As we of The Scallion extend Yule season's greetings to our gentle Readers, let us remind you yet again to consult www.democracynow.org and www.alternet.org for news you can use!

And now, for the week's top stories ...

Bush Pulls Yet Another Bait-and-Switch PR Stunt for Hand-Picked Live Troops, Continues to Ignore Dead/Wounded Troops

November 30, 2003. Now that Republican front-man George W. Bush’s tippy-top secret campaign PR stump stopover to Baghdad has been revealed to an unsuspecting public, neocon strategist Karl Rove offered details regarding the brief trip and its goals.

“Well,” stated Rove, “it’s all part of the administration’s ‘Respect Our Dead Soldiers,’ or RODS initiative, where, by ‘respect,’ we mean ‘ignore’ and where, by ‘dead,’ we mean ‘not out there laying their highly expendable butts on the front lines to defend our Iraq-based oil operations.’” He paused. “I wanted to name the initiative ‘RUBES,’ as in ‘Respect Unusable But Expended Soldiers,’ but I was voted down—looks like a few mightier-than-thou administration weenies will have their political heads handed to them on a silver platter, but, hey, I can bide my time and take my revenge when it best suits me.

“But I digress. The point here is that, just like ‘Clear Skies,’ where we unleash the country’s worst polluters on the environment, and ‘Healthy Forests,’ where we loose the loggers and let them annihilate the nation’s public woodlands, this initiative has to have a name meaning the opposite of what it does. That’s just good PR. After all, not even a self-respecting Republican can be counted upon to support accurately-named initiatives—like our ‘Poor-Raping Tax Cuts’ or our ‘Big Pharm-Pandering, Old Geezer-Screwing Health Care Reform’ efforts—at least, not until we’ve finished implementing the initiative we affectionately call ‘Everybody Votes, and All Votes Are Counted Fairly.’

“But I see that I’ve digressed again. Let me try to put it in simple terms for those of you who, unlike me, haven’t attended half a dozen colleges without actually graduating from any of them. Look at it this way. With the tacit blessing of a complicit corporate White House media corps, our illustrious President foolhardily risked his nigh-worthless life to attend a photo op with roughly 600 hand-picked troops in Baghdad. The very invasion itself was minutely timed around this particular PR stunt—flying the turkey into Baghdad for the troops on Thansgiving. And, believe me, the logistics were a challenge. Do you have any idea how insanely difficult it was to find that many uninformed—I mean, uniformed—personnel who could be counted on unequivocally to cheer for the President once he stepped out from behind the curtain? And even with all our repeated circumspection, interviews, background checks, and double-checks, our efforts still failed to meet with unalloyed success: one well-aimed forkful of mashies with giblet gravy did in fact manage to land ker-splat on His Highness’s well-pimpled nose, an unfortunate event which our friends in the media have already slavishly avowed to hush up because they know their jobs—nay, their lives—depend on it. I won’t even discuss what’s in store for the ungrateful cur who launched his victuals to voice his assiduously unreasonable displeasure at being sent potentially to his death to fight for the rights of American corporations to liberate Iraq’s oil. Beyond assuring you that he is already in custody at Guantanamo Bay, all I will say is this: keep watching Fox News. When you see that one fateful story in which disaster strikes a seemingly unwitting serviceman and his entire extended family amid circumstances of twisted, gruesome irony, you will recognize my handiwork and know that justice has been served and the President’s dignity avenged.” Rove paused, appearing to relish a bit of introspection upon some grisly possible fates for the offending serviceman.

“Well, I really seem to be having some difficulty staying on topic today. Where was I? Oh, yeah. For those of you who are foolhardy enough to second-guess my judgment and ask why in the name of all things sensible did the President fly halfway around the world and back to spend two hours in Baghdad rather than take the same total amount of time visiting injured and maimed soldiers here at home or attending dead soldiers’ funerals, I advise you to listen well to my answer so that you may be fully shocked and awed by it. There are actually several reasons for His Highness’s secret trip to Baghdad. It was secret so that the public would not have time to protest such an egregious squandering of taxpayer dollars. Furthermore, this administration’s policy is to thoroughly ignore injured and dead soldiers because acknowledging them in any way whatsoever draws undue attention to their very existence—a highly inconvenient existence, if you must know, because it points an undeniable finger at the growing number of casualties coming out of Iraq and our culpability in causing them. Oh, there are so many if’s—what if we hadn’t assimilated Iraq into our empire by violence; what if we had spent taxpayer dollars to equip our troops instead of insisting that they buy their own equipment, like socks and rucksacks and bullet-proof vests—that it is simply inconvenient to deal with in the public eye. People say that the government should be run like a business, and that’s exactly what we’re doing: let the monied elite make all the decisions in secret from behind closed doors and hand them down by decree to the great unwashed masses of peasants. This is democracy in action, folks. You asked for it; you got it.

