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Ben Sargent strikes again. Tom DeLay (R-TX) is an editorial cartoonist's dream. As William (Boss) Tweed said of the Thomas Nast editorial cartoons that savaged him in the New York Time in the early 1870s: I don't care what they write about me, it's them damn pitchers!
We all are familiar with the images of Saddam Hussein and his fawning sycophants stepping forward, bowing and kissing their great leader's shirt collar, his shoulders, his sleeves and hands in dutiful obeisance.
No sooner had Saddam been blasted from the earth, we were offered our own version of the above, with a local letter-writer demanding that liberal "whine-bags should get down on their knees and kiss (the president's) feet."
That the right should suddenly wax sentimental about Saddam is a trifle late, but is adopting the style of Eastern potentates in a republic really the best way to pay homage to their former ally?
The West has a long tradition of emulating and importing much that it has found in the Middle East. Ever since Alexander the Great conquered Persia and assumed the silk robes and jeweled slippers of Darius III in Babylon more than two millennia ago, god-kings, divine right and absolute monarchy have had an inordinate appeal to the ruling classes of the West.
Such customs have been a little out of fashion lately, but conservatives always have had a strong respect for tradition. Entering Babylon again has apparently excited ancient memories, older even than the late Strom Thurmond. Alexander's followers were required to prostrate themselves in his divine presence.
Was this writer onto something?
Does George Bush sit at his computer late at night like Bruce Nolan, watching the prayers to the Almighty stream in, beseeching him for solace and mercy?
"Please, please don't let me be indicted!" come the pleas.
"OK, Kenny Boy," George responds, punching the "Yes" key. "Sorry, Martha," hitting the "NO!" button.
"I pray the weapons of mass destruction will be found and the credibility of the United States is restored."
"OK, Laura, looks like I'll have to put them out myself!" says George.
Republicans may have their fantasies, but George Bush is not God. If he were, things would be quite different. The United States would act as if it alone ruled the world. Conservatives would think they owned the country and its affairs were nobody else's business. Republicans would control all branches of government and . . . uh, well. Ahem.
OK, things would be a lot different, but that has not kept right-wingers from believing Bush is the next best thing to God: divinely appointed. Democrats have always thought the 2000 election was a little queer and suspected the will of the people was thwarted. They were right. It was divine intervention, according to many conservatives. Who better to rig the voting without leaving any fingerprints?
Though members of the National Rifle Association said Bush owed his presidency to them, the fact he owes it to God has been obvious to the specialists who really know how to interpret events. Bush is on a mission from God.
How else is one to explain his swift ascent from such humble origins to the height of power unless he was marked out by the Almighty? Has he not been anointed with oil, lots of it? Was not his divine status foretold by the appearance of the burning shrub upon Mount Sinai as witnessed by Moses, played by none other than Charlton Heston, president of the NRA? Did Bush have not just three but nine supremely wise men and women recognize and usher him unto us?
In the fullness of time, we have witnessed the transfiguration of a C student into a towering leader with the "wisdom of Solomon," and a Methodist (considered apostates by fundamentalists) - into a "super Christian." With God's Own Party, he has cast the evil Demoncrats out of power and will reign a thousand years. Well, five more anyway.
Now, in these last days, with his terrible swift sword he did smite the harlot of Babylon to smithereens. He has unleashed a crusade upon the earth against evildoers to bring peace to the world. Oh, how the mighty tremble in anticipation of tax-free dividends, and the poor rejoice, freed from the bondage of employment.
Such a demigod deserves reverence and awe. Little wonder, then, that one peep about being "ashamed" can elicit so much outrage. Such blasphemies must be punished by those who demand respect be paid the president, just as they were so scrupulous in showing the utmost respect to the previous one.
Despite the fevered imaginations of some, it is not a sin to run or vote against Bush in the next election - yet. As for puckering up to Bush's 10 little piggies, real Americans bow to no man, especially their public servants. We're not about to have our president imitate divine beings and foreign dictators by kissing people on the head and strutting around in a military uniform and - oh, shoot.
