Bill Quigley

10 Sep 2008

Great White Snark

by
John Maxwell

"Little
Orphan Annie is so cute she doesn't need to know anything about foreign policy,
except never to find herself alone with that bad Mr. Putin."

I consider
myself something of an authority on American comic book characters, ever since,
nearly a hundred years ago, I was forced to spend months in hospital, aged ten,
with tubes coming out of various parts of me, while my innards were
reconstructed just in case I survived.

I survived
because the surgeon, a great man named
Herbert Morrison, saved my life with his skill and a new drug called
penicillin. In those days, during the Second World War, very limited supplies
of the new wonder drug were available outside of the war zones. The British
apparently sent a few doses out to special doctors in the colonies for testing,
i.e., for use on cases for whom there was no hope.

But I did
acquire a huge collection of comics and my fascination with this art form has
persisted. It also may explain why I see many politicians as comic book
characters and why I had been looking forward to the celestial pairing of those
quintessential bumblers Elmer Fudd and Mr. Magoo at the top of the Republican
party ticket. The combination of John McCain and Joe Lieberman seemed too good
to be true and it would have happened had Mr Fudd not decided on a Captain
Marvel type transformation into Daddy Warbucks and in the nick of time - found
his Little Orphan Annie.

The problem
of course is that Little Orphan Annie may be a political suicide bomber in disguise,
carrying baggage too toxic for the fans

US
Republican politics often reminds me of
a horror comic scripted by Dale Carnegie and drawn by Gahan Wilson, where the
monsters are all on their best behavior as they delicately dismember some
cherished principle of American democracy.

Principles
are fungible; foreign policy experience is absolutely essential, until Daddy Warbucks espies Little Orphan Annie, who
is very aware that when she sits in the Alaska Governor's office, Russia is
everything to the left and is a Very Bad Place, chock full of Very Bad Men.
Little Orphan Annie is so cute she doesn't need to know anything about foreign
policy, except never to find herself alone with that bad Mr. Putin.

If you are
an American it is deemed sexist to criticize Governor Palin. She makes tough
decisions, decisions that mere men could not dare. One such is to leave her
newborn son Trig, four days after his birth, to go back to work. Trig, with
Downs Syndrome, will need a mother's love for much longer than most babies and
if he were breast-fed, might have a much better chance of survival and living a
useful life.

But Sarah Palin is off to help McCain capture the women's
vote, the feminist vote; the Hillary Clinton discontents who, we imagine will
admire her Amazon self-denial, her NRA membership, her hunting prowess; her
opposition to the protection of polar bears, and her opposition to abortion even in cases of rape and incest.

"I had been looking forward to the celestial pairing of
those quintessential bumblers Elmer Fudd and Mr. Magoo at the top of the
Republican party ticket. The combination of John McCain and Joe Lieberman
seemed too good to be true."

She is
indeed a tough cookie, turning not a hair as it is announced that her
17-year-old daughter is pregnant and that despite that news, Mrs. Palin still
opposes sex education for kids. The governor announces that the boyfriend
involved is to marry the girl - perhaps to his own surprise - and he is flown
to Minneapolis to be part of the Palin family welcome to John McCain. His
airport abrazo with McCain should
live long on YouTube.

The Emperor McCain

John
McCain's Elmer Fudd public persona conceals a reality that may of course,
surprise and perhaps even frighten some people.

For more
than a decade he has been the President of the International Republican
Institute (IRI), an outfit that operates its own maverick and sometimes violent
foreign policy. it is the sort of outfit which goes into action, gets out of
its depth and then calls 911 at the Pentagon, to come rescue them and keep US
democracy looking good.

People who
may have been surprised by McCain's warlike declaration that he was "a
Georgian" at the height of the failed Georgian blitzkrieg, may not have
realized that Mr. McCain's IRI along with the CIA, the Israelis and other
assorted neo-fascist troublemakers were an integral element of the Georgians
attempt to incorporate South Ossetia and Abkhazia into Georgia and provide a
more secure path for Central Asian oil to Turkey and eventually Israel and the
US.

I and many
others, wondered at Mr. Mc Cain's presence in Colombia a few weeks before that,
shortly after the end of the Republican primaries. Then, while he was there,
there was a great hullaballoo about the freeing of FARC captives by the Colombian
government and its allies. Surprisingly, Mr. McCain's IRI was never mentioned
in dispatches nor was he included in the celebrations, although he was pictured
smiling smugly, as if he knew something the rest of us didn't. Could it have had anything to do with the
illegal use of Red Cross paraphernalia? And the IRI was spectacularly involved
with the failed anti-Chavez coups in Venezuela, about which a discreet silence
may be the best policy.

"Mr. McCain's IRI along with the CIA, the Israelis and
other assorted neo-fascist troublemakers were an integral element of the
Georgians attempt to incorporate South Ossetia and Abkhazia into Georgia."