“Another issue with allowing the President to have even the slightest contact with dead or injured soldiers or their families is that those traitors cannot be trusted to support this administration at all costs. They might blame us for the injuries or deaths of their loved ones—a catastrophe that cannot be allowed to occur because it would burst the President’s fragile bubble of belief that the entire world supports him 100% in everything he did, does, or ever will do. And we can’t have that. And another problem with soiling his Highness’s rarefied, sanctified air by allowing it to commingle with the breath of dead or injured traitors or their families is that many of these so-called individuals are likely to voice dissent not only with the President’s imperial policies but also with the ill-treatment they perceive soldiers are receiving both in deployment and upon return home. Peasants are greedy, you know—very greedy. They get upset whenever we reduce their hazard pay or their benefits—or when we reduce full-time military personnel to begging for food stamps just to put enough cat food on the table. Honestly, there is just no satisfying some people …

“Do you dare to ask why I call injured and dead soldiers ‘traitors’? Because they were reckless enough to get themselves injured or killed in the first place, of course. They failed their country by allowing themselves to be taken off the battlefield, alive or dead, without first destroying every real or perceived threat in their path. In short, a soldier on the hoof has value to us. Granted, that value is minuscule and can be measured in terms of a few odd pennies—and I mean what the average American would think of as a few odd pennies, not our good friends at Enron. Off the hoof, however, a soldier is just so much taxpayer burden—burden that our wealthy voter base would rather not waste precious money on for food, medicine, housing, education, jobs, etc. Heck, those military whiners are lucky that we don't just take all the dead and wounded soldiers sent home from Iraq and dump 'em, dead or alive, into one mass grave marked, “TRAITORS” and bury 'em once and for all—good riddance, if you ask me. So, we believe that it is the President’s prerogative—nay, duty—to snub these careless soldiers for the traitors they are and use his photo ops more wisely by spending a what-me-worry hour hither or thither with a handful of live, unwounded, on-the-hoof soldiers … convincing them—however untrue—that their President does care about their morale and welfare … when all he really wants is their votes and their unwitting complicity to help advertise and get other rubes’ votes.

“Besides … it’s so much more dramatic this way.”

Bush’s Promised 15B of AIDS Money is Loan for Africa, Hand-out for Big Pharmaceuticals

December 1, 2003. Pretending that this week’s $15B for AIDS in Africa is in some way different from the $15B earmarked by the Clinton Administration for AIDS in Africa that the Bush administration promised months ago but still hasn’t sent, Mr. Bush held a veritable bevy of PR announcements and signing ceremonies in the Oval Office today in honor of World AIDS Day.

“We in the Bush administration find the bait-and-switch, lie-through-your-everlovin’-teeth technique to be so much more effective if you sometimes tell the truth, so here goes,” explained a White House spokesman. “This $15B is the same loan that the Great Satan, Bill Clinton, promised to Africa as a bribe—albeit, a usurious bribe because Africa could never pay back the principal, let alone the interest. Another catch is that, if Africa bites the bait, they will only be able to use the money to buy American-made AIDS drugs at world-market prices—prices set by the big U.S. pharmaceutical companies. If Africa accepts the loan and gets caught buying or making their own cheaper AIDS drugs, then the deal is off. So, since Africa is screwed either way, the $15B is really just a cleverly disguised chunk of white collar welfare for our friends in the big drug companies.”

With the conclusion of the photo op signing ceremonies, oddly enough, nobody, including Mr. Bush, still has any idea what he actually signed with the half-dozen gold-plated, taxpayer-donated, $1000 Mont Blanc signing pens he so generously doled out to friends and supporters amid handshakes after flourishing his signature onto heaven-knows-what pieces of paper. “For all we know, they could be pages torn from his latest self-help book, ‘You Too Can Help Color Muffy,’” mumbled a nervous aide.

Engineer Loses Job over Security Reinvestigation

November 28, 2003. In a stunning turn of events, Ms. Mary Shipley, a single mother of two, was fired from her job at a federal laboratory due to the outcome of a security clearance investigation.

“I’ve been an engineer with [facility name withheld upon request] for twenty years, and this is how my country pays me back?” an incredulous Ms. Shipley half-sobbed. “Because of some freak whims of the courts, I’m already paying child support and two mortgages: on my home and my children’s father’s home. Heaven knows it’s been hard enough making ends meet as it is. I’ve exhausted my retirement and my savings in legal fees. I have no idea where the money will come from now. The way things in the courts are going, they’ll probably throw me in jail for willful nonpayment.”

She was unavailable for further comment.

