Beating Around the Bush (11 page)

“Yes, and when he is on Air Force One he is patched into heaven. The U.S. has the most modern communications of any country in the world.”

I said, “Kelsey, you are very smart to ask the question. Most adults wouldn’t ask. As a matter of fact, many people think the president
is
God, which of course, is not true.”

“Are you going to be in trouble for saying all this?”

“No, but Jerry Falwell will be mad as hell.”

IT IS CHRISTMAS in the year 2020. The American troops are still in Iraq. Bing Crosby is singing “White Christmas” over the loudspeaker.

Most of the soldiers have been here since Christmas 2003. They are homesick and also mad at the presidents who succeeded Dubya.

Each one promised the men that they would be home by Christmas, but not one of them said which Christmas.

Tom Brokaw the Third (no relation to Tom Brokaw the First) is now anchorman for the merged CBS, NBC and ABC Networks. He is in Baghdad to see how morale is holding up.

On his evening news program he says, “The soldiers have just
been told they will have to be here for another year—until the chaos quiets down and the various religious factions stop their fighting.

“Standing next to me is Master Sergeant Jason Marks, who has been here since the war started in 2003. He is attached to Third Infantry Division.

“Sergeant, it has been a long time, hasn’t it?”

“Yeh, but somebody has to get the job done.”

“Are you sorry you have to be here at Christmas time?”

“Well, if I had my druthers I’d rather be home with my grandchildren. But I’m a soldier I am not going to question what the people in the Pentagon want me to do.

“The Iraqis are fine people and once the U.S. Army trains them to have a police force we’ll be outta here and ready to go home.”

Tom asks, “How long will it be?”

“Don’t know. Every time we build a police station the Baath Party blows it up.”

Brokaw says, “I’m now going to talk to a PFC tank driver named ‘Peanuts’ Barcelona. Peanuts how do you feel about spending another year guarding the Iraqi oil wells?”

“I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore. My girl left me in 2012 and married the guy who fixed her water heater. It hurt because I knew her when she was thirty-five years of age.”

“Is guarding the oil wells a very important job?” Tom asks.

“It’s a dirty job because the sand keeps blowing up and I have to clean the engines every day.”

“You are not like the sergeant I interviewed who said he would stay here as long as it was necessary.”

“I only enlisted for four years and they keep extending it every Christmas. Why should I be happy?”

“Thanks Peanuts. I have a civilian here, Bill Gadzuk, who is still
looking for weapons of mass destruction. Mr. Gadzuk, you started looking for the weapons in 2003. Any luck so far?”

Gadzuk says, “We’re getting close. We found an abandoned mobile home rusting in a garbage dump. It could have easily been used to make poison gas. We became suspicious when we saw it had a ‘For Sale’ sign on the windshield.”

“Any thoughts about being here for Christmas?”

“No, I am a tenor in the Ist Marine Chorus and Drum Corps, and we give a concert every year for all the troops.”

Brokaw finishes his broadcast, “And so it is another Christmas in Baghdad, and although it is still not all peace, it’s a good start. As the president said in his State of the Union Speech, ‘We’ll stay here until the job is done.’”

THE FACT THAT NIXON did or did not know about the Watergate break-in didn’t bother me. What bothered me was that the people in my living room didn’t know what Watergate was.

I tried to pique their interest. “Watergate was one of the most important events in the this country’s history,” I said.

O’Reilly asked, “Was it a dam?”

“No, it was an office building,” I said patiently. “Someone broke into the Watergate to steal the files of the Democratic Party.”

Their eyes glazed over. O’Reilly said, “Why the big deal? People break into buildings all the time.”

“But this was a political break-in. The Republicans hired the robbers to steal the files of the Democrats. When they found out who was behind it, it became the biggest scandal in the country and brought down a president of the United States.”

Bubba said, “President Kennedy?”

“No dummy. President Nixon. Don’t you know who Nixon was?”

