Thursday, April 21, 1994 Confession of fey Jertmy Sfen I have a horrible confession to make. Yes, I sen a liberal. In feet, I am a member of a highly secret world-wide organization which will have me killed when they realize that I have exposed them. We exist for the sole purpose of taming fee youth of die worid ■prfnw rinh* mif aaplfwd lowani gpdfess tofa-shoping new sge Marxist homosexuality. Yes, it’e tree. We are the descendants of fee commie pinko In the basement of a small farmhouse in Girard, Pierre Ifanens at the collar door for the secret i*"** and gives die sign: "Laßouche." He then wails for tbe coaatenign: "Leary.” When he thinks that it’s safe, Pierre tees us into our Erie headqpaaters. Andfe-visnal equipment and a tifMt* gap of the ftjfete belt fill the dart room. Sven gives us our weekly instructions Horn fee liberal elitists and sends oat encrypted messages over shortwave radio to our deep cover propaganda agents in the The Goober System by Dave Barry SymdicMtd Cotmmut I see by the newspapers that solid progress is being made by the faded Clinton administration, which has finally moved beyond the Bumbling Around Cluelessly Phase and is now deep into the Big Incomprehensible Scandal Phase. This is good. Under our system of government (called, technically, “The Goober System”), the primary function of the executive branch, aside from frowning sincerely down from helicopters at natural disasters, is to get involved in vast, festering legal masses that affect the legislative process in a manner very similar to what happens when you attempt to flush a dead moose down a commode: Everything gets stopped up. Which is exactly what we want. As the great statesperson John or Samuel Adams once “A government engaged in the legislative process is a government that can, at any moment, without warning, decide that it needs to spend $14.3 million on a Bureau of Catfish Safety.” So we need big executive branch scandals. That's why time's a top-secret, high tech, self-activating device in the White House attic called the Stupid Ray. I’m sure you have of Bchrcnd. We theu eat a meal of bean sgrontt and sing socialist hymns. The meeting ends with a ritual burning of the American flag; we wander off in twos and threes to «nAimi» mAmtniher What scares me is that somebody out there just said, “Ahal I knew it!” Urn. guys, there's no conspiracy. In feet, I've found that there’s very little organization at all among left-wing poups. I have a hand time believing feat they ooold organize a collective picnic, much less the subversion of fee Amwipyi people. The feminist group f lcnow of can't decide whefeer to aqpell 'women', with n y or an *i.’ The pro-hemp hxfivifeials on interim groups Noe alt-drags hold heated debates over questions Eke: “Can WiUiaffi Buckley be trusted?” and “Can you fill a bong wife vegetable oil?” I tmdermmd oa campus, Trigoo's last subversive plot was to print up tee shirts and sell them. (By the way, ask a member of Irigon about having posters ripped down,..) As mange as I feel saying this. long suspected that there was such a device. You have noticed that we keep sending all these brilliant people to fee White House - dynamic leaders with their 14-point programs and their Bold Visions for America and their dozens of whip-smart National-Honor-Society Phi-Beta- Kappa Rhodes-Scholar aides and lawyers, and the instant they grab hold of the controls of the Ship of State, they become Jerry Lewis starring in “The Nutty Take Richard M. “Dick” Nixon. Here is a man wife an IQ of 384, a man who every six weeks produces a hard-cover book explaining how we can solve every single problem in the entire world, and look what happened when he got into fee White House: NIXON (to his aides): ... and our first priority must be fee implementation of the New Federalism, with the concomitant amalgamation of fee structural parameters Of the... STUPID RAY: Hummmmm NIXON: ... I know! Let’s install a tape recorder in here, then discuss a criminal conspiracy! AIDES: Great idea, sir! HENRY KISSINGER: Then let’s screw in a light bulb! And it wasn’t just Nixon. Jimmy Carter was a nuclear engineer. Do you think a nuclear John Romomando is right about a few things in his column last week. He is right to say that political correctness is wrong. He is also right to criticize groups that use vandalism, intimidation, and violence against their opposition. However, he conveniently overlooks his own use of the word 'radical' rod fails to give us a realistic portrait of left-wing groups. He also takes us on a ride down the slippery slope by presenting good premise* and expanding them, wifeout my explanation or logic, into a Marxist conspiracy theory. To quote, “Confuscious once said, 'When words lose their meaning, men lose their freedom*.” True. Butwhatabout fee word ‘radical’? Radical groups, fey definition, advocate “sweeping changes in laws and methods of government.” (Menriam-Webster). They arc to die left-wing whit groups such as the KKK are to fee political