Our future secured

DIANE SAWYER:   What would it take to convince you he didn’t have weapons of mass destruction?
PRESIDENT BUSH:   Saddam Hussein was a threat and the fact that he is gone means America is a safer country.

Chris Jones

Managing Editor

Of course the biggest story to break during the Christmas holiday was the capture of one pole of the axis of evil, Saddam Hussein. After a brief interval to avoid the appearance of excessive gloating, the Bush team was all over the airwaves claiming that America was now much safer since the evil dictator had been extracted from his opulently appointed “spider hole”.

No one in the press seemed to notice that within a few days of Saddam’s capture the Terror alert level was raised to orange, nuclear experts were dispatched to a number of major urban areas to try to detect dirty bombs, and airline flights from France, Great Britain, and Mexico were all interrupted on the basis of “specific and credible information” that a new 9/11 style attack was imminent.

Killing of American soldiers continued without stop and the tactics of the insurgents reached new levels of sophistication. Comments by presidential candidate Howard Dean that perhaps America was no safer as a result of Saddam’s capture were treated as if he had had a momentary lapse of sanity.

On December 16, Diane Sawyer, hoping to replace Barbara Walters as the softball queen of American journalism, interviewed the President. The question that inquiring minds wanted to know, “exactly how were we threatened by Saddam Hussein and how have we been made safer by his removal?” The question practically wrote itself across the TV screen, it hung in the air motionless like the Goodyear blimp with its huge LED screen flashing, “ask me … ask me,” and it remained unasked… and unanswered.

Switching subjects, Vox Clamatis has, in the manner of recent Geico commercials, received some good news. A major publisher of trading cards has made an offer to pay royalties for rights to use our (fortunately for us) copyrighted phrase “Asses of Evil”.

In hopes of following up on the success of their series of Mafia trading cards, Pyrrhic Publishing of Dismal Seepage Ohio is planning to use our phrase as the title for a new series of cards covering the leading figures of the American right wing. The new cards will follow the format of their Mafia series: portrait, name and moniker on the front; “stats” (i.e., rap sheet, prison time served, and major “hits”) on the back. For those individuals who at the time of printing have not yet been indicted or served time, statistics will be augmented by various economic indicators, campaign contribution sources and totals, and golf scores. Pyrrhic has promised bonus payments for coining suitable monikers. Rush “Oxycontin” Limbaugh, Newt “Motor Mouth” Gingrich and Paul “The Wolf” Wolfowicz are all possibilities still being considered. It has however already been decided Vice President Cheney will retain his regular appellation. It is planned that the cards will be given as a premium with various products just like bubble gum and cigarette cards of the past. Pyrrhic plans to market the cards to the demographic where they will do the most good. Letters of intent have already been signed with a major manufacturer and owner of large numbers of vending machines placed in the men’s rooms of honky tonks throughout the South.

We have hopes that revenues will be enough to sustain us through our declining years and make up for the loss of Medicare and Social Security benefits which appears to be a certain consequence of a second (or third) Bush presidency. With luck there may be a little left over to augment my children’s income when they are ready to take up their careers at Wal-Mart. That is, of course, only if those jobs haven’t been given to Mexicans imported under Bush’s new immigration policy.

I have already received several draft sets of the “Asses of Evil” trading cards and distributed them to the neighborhood kids. Only yesterday I heard one of the kids make an offer that really struck home. “Hey,” he said, “I’ll trade you three Bush rookie years for a Nixon.”

Sounds like a deal.