On Saturday night, comic Wanda Sykes elicited awkward, if not disapproving, groans at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner when she told the following joke:
Rush Limbaugh, one of your big critics, boy – Rush Limbaugh said he hopes this administration fails… To me, that’s treason. He’s not saying anything differently than Osama bin Laden is saying. You know you might want to look into this, sir, because I think Rush Limbaugh was the 20th hijacker but he was just so strung out on Oxycontin he missed his flight.
Too much?… Rush Limbaugh! I hope the country fails? I hope his kidneys fail, how about that?
Yes, that was too much. But even worse, it was not funny!
Though, in fairness to Wanda, this ill-conceived jab at Limbaugh was entirely in the spirit of jokes that have been told by other comics, including, perhaps most infamously, shock-jock Don Imus, who have headlined this annual dinner. And like all of his predecessors, Obama reacted to this bomb by feigning laughter to appear a good sport….
Nevertheless, Wanda’s shtick was notable for its unwitting reference to Osama bin Laden. Because the act of treason is not Limbaugh and his ditto heads, including former VP Dick Cheney, declaring that they want Obama to fail. Instead, it’s their ideological pining for Osama to succeed … again.
Specifically, these folks are acutely mindful that their Republican Party is now wallowing in the throes of political irrelevance. And they have clearly decided that its only hope for survival is for the Democratic administration of Barack Obama to fail … spectacularly.
They know, however, that praying for Obama’s economic policies to fail simply won’t cut it. Not least because, even if the economy is still in recession two or four years from now, arguing that Obama has failed to completely clean up the mess it took Bush eight years to create will not constitute a winning political strategy.
But one wonders why it does not occur to Cheney that declaring he would choose Limbaugh over Colin Powell as their standard bearer only pushes the party further out on the lunatic fringe of the political spectrum.
On the other hand, they know full well that nothing would herald the revival of the Republican Party quite like a terrorist attack on Obama’s watch:
I agree with critics who assert that Obama’s presidency is now doomed if terrorists pull off another 9/11-style attack. Especially since this would stand in damning contrast to one of the only redeeming features of Bush’s purportedly failed presidency, namely, that he protected the American people from such an attack.
[CIA Memogate: protecting Americans or betraying values, TIJ, April 23, 2009]
This is why Cheney is on a mission to keep preaching about another terrorist attack until his self-fulfilling prophecy is realized:
They have moved to take down a lot of those policies we put in place that kept the nation safe for nearly eight years from a follow on terrorist attack like 9/11. Dealing with prisoner interrogation, for example, or the terrorist surveillance program.
It was a time of great concern, and we put in place some very good policies, and they worked, for eight years… I think to the extent that those policies were responsible for saving lives, that the administration is now trying to cancel those policies or end them, terminate them, then I think it’s fair to argue — and I do argue — that that means in the future we’re not going to have the same safeguards we’ve had for the last eight years.
(Cheney delivering his political sermon on Sunday morning’s edition of Face the Nation)
Yet, notwithstanding the perverse nature of his mission, if America suffers another 9/11-style attack, I have no doubt that Cheney would be hailed the prophet (of doom) whose warnings should have been heeded. Moreover, I suspect that many of those now criticizing Cheney would exorcise their guilt by joining the right-wing chorus in criticizing Obama as too naïve to serve as commander in chief in this age of terrorism….
In the meantime, it only feeds the visceral contempt zealots like Cheney have for Obama that he’s sanctioning in private many of Bush’s war-on-terror tactics he’s still condemning in public. And even though a die-hard Obama supporter, I sympathize with their outrage. Particularly since I think the Democratic Party’s obsession with torture reeks of naivete and hypocrisy:
Until Obama leads the country through seven years without another terrorist attack, I am going to accept President Bush’s [and Cheney’s] word that the “enhanced” interrogation methods and techniques he approved were absolutely indispensable in foiling numerous attacks and saving thousands of American lives. The proof is in the pudding…
[And frankly, I don’t give a damn if, by some subjective application of international law, those methods and techniques amount to torture. After all, it beats the alternative!]
[CIA Memogate: protecting Americans or betraying values, TIJ, April 23, 2009]
NOTE: Except for the bit about that big, fat, OxyContin-poppin’ idiot, Rush Limbaugh, Wanda dished out some pretty hilarious stuff. But, ironically, she was upstaged by Obama who gave a performance I doubt even Leno or Letterman could match.
Related commentaries:
CIA Memogate…
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