco, Texas. Further, Reno pre-vindicated all White House criminals and authorized them to be volunteer free-lance pyromaniacs. Reno is now officially America's first Lynch Mob General. Is this a great country, or what?

SENATORS - The Senate is a funhouse mirror image of the virtues it ascribes to itself. When it says deliberative, it means long, when it says polite, it means obsequious, when it says deferential, it means sniveling. The nation is not being lost to Clinton but to cowardice. Even a Congressional Medal of Honor winner has blended in with his fellow Senators. Is timidity contagious or is it something in the water?

TOM DASCHLE - the Leon Trotsky of the Prairie, whines and whimpers endlessly about the plight of the black people. Had he not been flushed out of South Dakota, he would never have met one, and knowing of his racial hypocrisy, that would not have been an accident.

TRENT LOTT - The most cogent natural force in the universe today is the inertia of Trent Lott. Einstein could not have formulated an equation that would account for his dormancy. People in his home state may yet commemorate Lott's torpor by changing the Mississippi State bird from the mockingbird to the dead duck. More appalling than the psychotic fascist ambition of Bill Clinton is that only Trent Lott could stand in the way of its realization. Thank God Lott is not the Surgeon General or he'd be working not for a cure, but for a compromise with cancer.

TEDDY KENNEDY - a hangover on its way to happen, and the living proof that, in America, anybody, no matter how rich, can "sleep it off" in a doorway.

BOXER AND FEINSTEIN - Common as it has become, it is no longer astonishing how many Jews fall under the malignant influence of the Stockholm Syndrome that enables them to empathize with their fascist captor, Bill Clinton, who resides high and godlike in his ivory gun turret. Two of the most stiflingly barren of charm women on the planet that succumbed to a full Monty romance with Bill Clinton are these yenta Senatrixes from California. The vacancy of their personal allure is exacerbated by their proximity to Hollywood, which has given them delusions of sexual sublimity. It's reported, in guarded conversations, they refer to each other as "Gwyneth" Boxer and "Sigourney" Feinstein.

Boxer and Feinstein have sabotaged California's sovereignty, converted it to a puppet socialism, and made altar victims of its people as an offering to Bill Clinton's plan for the caramelization of the races. Even people with the meager intelligence of Boxer and Feinstein should require the Clintons to show genuineness in their racial attitudes by holding a raffle in the inner city with Chelsea Clinton as the prize.

BARBARA MIKULSKI: HAG POWER - Consistent with their own sobriquets, Boxer and Feinstein refer to the Senatrix from Maryland (while snickering behind their hands) as "Winona" Mikulski. Even Jenny Jones' fashion paramedic teams working in relays could not handle an emergency crash program makeover to regenerate Mikulski from looking like anything other than Central Casting's idea of a sadistic prison matron.

"HULKERY" CLINTON - It will surprise no one if in the eleventh hour of the presidential campaign, Clinton summons a veterinarian to put Gore "to sleep" and replaces him with Hillary (providing he cannot steal back the presidency for himself.) America then will be treated to the obscene spectacle of this shady lady lawyer and keeper of irregular books giving her husband a presidential pardon (about which Trent Lott will say absolutely nothing.) It is hoped the nation is becoming immune to Hillary's counterfeit smile, the result of years of wearing novocaine lipstick, and that New Yorkers will recognize the insult to their state of being used as a stepping stone for Hillary's real ambition - to become America's first Dominatrix-in-Chief.

AL GORE - THE GOMER PYLE OF SOCIALISM - Al Gore, the Tennessee lump, claims he is fit to be elected to the Presidency because he's had experience doing a big job. So does an elephant's proctologist. The Clinton Administration is a crime school for sly morons. Gore's hiring of Tony Coelho to run his presidential campaign reveals Gore is capable of learning something, providing it is sufficiently immoral. Slow as he is, Al managed to learn the Clinton mantra, i.e.- the way to avoid punishment for your sins is not to deny them - but to embrace them. Gore is now busily incorporating the list of Bill Clinton's felonies in his own résumé. Hello, boys and girls, can you say shmuck?

BILL BRADLEY - political predilections notwithstanding, it would provide a refreshing change to have a guy in the Oval office that looks "slept in" rather than "slept with."

JIMMY CARTER - affronted Nature with the most pompous, vapid and futile of all designations since Time began, "Habitat for Humanity." Humanity would do well to consider it is God, and not Jimmy Carter, who provides habitat. (Carter is now badgering Clinton to pardon Patty Hearst, for whom the Department of Corrections has already provided five years of "habitat.") We expect it will be Carter's next enterprise to get Bubba to dig up Che Guevara and re-bury him in Arlington Cemetery, not realizing Clinton will claim it as his own idea.

MAXINE WATERS - is a hundred and fifty pounds of angry, ill-mannered, beef jerky in cosmetic emergency. Some contend she cannot help what she looks like. I contend she's not trying hard enough.

ALAN DERSHOWITZ - is as much fun as a dead clown. He and his Ivy League ilk have championed Affirmative Action to a point where mediocrity is the new excellence, and selling out the nation is the new patriotism.

BARNEY FRANK - Whenever he wears a woodsy cologne his colleagues think he is "in drag."

THE DEMOCRAT NATIONAL COMMITTEE - Democrat money-grubbers all resemble the streetwalkers of Robin Hood's time who worked Sherwood Forest. Like Bill Clinton's fundraisers, they took from the rich and gave to the pimps.