“Not really. I flunked American History.”

I explained, “President Nixon went on television during the scandal and said, ‘I am not a crook.’ Later on they proved he lied.”

Bettina, in her early thirties, and a mother of two said, “What difference does it make? I was hardly born then.”

“It makes a difference because we had to know what Nixon knew and when he knew it.”

Alexa said, “How did we know what he knew and when he knew it?”

“Jeb Magruder, one of the president’s top aides said that he heard Nixon give the green light for the break-in. Didn’t you see him on PBS the other night?”

Alexa said, “No, we were watching
American Idol
.”

I continued, even though I knew I was losing ground. “Not everyone believes Magruder because it took him thirty years to say anything.”

Nelson said, “I was born in 1972, so I never read anything about it.”

“Now here’s the kicker,” I told the group. “Several experts on Watergate don’t believe Magruder’s story even though he became a Presbyterian minister when he got out of jail.”

I could tell by their body language that they were getting bored. I said, “Has any one of you heard of Deep Throat?”

O’Reilly said, “I thought it was a porno movie.”

“No. Deep Throat was a whistleblower for Woodward and Bernstein, the two reporters who were on the story. Deep Throat met with them in a parking garage at night and gave them the roadmap to Nixon’s involvement.”

Nelson asked, “Who was Deep Throat?”

“Nobody knows. The reporters have kept it a secret. The only secret ever kept in Washington.”

People started to leave the room one by one. It dawned on me that no one under fifty remembered Watergate.

As the last person went out the door I said, “You should have been there.”

SEX. There, I know I have your attention.

The most used and abused word in the English language is SEX. Putting it on magazine covers, mentioning it in the newspaper, advertising it on television and inserting it in a movie are just a few of the places we see it every day.

The Supreme Court has mentioned it in its decisions. The military academies try not to mention it. Priests worry about it. Both homosexuals and heterosexuals practice it.

I first discovered SEX while waiting at LaGuardia Airport. I was looking at the magazine stand and I noticed almost every magazine had the word “SEX” on the cover. It wasn’t just
Playboy
and
Penthouse
—every periodical from
Cosmopolitan
to
House and Garden
was using it so that I’d buy their magazine.

When I got home I turned on the television and darned if “Sex and the City” wasn’t on the air.

“That does it,” I said to myself. “It is time to research the word.”

I assigned the job to my assistant, Cathy Crary, who usually does my research on the federal budget. She was reluctant to take on the subject, but I told her she was doing it for her country.

This is her report.

“Originally SEX had something to do with making babies, but because it was forbidden in most cultures for anything else but procreating, it took on a life of its own. Since people found it very pleasurable and forbidden and fun, it wasn’t necessary to use it just to produce offspring.

“Soon after, the word took on a broader meaning and the advertising industry picked it up because they found whatever was forbidden in our society sold like hotcakes.

“They said a woman couldn’t be sexy if she didn’t use a certain shampoo and she wasn’t attractive if she didn’t wear a certain perfume, and the only reason for a lady/girl to wear a bathing suit was so other people would think she was sexy.

“Different parts of the body attracted men to women, depending on how they were treated by their mothers.

“This is not to say SEX has played a part only in men’s lives. Women talk about it as much as men, and possibly more.”

Cathy continued her report.

“SEX constantly rears its head in divorce cases. One or the other of the aggrieved parties claims the mate had an extramarital affair or affairs.

“The reason SEX is so popular is that Homo sapiens discovered it was extremely pleasurable. It is even more pleasurable than finding a parking place on Main Street on shopping day.

“The first person who discovered SEX was Hugh Hefner. He was
laying out a new magazine on wild birds when he accidentally inserted a pullout of a beautiful unclothed girl.

“‘Watson!’ he cried over the intercom. ‘I think I’ve got it. Instead of a magazine devoted to bird watchers, let’s do one on real birds.’

“Hefner did, and for the first time SEX came out of the closet.”

