It’s not the fear of nuclear meltdown, germ warfare, Saddam Hussein, terrorists, STDs, UVBs, L.A., the FBI, CIA, PLO, nor even global warming, neo-Nazis, skinheads, cloning, Cuba, Commies, nor being trapped inside a Mandy Patinkin concert that’s keeping me up nights. These demons we live with.
What frightens me is the terror of knowing that the fate of the world (or at least life as we know it) is now resting in the hands of “politicians” like Mrs. Sonny Bono. As you may recall, Congresswoman Bono brings a broad range of experience to the task of presidential impeachment— such as listening to her late husband sing, and harboring illusions that she makes sense.
OK, that’s not fair— Bono is more than just the widow of half of Sonny and Cher. She made this abundantly clear recently when she took time out from the impeachment hearings to tell the press she’d just had a date with a country-and-western drummer. For reasons too frightening to contemplate she assumed the world would be interested in this information. She also let us know that he makes her feel like she’s “in high school.” When someone is deciding the fate of the presidency, the last thing we want to hear is that she has the judgment of a high schooler. As soon as she said it out loud she proved that if nothing else her judgment— at least about herself— is right on point.
Just when we thought it was safe to go back into the hearings, she decided to give an interview— to TV Guide yet— in which she told the world that Sonny was a pillhead and that’s why he slammed into the tree, killing himself. Why do I need to know this? Why is she acting like she’s just slammed into a tree herself?
But Mary Bono isn’t the only politician awaiting a brain transplant. There’s Staten Island’s own congressman, Vito Fossella. Hard as it is to believe, he said proudly at the congressional hearing on impeachment: “[G]enerations of Americans yet unborn must look back on this day, in this matter, in this situation, and see this is our finest hour upholding what our founding fathers and every generation since have looked for and yearned for.” What?
Vito, Vito, Vito. First off, I didn’t— ever— yearn for this. And secondly, don’t you remember? The reason our founding fathers didn’t fool around with interns is that they were too busy raping their slaves! Can you imagine those impeachment hearings? The founders would have been so busy with their lawyers they would never have gotten around to writing the Declaration of Independence— let alone thinking up clever platform slogans like “No Taxation Without Representation.”
After listening to Bono and Fossella, I’m sure it’s time to bring this always appropriate slogan back to billboards across America. You need only look at Congress to see how far we haven’t come since 1776. The country says it doesn’t want impeachment, so Congress goes ahead full bore with the hearings. And watching the racial-gender-ethnic divisions between the Dems and the GOP is equally telling: they look like the House of Commons and the House of Lords.
Then there’s the issue itself: The charges against the president— lying under Monica Lewinsky— are even dumber than the nitwits deciding the issue. First off, even Dan Quayle could figure out that if you’re going to appoint someone to investigate sex (and let’s face it, that’s what this investigation is really about), you should pick someone who has actually had some since Eisenhower left the White House. And how about that interview Ken Starr gave Diane Sawyer? His warm, fuzzy side was like a scene from Orwell’s 1984— even more brain-numbing than Fossella and Bono.