Well, liberals, being un-American, had better pray Bush changes his socks and doesn't have smelly feet.
WASHINGTON — Antonin Scalia fancies himself the intellectual of the Supreme Court, an aesthete who likes opera and wines, a bon vivant who loves poker and plays songs like "It's a Grand Old Flag" on the piano; a real man who hunts and reads Ducks Unlimited magazine; a Catholic father of nine who once told a prayer breakfast: "We are fools for Christ's sake. We must pray for the courage to endure the scorn of the sophisticated world."
Like other conservatives, he enjoys acting besieged while belittling the other side. "Alas," he drily told the journalist Hanna Rosin, "being tough and traditional is a heavy cross to bear. Duresse oblige."
He's so Old School, he's Old Testament, misty over the era when military institutes did not have to accept women, when elite schools did not have to make special efforts with blacks, when a gay couple in their own bedroom could be clapped in irons, when women were packed off to Our Lady of Perpetual Abstinence Home for Unwed Mothers.
He relishes eternal principles, like helping a son of the establishment dispense with the messiness of a presidential vote count. (His wife met him at the door after Bush v. Gore with a chilled martini.)
He's an American archetype, or Archie type. Full of blustery rants against modernity and nostalgia for "the way Glenn Miller played, songs that made the hit parade . . . girls were girls and men were men." Antonin Scalia is Archie Bunker in a high-backed chair. Like Archie, Nino is the last one to realize that his intolerance is risibly out-of-date.
The court issued a bracing 6-to-3 decision declaring it illegitimate to punish people for who they are, and Justice Scalia fulminated in a last gasp of the old Pat Buchanan/Bill Bennett homophobic conservatism.
In his dissent to the decision striking down a Texas sodomy law and declaring that gays are "entitled to respect for their private lives," Justice Scalia raved that the court had "largely signed on to the so-called homosexual agenda" and predicted a "massive disruption of the current social order." (Has this man never seen a Rupert Everett movie?)
State laws could tumble, he huffed, barring masturbation. Next, Sister Scalia will tell us it makes you go blind. He also tut-tutted that laws against bestiality might fall away. (Maybe he should be warning fellow dissenter Clarence Thomas. Anita Hill told Congress he had been beastly to her by describing an X-rated film about bestiality.)
The stegosaurus Scalia roared that the court had "taken sides in the culture war." Conservatives shrieked the door was open to everything from lap dancing to gay marriage. (Note to the panicked right: Newsweek just reported married heterosexuals were strangers to sex. So, if you want gay couples to stop having sex, let them get married.)
Mr. Scalia has frothed about "Kulturkampf" since 1996, when he did an Archie screed on gays having "high disposable income" and "disproportionate political power." Sounds just like people at Bush fund-raisers. (One here Friday was headlined by the First Nephew, George P. Bush, to buck-rake for a group promoting conservative court nominees.)
Most Americans, even Republicans, have a more tolerant and happy vision of the country than Mr. Scalia and other nattering nabobs of negativism. Their jeremiads yearn for an airbrushed 50's America that never really existed. (The pedophile scandal in the Catholic Church, which condemns homosexuality, proves that.) And the America they feared — everyone having orgies, getting stoned and burning the flag — never came to pass.
Nino is too blinded by his own bloviation to notice that Americans are not as censorious as he is. They like the complicated national mosaic — that Dick Cheney has a gay daughter, that Jeb Bush has a Latina wife, that Clarence Thomas has a white wife. Newt Gingrich can leave two wives for younger women and Bill (Virtues) Bennett can blow $8 million on slot machines. Even those who did not like Bill Clinton cringed at Ken Starr's giddy voyeurism.
Justice Scalia may play patriotic songs on the piano, but Justice Anthony Kennedy gave patriotism true meaning in time for the Fourth of July. His ruling eloquently reminded the country, "Liberty presumes an autonomy of self that includes freedom of thought, belief, expression, and certain intimate conduct."
In the immortal words of John Riggins, loosen up, Nino, baby.
