Dodo’s and Reptiles

by Mad Adam

The Reptilians in Washington beam with pride, boastfully crediting themselves with railing through their first ‘100 days’ and flogging the citizens of this nation with their ‘Contract with America’. What have they done up there in the House? Cut the school lunch program. Cut the program to ensure good nutrition for pregnant women and newborns. Cut the summer jobs programs for poor kids. Cut the job-training programs at a time when the changing workplace demands better skilled workers. Cut the education loans programs. Cut Supplemental Security Income for poor children with spina bifida and multiple sclerosis. (Newt Gingrich actually made the statement that people were coaching their children to fake spina bifida symptoms in order to defraud the government. Somehow I can’t imagine a 2 year old pulling it off but Newt can.) Cut the recreation programs for teens in the inner cities even though statistics show that these programs cut crime dramatically.

All of this amount to a savings of less than one percent of the federal budget. All this from the family values party. Now that we know what they took, lets have a look at what they didn’t take: Increased military spending during peacetime. Took away a tiny tax on the wealthiest senior citizens. Proposed a $500 per child tax cut for families making up to $200,000. Increased spending on prisons and added the death penalty for a large number of crimes.

They’re on a roll so, I guess they just figured ‘hey, let’s go for it’, because look at a list of some of the other things they want to do:

Promised to cut all the money for public broadcasting. Allowed lobbyists for the country’s biggest polluters rewrite the Clean Water Act. There is a full frontal attack on all the environmental laws. The EPA, the Clean Air Act, etc. Now that MacNamara has come out of the closet about his opinions regarding the Vietnam war - that it was wrong and we shouldn’t have been there - back at the time when he could’ve done something about it, what does that mean? That the Big Mac will now have to grapple with his conscience does not move me to tears. The horrible, senseless, unnecessary waste of life and the obscene profit made from what he could’ve help prevent does. He is guilty of sending a lot of American boys home in wheelchairs and body-bags, as well as many times as many Vietnamese, and we did this for almost ten years. Johnson and Nixon are even more to blame - it was they who employed him. Is that what they mean when they talk about ‘leadership qualities’? Lying to the People? Send the youth out to fight an unnecessary, unjust war for personal political profit? So, all those hippies were right. Don’t forget Kent State. Yeah, sure, the General was just doing his job but aren’t there times when it is morally right to not do your job?

Terrorism strikes US! So the headlines read in today’s papers. US no longer safe from terrorism! As if it never happened here before. Did I just imagine all those clinic bombings we’ve had over the last ten years? Well, they couldn’t blame those on ‘middle-east terrorists’, like they tried immediately following the bombing. Then of course the next group they suspected were domestic ‘religious fanatics’, the Branch-Davidians. When the evidence led them to a government-hating middle-American white-supremacist type youth everybody acted surprized.

25 years ago you’d go immediately to jail for bad-mouthing the government. Now they have guys radio-broadcasting anti-government vitriol from the basement of the capitol, and when congressmen get chewed out by their peers for unethical behavior in the House, they run downstairs and whine about it on the radio. If you ask me, it’s the likes of Limbaugh, Oliver North, and Pat Buchanan who feed the fever in the latent bombers out there.

In no way do I condone bombings. Only a mad-man takes so much innocent life in such a way. I will say this though: had there not been a day-care in the middle of that explosion, I believe there’s a significant portion of our population who would secretly smile at the daydream of the Departments of Agriculture, Social Security, DEA, IRS, Veteran’s Admin., FBI, CIA, or whatever, taking a big fat flaming hit someday. Sorry, but it’s true.

Newt and his lock-step, mealy-mouthed legions of fanatic followers have somehow managed to bad-mouth every single thing the government does take care of it’s citizens and the environment they live in. The government didn’t shove the environmental laws down our throats, the people of this country demanded them. Social Security isn’t a hand-out, it came out of your pocket, it’s your money, you have a right to it. Newt thinks SSI causes child abuse!