monkey

Word around Washington is that Justice Department Attorney General John Ashcroft lately has been comparing himself to Bobby Kennedy.

Ho ho ho. Hairy X-Mas. And Georgia Governor Lester (Axe-Handle) Maddox was one of the Freedom Riders. Spin On, tortured planet, Spin On.

Ashcroft�s �anti-terrorism� measures, signed into law on October 26 under the Orwellian name of the �Patriot Act,� essentially guts habeas corpus, so that violations of the Bill of Rights by state courts are no longer open to relief by federal courts; repeals the Edwards amendment, which barred the FBI from opening investigations based solely on activities protected under the First Amendment; and allows intelligence agencies to install �roving wiretaps� on any domestic telephone of a �suspected terrorist,� amongst other Fourth Reichian goodies.

What constitutes a �suspected terrorist?� That, of course, is at the discretion of the Government. Anyone criticizing the Government�s policies, to be sure, could easily be construed as a �suspected terrorist.�

Already in place is the U.S. Government�s �Carnivore� software system, which allows the FBI to spy on e-mails sent or received by �criminal suspects� -- not necessarily �terrorists.� What constitutes a �criminal suspect,� is again, of course at the discretion of the Government and its various agencies of �intelligence,� overt and clandestine. A skeptic of U.S. foreign or domestic policy might well be construed as a �criminal suspect.� Everyone, in fact � except Junior Bush, Ashcroft, and friends -- is a potential �criminal suspect.� It all depends on who�s defining �evil,� and these days we�ve got more self-elevated moral Carnivores than Afghanistan has land-mines.

As for the newly created �Office of Homeland Security,� its moniker and mission sounds suspiciously like �Office of Fatherland Security� to many. We all know how Secure that turned out to be.

The John and Junior Show likewise wish to form secret military tribunals which, we are assured, will administer "justice" to the world's "evildoers." In Vengeance America a large chunk of the pablum public finds this notion just spiffy.

Likewise, "commentators" around the nation, especially in Rupert (Murderin') Murdoch's Empire of Spin, opine that secret military tribunals are wrist-slaps. Their sagacity demands the use of torture as the correct, efficient method for extracting information, and bringing to heel, "terrorists" and other "criminal suspects."

Right. These pampered, putrid pundits have never served in the military, lived on the street, been in a bar-room brawl, or pulled on their own galoshes. They attended Ivy League think-factories and drive BMWs with in-dash navigational systems. They haven't the faintest clue what it means to be tied upside-down and dipped into boiling water, or to be shocked with cattle prods day after gruesome day. They don't know and don't wanna know.

When the flyboys who had been imprisoned and tortured by North Vietnam came home, I took care of some of them. Ask them if they advocate torture as a tool of "intelligence."

Yet our commentators are fully prepared to torture "suspects" (i.e., other folks) so that nothing will come between them and the new redwood-set jacuzzis in their lake-front summer homes.

Their opinions emerge from the posterior ends of their alimentary canals.

These measures, we are assured, are necessary in a nation whose prison population has tripled in the last twenty years � being comprised chiefly of lower-class males receiving mandatory-minimum sentences for �crimes against the [alleged] public conscience.� Quite a budding enterprise in the Land Of the Free.

The man-caging spree spread so fast that the Government had to farm out prison-construction to the private sector. Economically-strapped small towns across America found the trend a veritable civic-goldmine � until too many of the locals started ending up on the other side of the bars. It�s becoming so hard to tell who�s who � ya know? The prison-guards� union in America is now as powerful as those representing teachers. Sigh. It's always a struggle at the top of the ol� cannibal food-chain.

Defender-of-the-law Ashcroft, supposedly representing the extreme right-wing �balance� against the feminist/identity political Left, was a guiding force behind the Violence Against Women Act. (Read: violence against American men, no problemo.) Conservative columnist Ann Coulter stated: �While in the U.S. Senate, John Ashcroft co-sponsored that unconstitutional feminist lunacy, the �Violence Against Women Act.� That really helped calm down the harridans�.�

Indeed, Anne. it only whetted the appetites of the neo-matriarchy for more man-blood.