JOURNALISTS

America may have more profound enemies but none more frustrating and stomach-boggling than the media. While journalists have been busy suffocating the news and misdirecting the electorate, the rest of America has an emerging awareness the Clintons are not a couple, they're a crime wave. In ethical paralysis, the press embraces vulgar affronts from this President that would drive a wedge between Damon and Pythias.

The media deals in two commodities: collusion and intrusion. Other than that, it exerts its energies in promoting itself as a religion for gullible and devious pinheads who don't like to rise early on Sundays. Having no piety of its own, the media hopes to create its Styrofoam spirituality by elevating crap to Crapism.

However much journalists profess to love each other with reckless abandon, it is an aggravated example of misplaced affection. Here follows a roster of media pests who we wish would go the way of the dinosaurs:

GEORGE STEPHANOPOLOUS' - puppy cuteness will keep him in ABC's pet shop window until he finds another crooked home - perhaps even go back to the Clinton White House where, God knows, they have plenty of shredded paper for him to frolic in. Irrespective of his boyish looks it is said he is growing in maturity. In fact, next year his mother is going to allow him to drink coffee.

BILL PRESS, AL HUNT, ELEANOR CLIFT - Dogs and journalists go on the paper.

MARGARET CARLSON - her fleabite mentality may give rise to an entirely new study of the brain called psycho-entomology.

DORIS KEARNS "GOODSPIN" - doesn't see much wrong with Clinton, which makes it easy not to see much right with her. Politically, she and Hillary Clinton are a little to the left of each other.

KATIE COURIC - has inspired the bumper sticker warning, "PERK KILLS!"

CHRIS MATTHEWS - is the custodian of a garden variety Hibernian chauvinism, and is his own favorite locker room Irishman. Matthews projects a parochial school mentality in which snapping wet towels at people's behinds represents high wit. His constant need to remind viewers he is Irish is as requisite as Jackie Mason checking himself in the shower each morning to make sure he's still Jewish. The first, last, and only thing any Matthews' guest can be heard saying is "Hello." Sparrows run a greater risk having their twitter eavesdropped on while in the glide path at LAX.

TIM RUSSERT - his cozy schmoozing with the Washington political whores he should be calling to account ought to be a hanging offense. Russert's self-castrated questions bring out the unctuous get-along go-along affections of those who should be his natural enemies. Apparently, the higher media imperative is the impulse for journalistic cross-admiration. Despite the studio table dividing them, Russert and Rush Limbaugh seem barely able to keep their hands off each other.

MARK SHIELDS - is an unseemly fountainhead of crude razzing of Bob Novak. Consider this unkind snickering emanates from a guy with a throat that a pelican would try to hide under a whiplash collar.

BARBARA WALTERS - In journalism, a profession rampant with moral leprosy, few episodes achieved the level of the Barbara Walters/Monica Lewinsky interview as a moment of high garbage. Due to Walters' want of discrimination, 20/20 telecasts should not be presented in segments, but in piles. Recently, Walters has undergone the most Draconian cosmetic surgery in medical history, which seems to have suspended her face in a holding pattern over her body. The doctors will not know how successful the surgery on her face is until after they remove the scaffolding.

TED TURNER - Enlightened people know Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was wrong. It is not religion that is the opiate of the people, it is CNN. Ted Turner has made the State of Georgia his Byzantine Empire of the South, and the home of his Constantinople News Network. CNN has made Atlanta a slum of informational bias. The South now endures something worse than the stigma of slavery, the dinner-hour cadaverous presence of Judy Woodruff and Bernard Shaw.

CNN's efforts at capsizing freedom in Dixie is superfluous. Clinton, Carter and Lott have already vouchsafed the South will never rise again. Still, one supposes the South is ahead of the game, having experienced a sense of liberation after its worst fear proved unfounded - slavery ended, and the cotton did not go unpicked.

On a recent visit to China, Turner announced he is a socialist, which came as big a surprise to Americans as finding out water is wet, and who already knew surprises are not the only thing Turner is full of. Turner recently gave a million dollars to the United Nations. Apparently, he is entertained by watching futility in its gaudiest and most chaotic display. He calls this altruism, as is consistent with the first tenet of despotism - to bullshit yourself about what it is you're up to. Like Turner, slave ship Captains also called themselves yachtsman. This suggests, there is nothing wrong with the good ship CNN that a mutiny wouldn't cure.

Turner constantly reproves the United States, the most generous nation in the history of the world, for mistreating the UN, that polyglot orphan some wayward lass dumped on America's doorstep and then ran like hell. This perennial vampire infant, having gorged itself on the milk of American naiveté is now suckling blood from the American teat. If Rudy Guiliani wants to clean up New York, dispossessing the UN ought to be his most urgent priority.

BILL CLINTON - There remains only the media's obsession with what Bill Clinton will leave behind. Clinton trying to think of something he might do to enhance his legacy is analogous to the Marquis De Sade trying to think up something new to do on his wedding night. So far, three items are the total of Bubba's legacy, his impeachment, his aversion to guns (he's against anything that can discharge accidentally except himself) and his mockery of his one time hero John F. Kennedy, whom he paraphrased, "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do to resurrect the Soviet Union."

Irrespective of Humanity's sins, or whatever punishment karma has in store for it, we hope for an instance of Divine compassion - one glorious chance for our species to experience the goodness of a world as it was without Bill Clinton in it. The hot pursuit of the Clinton legacy is just another media conceit. The Clinton legacy is simple: Godless he arrived. Godless he will depart.

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