Let's Stop Beating Around The Bush Political Subversion from Jim Hightower

INTRODUCTION ?You've got to take the bull by the teeth.' ?movie mogul Samuel Goldwyn Whoa, Sam, you could lose a hand doing that! Yet here I am foolishly practicing Goldwyn's malapropism, reaching right into the maw of the Bush White House to try throwing this raging bull to the ground.Why? Because the Bushites are'let me put this as politely as I can?NUTS! Bull-goose- loopy, ideological freaks, whose snorting rampages pose a threat to us all and to all we hold dear. Oh, I can hear you thinking [Reader's Alert: It's true, I have uncanny ears]: Surely he doesn't mean loopy. While the Bushites might be unusually robust, aggressive even, in the pursuit of their agenda, they are still within the bounds of America's mainstream political thought . . . right? It's not like they're, you know, EXTREMISTS who would try to superimpose their own Orwellian, Strangelovian, AynRandian, JerryFallwellian ideology over America's good ol? egalitarian ideals . . . right? I mean, these are rational people who just happen to be a little to the right . . . right?No. They're insane. They're zealots totally dedicated to implementing their plutocratic, autocratic, militaristic, and imperialistic vision of America'and it's time we stopped beating around the bush about it. How crazy are they? Consider these symptoms: Rumsfeld'scowling, barking, and thrusting out his chest'sees weapons of mass destruction that are not there; George himself constantly hears voices in his head telling him to ?cut rich people's taxes . . . again?; Ashcroft lunges from place to place, frenetically searching for more ways to ?protect? our freedom by (follow the bouncing logic here) throttling our freedoms; and Cheney, with that fiendish grin always slashed across his face, insists that God created earth so oil companies would have something to plunder. These people must be stopped and taken away to a very quiet, soothing place where they can no longer do harm. Think about it. In four short years, they have: ? heisted $1.3 trillion from our public treasury and doled it out to their richest campaign backers; ? defoliated our environmental protections; ? launched a class war not only against the poor but against the middle class as well; ? taken a Weedwacker to our Bill of Rights; ? sought to castrate labor unions; ? turned a $240 billion budget surplus into a $520 billion debt; ? attempted to privatize everything from the Park Service to Social Security; ? and hurled our nation into a maniacal, messianic, testosterone-driven global war to make the world safe for Halliburton.Imagine what they'd be doing if they'd actually won the election! Now imagine what they will be doing if they win this one . . . or if they Supreme-Court it again. Unbelievableis a word usually reserved for breathtaking circus acts or the kind of astonishing oddities found in Ripley's Believe It or Not, but it has now become the defining term for the madness of King George the W. As I've crisscrossed America since the Bushites took power, person after person has come forward'mouth agape, head shaking, eyes wide'with yet another horror story of the mind-boggling arrogance and downright weirdness of this bunch. And every one of their stories is punctuated with ?Unbelievable!? Bush & Company have made the bizarre commonplace. So common that whenever there's another White House announcement of some action they've either taken or proposed, people instinctively cringe: ?Oh no, here it comes again.' What ?it? is doesn't matter, for people know it's going to be yet another awful step backward, another dollop of unfathomable ideological excess, and another wallop for the rest of us. When I say ?people? cringe, I don't merely mean yellow-dog Democrats, but also political switch-hitters, Libertarians, nonvoters, none-of-tHightower, Jim is the author of 'Let's Stop Beating Around The Bush Political Subversion from Jim Hightower', published 2004 under ISBN 9780670033546 and ISBN 0670033545.