Sometimes I imagine our fair friends in Morgan Hill, Gilroy and San Martin casting their eyes toward the boobs of San Benito County, and they must be shaking their heads in a mixture of amusement, disbelief, perhaps pity – much like my class of fellow grade-school students did when I was a kid a million years ago, when the teacher would have us watch old leaden KGB propaganda films. We’d laugh out loud and make fun of the secretive, fearful and loathsome communist Soviet Union.
Now, with Bush and his administration spending billions of our tax dollars letting Osama Bin Forgotten go and at the same time spying on their own people, we’ve become what that old “evil empire” was. So it’s not so funny anymore.
I wish we could all pull the covers over our heads to shut out the news of Bush’s illegal wiretaps, the widespread bribery and corruption that has a stranglehold on the Republican Congress and the fact that President Cheney is destroying democracy here while he ballyhoos building a new democracy in Iraq (and if that’s democracy, wait ’til you see his version of full-blown totalitarianism).
Don’t get me wrong. I realize there are some Democratic Congressmen who took pay-offs from high falutin’ Republican bagman and lobbyist Jack Abramoff as well, and they got to go. But let’s face it. There’s been a stampede of Republicans this week who are dying to distance themselves from this troll by holding press conferences and announcing giving back the money to charities. Why not give it back to Abramoff? After all, he stole it fair and square from Native American tribes.
The White House, through their Charlie McCarthyite named Scott McClellan, called Abramoff “outrageous,” which is a quite a turn from their usual “that’s inappropriate, but that’s OK!” stand. Well, if it’s so outrageous, why doesn’t Baby Doc Bush and Pickles give back that $200,000 Abramoff raised for his 2004 “reelection” campaign?
People in Morgan Hill (where the number of brain cells are higher per capita than in other communities throughout the country) and Gilroy can at least shut the white noise of the NeoCon echo machine out every now and then by taking comfort in the knowledge that their locally elected officials aren’t as brazenly buffoonish and incredible as the ones in D.C., who are smothering the nation right now.
Not so in San Benito. Here, we have to contend with both a national government run amuck and a local one that is confoundingly perplexing, and an insult to our intelligence. I don’t think that’s being overly harsh, and I believe you’d agree if you got a load of what occurred at the San Benito County Board of Supervisors meeting this week.
Not surprisingly, the meeting was eerily similar to one that occurred in the toxic defunct mercury-mining ghost town of New Idria. The one in New Idria went like this:
SUPERVISOR CHAIR FIBBER BIG KNOCKERS: Ah, hell. I guess I gotta give the gavel over to Supervisor Sat Low.
SUPERVISOR FLAMIN’ IN THE NEWS (screeching): No! No! No! No!
SUPERVISOR KNOCKERS: OK, OK. But I’m going to make it a “white ballot.”
ALL SUPERVISORS EXCEPT FLAMES (in unison): Huh?????
FLAMES: No! No! No! No!
KNOCKERS: Shut the [blank] up.
SUPERVISOR CON BARKUS: I nominate Sat Loe.
FLAMES: No! No! No! No!
SUPERVISOR CORNY BORDELLO: I second it.
FLAMES: No! No! No! No!
KNOCKERS: All those in favor of the white ballot?
SUPERVISOR LOW: What the–?
FLAMES: No! No! No! No!
COUNTY COUNSEL MEL: Could someone get a straight jacket for Supervisor in the News before he messes up the carpet?
San Carlos Creek Update: See what I mean? And it got better. After the meeting, Flames in the News made a beeline for the Daily Disappointment to justify his – I guess – “vote.” He said Sat was a member of the “old board” that spent too much money on “frivolous lawsuits.”
“Thank you Supervisor Flames, sir, your honor, your highliness, very good, sir,” said the daily reporter.
Just then, I, reporting for the Mad Hatters Hallucination Weekly, popped out of the bushes next to the filthy orange polluted creek and asked the obvious question:
“Excuse me, Supervisor Flamy? Wasn’t it you and your ventriloquist who cost the county all that money in a frivolous lawsuit that you later had to drop because your lawyer hadn’t bothered listening to the New Idrian town tapes of the meeting??”
“I don’t talk to you, Kate,” Flames said.
A beacon of transparency for the public! Gee. What does that remind me of, on a much, much larger scale?