In Haiti,
the IRI led the racist assault on democracy and Aristide. The IRI retains a
commanding position in the American takeover of a sovereign nation where life
gets ever more interesting and more desperate every day

Hurricanes
and rainstorms kill more people in Haiti than in most other places for one
reason: the democratic leadership has been destroyed. The institutions and
community arrangements by which other societies protect themselves are broken.
The President is in forced exile, other leaders have been murdered or exiled
and one in particular, Dr. Lovinsky Pierre Antoine, has been kidnapped and has
not been heard from for more than a year.

The
destruction of the Haitian polity and economy means starvation for the people.
While people eat dirt and die of hunger the IRI and its allies are moving to
improve their image and strategic position, and no doubt, build more swimming
pools.

The latest
initiative is the open but totally
illegal capture of land owned by Haitians in Cite Soleil, for the building of
what seems likely to be the American answer to Henri
Christophe's Citadel.

Perhaps
someone might ask Daddy Warbucks if he knows anything at all about all this
activity?

And, if he
does, what does he think about it?

Racism, chauvinism and sport

The gulf
between writers and hacks is nowhere greater than in the field of sports. There
are those who not only know their subjects backwards but are poets and gracious
human beings as well. And there are those who are the real offspring of the
economic prostitution of sport.

These are
people who don't bother to know their subject, are hopelessly chauvinistic and
spiteful towards people they regard as somehow unworthy. Some of this is racist
as the Williams sisters discovered at the height of their glory. The Olympics
provided a showcase for some of these sarcoptic flies of journalism.

The worst
that I saw was one Rick Maese of the Baltimore
Sun whose interest was to denigrate Usain Bolt:

"Last week
I cast skepticism on Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt's incredible feats at these
Olympics -- shattering the world records in both the 100 and 200 meters. Not
surprisingly, there were some who disagreed, who want to believe that Bolt
earned that record through hard work, powerful homegrown yams and his pre-race
Chicken McNuggets. Admittedly, I'd love to believe that too. Unfortunately, I
just can't."

He can't
because he hasn't bothered to do his homework. According to this bozo:

"Put simply,
Phelps' growth curve is a bit different and the testing standards for his home
nation are significantly different. Bolt entered these Games as a curiosity,
while Phelps had long ago established himself as swimming's version of a bull
in a world-record shop."

"The
Olympics provided a showcase for some of these sarcoptic flies of journalism."

Maese does
make a slight bow in the direction of fairness:

"This isn't to suggest that Bolt wasn't also a rising star (in fact, at
16, he was the youngest world champion ever). But their respective paths were
different. For most of his competitive life, when Phelps wasn't performing in
the swimming pool, he was performing for doping officials behind closed doors.

"For the sake of
accuracy, Bolt has also faced plenty of tests. After winning his third gold
medal of these Games, here's what he said: "I've been tested so many times
in the competition I've lost count. We know we're good, we know we're clean. We
work hard and any time you want to test us, it's OK.

"Here's the difference: The United States has a much more stringent
testing program. Jamaica doesn't even have an accredited anti-doping system.
The only times many athletes there -- and in many other countries -- are tested
is when they're in actual competition."

Garbage!

More
reprehensible was the space given in the San Diego Union Tribune to the notorious corrupter of the young, the druggist
Victor Conte, who, in a perfect world would be spending the rest of his life in
some workhouse contemplating the lives and careers he helped to ruin and
working to make amends to the idea of sportsmanship he did so much to smear. Instead,
this blood-sucking parasite is allowed to recklessly libel Jamaica and its
athletes, finding a ready audience in a nation that finds it hard to believe in
the integrity of anyone or anything.

Conte
reminds me of Ogden Nash's cobra, who:

"fills his
mouth with venum

and walks
upon his duodenum."

"In December,
Conte says, he met with former World Anti-Doping Agency chief Dick Pound and
provided details - name, address, phone number - of a drug dealer providing
banned substances to Jamaican track athletes. Pound passed along the
information to his successors at WADA, who have indicated that protocol
requires such data be forwarded to that country's anti-doping agency."

The
suggestion is that the Jamaican authorities are complicit in athletic corruption.

I would be
surprised if Conte were not the creep who posted that infamous parcel to
Beijing, addressed to The Jamaican team and allegedly full of dope.

Creatures
like Conte have a terrible thirst for justification, and if the Jamaicans prove
that you don't need dope the Contes will be forced back into the compost heaps
which are their natural habitat.

Meanwhile,
Mr. Conte should be forced into court, to prove the truth of his allegations or
pay substantial sums to the Jamaican sporting authorities and the athletes.

John Maxwell a veteran Jamaican journalist. He has covered
Caribbean affairs for more than 40 years and is currently a columnist for The
Jamaica Observer. He can be contacted at [email protected]

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