But why was Ms. Shipley dismissed from her job? She is in the prime of her career—at an age and experience level where engineers hit their stride and anticipate their highest earning potential in the years ahead. Her performance has consistently been rated “above satisfactory” or better by her supervisors over the past twenty years. Her time and attendance records have always been above reproach. Rather, the fatal blow stemmed from the results of Ms. Shipley's recent security clearance reinvestigation—a usually all-too-routine occurrence—and a new homeland security question ... and how Ms. Shipley's friends and acquaintances answered it on her behalf.

Here was the offending question: “Does Ms. Shipley have any contact with the media?” Added recently to clearance questionnaires at the behest of the Department of Homeland Security, this question seems innocent enough, albeit unrelated to Ms. Shipley's trustworthiness with her homeland's security secrets. Equally innocent seem Ms. Shipley's contacts' answers. When questioned about Ms. Shipley's media contact by an investigator—interestingly, these investigations are no longer being made by government agents but by contracting firms—one respondent, a co-worker from a previous job, replied, “Well, every now and then, she'd mention having written a letter or two to some newspaper editor or other. Since none of her letters were ever published, I never took it very seriously.”

Innocent enough, right?

Certainly, the remark entirely failed to alarm the investigator, who spoke with The Scallion under condition of anonymity: “Our job is just to collect the data. We write down whatever people say to us—we don't analyze it. That happens higher up the food chain.” So, what did happen higher up the so-called food chain? The Scallion was fortunate enough to speak with a clerk in the Department of Homeland Security, who also insisted on anonymity. “Well, I remember Ms. Shipley's case because it's one of the more recent ones. It was one of those cases where one informer's remark sends up a red flag, and you pull the thread, and, lo and behold, a bona fide 'problem child' lands up right smack in your nets. The red flag was Ms. Shipley's media contact—her practice of writing letters to newspaper editors. The investigator had no idea what a good lead he'd gotten his hands on, but that's OK. That's not his job—it's mine. I could have gone to the newspapers and tried to get Ms. Shipley's letters more or less as a matter of public record, but it's a lot easier to use 'sneak and peek' now that we have it—why spend more effort than I have to?

“Anyway, I got onto Ms. Shipley's home computer while she was away at work—and, sure enough, there were all the letters she'd written since she owned that computer right there on the hard drive. Talk about hitting the jackpot! All she ever did was rant and rave about how evil President Bush II is ... how the war on Iraq was founded on lies ... how America now only has one political party, and it's devoted to corporate fascism—not to mention the state-run corporate media—it's incredible how vociferous she was. And then she would send all those letters to newspaper editors, to her Senators and Congressmen, to her church leaders—sometimes, even to the President himself.

“While I was busily nosing around on her computer, I noticed some newsletters on her desk that I felt it was my responsibility to check out. Clearly addressed as member-only mail to Ms. Shipley herself, these newsletters proved conclusively that, at that time, Ms. Shipley was a member of multiple seditious organizations intent on the overthrow of the American government. Denial of Ms. Shipley's security clearance based on the evidence was an open-and-shut case. However, we are still deliberating on whether to prosecute her for her treasonous offenses.

“What treasonous offenses, you ask? Let me give you a sound-bite. The criminal aspect of Ms. Shipley's contact with the media lies in her gross violation of the recently streamlined, clarified First Amendment of the Constitution, which clearly allows total freedom of speech except for dissent, which includes any and all criticism of the President, government, corporations, and/or any and all Republican individuals, groups, and/or interests. That's part one—it's bad enough, but we might not have bothered considering prosecution except for the seditious organizations and government overthrow what-not—of course, depending on how she fares in the family courts, we might not have to bother after all: they may throw her in jail for us. What seditious organizations was Ms. Shipley in? Well, I'll tell you, since it will be a matter of public record sooner or later anyway. Just remember: your readers may not even have heard of some of these groups because they're so far below the public radar. In short, Ms. Shipley was an active, supporting member of Pacifica public radio; she was in abortion-rights groups like NOW, NARAL, and Planned Parenthood; she was a peace activist in groups like Move On, International A.N.S.W.E.R., Black Voices for Peace, Code Pink, and others; and, most damningly, she was an active member—freely volunteering time and untold money—in groups intent on overthrowing the government. What groups? Well, they're pretty bad. For example, it's bad enough that she was an active member of and donated time and money to the Democratic National Committee—that alone would have cost her her clearance, if not her job. It's even worse that she supported and volunteered for that bleeding heart populist Dennis Kucinich's campaign. But she could have done worse. If she'd been a member of the Green Party instead of a mere Republican-lite Democrat, she wouldn't just have lost her clearance and, subsequently, her job—she'd have been packed off to the Traitors' Hilton in Guantanamo Bay.

“The lenient treatment Ms. Shipley is receiving only goes to show what a big softy [Attorney General] Ashcroft is, after all.”