Cathy handed in her research. She said, “This is all I could find on the subject. Will it be enough for a whole column?”

“It is more than enough. No one knows what an important role SEX plays in our culture and if we don’t tell them, who will?”

POOR RUPERT MURDOCH. He owns newspapers, TV and cable networks, movie studios and magazines. He can hire the best lawyers in the world. He is a billionaire, yet he can’t even win a lawsuit against Al Franken, the satirist (aka Flaming Liberal).

Franken is coming out with a new book titled,
Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them,
subtitled,
A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right.

The cover has a photo of Bill O’Reilly (the star Fox commentator), President Bush, and Vice President Cheney.

Murdoch had his day in court and it was a bad one. Fox maintained that the words, “Fair and Balanced” are owned by them and no one else can use them.

The Fox people asked for an injunction to keep the book from being distributed with the title.

The Judge, Denny Chin, had to decide if “Fair and Balanced” was owned by Murdoch, Al Franken, or the entire English-speaking world. He also had to decide whether putting Bill O’Reilly’s photo on the cover would mean that he was endorsing the book.

Murdoch’s lawyers said it was a deadly serious cover and Franken was using Fox to sell his book. The judge looked at all the evidence and then declared that Fox’s case was “Wholly without merit, both factually and legally.”

Legal experts said this was the first time anyone found a Murdoch-filed lawsuit without merit. Mr. Franken’s lawyer said the decision was a great victory for the First Amendment.

I wasn’t called as a character witness. If I had been I would be on Mr. Murdoch’s side. I am a die-hard conservative, far to the right of Robert Novak. I have two subscriptions to the
National Review
, one in the office and one at home.

I read every book on the
New York Times
bestseller list that attacks liberals—who are worse than traitors and terrorists.

I send money to Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson and all the right-wing causes. I subscribe to Murdoch’s
New York Post
, which I consider my paper of record.

I would have made a telling witness for Fox because of my knowledge of the English language.

Having said all this, I think Al Franken is a troublemaker. He makes fun of the things that Americans hold dear—and he wants to make money doing it. I have another reason to suspect that Franken is a liberal. It’s that he uses satire to put over one of his extreme left-wing ideas.

As Fox so ably pointed out, most people don’t understand satire or that when Franken puts Bill O’Reilly on his book cover he is not calling him a liar but just joshing with him. The same goes for Bush and Cheney.

The First Amendment protects satire, but as the Fox lawyer maintained brilliantly, Franken’s title was ambiguous because it did not say “parody” or “satire” on the cover. How is anybody going to know?

I, of course, believe in satire. I put it in the same class as pornography. If I ever want a picture of Bill O’Reilly on the cover of one of my books, I will never use the words “fair and balanced.” Those words belong to Rupert Murdoch and I’m not going to upset him. The reason is he owns a ton of newspapers and Franken doesn’t own any.

If I am going to sell my column to the Murdoch newspapers, I want him to know that I am on his side.

I AM ALWAYS HAPPY when we approach an election year and politicians start to worry about senior citizens and how they will vote.

The main reason is that I am a senior citizen and I will take any help I can get. The reason I know I am a senior citizen is that I am not a prospect for product merchandising. I have been told by advertisers and TV networks that I don’t count and that they only want to suck up to the 18-to-45-year-old age group.

Every time age discrimination is brought up it winds up in the Supreme Court, which is made up of nine senior citizens. While I would be happy to have the government pay my Medicare and pharmacy bills, the legislation has not yet passed, as it has many
potholes in it, mostly put there by lobbyists. The one I lose the most sleep over has to do with urging us to give some of our Medicare business to private health plans. I am frightened that the company I sign up with will go bankrupt and the officers will wind up in Brazil.

The honorable companies have to make a profit. Since more and more senior citizens will be urged to try out the private sector, the healthcare industry will raise its prices. More senior citizens will be dropped if they become an insurance risk.