right To categorize all liberals by the actions of radical groups is tantamount to calling every Republican a racist I could have engineer with an unimpaired brain is going to tell reporters that he was being chased by a GIANT SWIMMING RABBIT? No, that was the Stupid Ray, which also caused the massive incomprehensible Iran-Contra scandal that paralyzed both the Bush and Reagan administrations (although for some reason the ray appeared to have no effect whatsoever on President Reagan himself). And now we have the Clinton administration, loaded with brains, flailing around like a blindfolded mud wrestler, getting itself deeper and deeper into this Whitewater Development scandal, the scope to which has now been expanded to the point where, any day now, there is going to be a Texas School Book Depository a liberal dog up every human rights violation supported by fee Reagan administration, e.g. The New Yorker Dec. 3,1994. But that would have been just as unrealistic. Many liberal groups simply do not fit the Rossomando stereotype, just as many conservative groups do not fit their own common stereotypes. Let me point a flashing neon sign toward the American Civil Liberties Union. This group vigorously defends the right to free speech for groups which have very little popular support and which may even oppose the First Amendment itself, e.g. the American Neo-Nszipmty. I agree wholeheartedly feat free speech is an intrinsic pint of our society. I also agree that ‘political correctness’ implies an erosion of the right to free spooch, in modi the same way that laws which discriminate »jpiiwt imply an erorioa of the separation of church and atme. But how does . political correctaes* translate into Marxian??? Not a wool of last week’s column explains this mysterious and arcane link, angle. We here in the print medium are working overtime to keep you abreast of this scandal by cranking out long, fact-filled stories. Each of these is carefully reviewed prior to publication by a team of brilliant theoretical physicists headed by Stephen Hawking; if these people have even the faintest clue as to what the story says, we rewrite it to make it mare incomprehensible far you, the average citizen. This is easy for us, because even WE don’t understand this scandal. Some days, when we’re running a little short, we stick chunks of old Watergate articles in our Whitewater stories to bulk them out All we know for sure about Whitewater is, it has something to do wife •• surprise! a failed savings-and-loan. EVERYTHING has to do with a failed savings-and-loan. Hundreds of years from now, historians will look back on die ravaged remains of our society and wonder how come we never used nuclear weapons on the savings and-loan industry when we had die chance. Here’s what I want to know: Did YOU, personally, ever have any money in a failed savings and-loan? No, right? Neither did I. Neither did anybody I know. I bet neither did anybody you know. So where the hell are all these failed savings-and-loans “Political correctness is something right out of the Marxist playtook.” Um, what exactly IS the Marxist playbook? Can I get a copy? It sounds fascinating. Do tiie heads of universities which advocate PC consult their Marxist playbooks first? Seriously though, argument by blind assertion does little but waste ink. Maybe every controversial group on campus (except for the Conservative Alliance) has bean ripping down its own signs. Maybe the burning of the library at Alexandria was accidental. Maybe there is a link between Marxism and political correctness. But John Rosaomando hasn’t shown us the connection. Maybe there is a world-wide conspiracy of liberals. But John Rossomando hasn't given ns tmy compelling reason toheiieveso. I say we shouldn't suppress free speech. But could we phrase save the conspiracy theories for Oliver coming from/ Who put all these billions of dollars into them that we taxpayers are always putting back? Space aliens? Are we bailing out Martians here? This is only one of the many Whitewater questions now under investigation. And although of course it would be wrong to pass any judgment before all the facts are known, we can safely assume that everybody involved Is guilty. The Republicans cannot BELIEVE their good luck, but they are trying to be cool about it. As Senate Minority Leader “Bob" Dole (R-Mister Meany Pants) put it in a recent speech, “We cannot allow work on critical national issues to be halted by a shortsighted partisan obsession with Whitewater Whitewater Whitewater Whitewater Whitewater ncener neener neener ha ha ha.” Speaking of issues: There are some other ones, such as the budget deficit, and fee fact that you apparently can write “RUSSIAN AGENT" on your Central Intelligence Agency employment application and stiF get a high-level job, ana as concerned citizens we SHOULD be thinking about these things, and demanding better from our leaders, but every time we try to Hummmmmmmm Page 9
Significant historical Pennsylvania newspapers