Posted on October 15, 2002

by

Daniel Clark

Whenever an election approaches, it is difficult not to think of the Democrats as the Silly Party of American politics. You remember the Silly Party, whose candidates won by a landslide in Monty Python’s "Election Night Special." Silly Party candidates were easily distinguishable by their big clown noses, baggy pants, objects sticking through their heads, and long, nonsensical names like "Tarquin Fin-Tim-Lin-Bin-Win-Bim-Lim Bus Stop F’tang-F’tang Olay Biscuit Barrel."

Well, all right. Democrats aren’t silly in quite that way. That’s more of a Reform Party kind of silly. The Democrats’ silliness is more covert. Many people even think that they are the serious ones, based on their humorless demeanor, grim facial expressions, and apocalyptic outlook on life. But in reality, those are some of their silliest traits, because their congenital pessimism is uncalled for. While they neglect to address most of our nation’s actual problems, they’re constantly busy concocting the most outrageous doomsday scenarios, and apparently succeeding at convincing themselves that they’re real. Most of them oppose President Bush’s strategic missile defense plan, because they don’t believe that future missile attacks from abroad are a serious threat, but they worry that the Earth is being burned to a cinder by gas lawnmowers, barbecue grills and belching sheep.

Democrats are the ones who profess to believe that the rest of the world is made poorer because Americans consume too much of the world’s resources. This means that if you engage in what they deride as "conspicuous consumption," by buying a big car, expensive clothes and state-of-the-art appliances, that has a negative impact on those people in other countries who are paid to produce most of those items. If that’s not silly enough for you, remember that the people in the American Silly Party are also the ones who are constantly "preserving" land by forbidding people from living on it, and then complaining about a lack of affordable housing. The Sillys will swear to us that punishment does not deter crime, but then they use punitive taxation to deter people from smoking, eating fatty foods, or engaging in any other perfectly legal activity which they find annoying. For years they’ve whittled down our military budget, and denied funding for new military initiatives, but now Sen. Teddy Silly Kennedy (S, Mass.) and others are warning Bush not to take action against Iraq because it will stretch our military resources too thin, as if that had ever been their concern up until now.

The Silly Party poses as the defender of racial minorities, while portraying their opponents as vicious bigots. They reflexively accuse Bush’s judicial nominees of racism, regardless of whether there is any evidence, and even when the evidence contradicts the charge. Yet it is they who appointed former KKK recruiter Sen. Robert Byrd (S, W.Va.) as president pro tempore of the Senate, which places him fourth in the line of succession to the presidency.

The former president and vice president of the last Silly presidency have both said that Bush should not invade Iraq without the approval of the United Nations’ Securtiy Council. This has also been the opinion of many other representatives of the Silly Party who have cautioned Bush not to act "unilaterally." Each of the five permanent member states of the Security Council has veto power, and one of those members is Red China. So what the Sillys are actually proposing is that Communists, being by nature diametrically opposed to American interests, should be granted the authority to veto the decisions of the United States’ Commander-in-Chief.

The Sillys moan that President Bush is obsessing over international affairs while ignoring domestic concerns, yet it is the Silly-controlled Senate, led by Silly Majority Leader Tom Daschle (S, S.D), that is preparing to adjourn without passing a budget, voting on a homeland security bill, or bringing any one of a slew of backlogged judicial nominations to the floor. Nor have they bothered to take up the proposed ban on human cloning, or the president’s plan for pension reform. Handily, they’re now trying to alter an election reform bill in committee, in order to strip it of its provisions to combat voter fraud.

Even when they actually address problems, they do it in the silliest and most irresponsible way possible. We have a serious problem in public education, which Bush wants to solve through competition, by allowing parents to pull their children out of failing schools with the aid of school vouchers. The Sillys become outraged by this, because our public schools are really Silly schools, which spend so much time indoctrinating kids in the Silly orthodoxy that they never get around to teaching them math or English. So the Silly Party argues that the solution is to give the Silly schools more money, so that they can do the irresponsible thing more expensively.

President Bush wants to allow people to opt out of Social Security, and direct their money to investments that promise a higher rate of return. The Silly solution, again, is to keep the program unchanged, but pour more of the taxpayers’ money into it, which is what will need to be done to keep it solvent if it isn’t reformed. Just as in regard to education, Bush -- whom the Silly Party complains is doing nothing domestically -- has proposed a solution to a domestic problem, and the Sillys’ counterproposal is to keep the original problem, but make it bigger.

It’s a good thing the Silly Party didn’t win our last presidential election, or else Al Gore, the former Vice Silly, would now be our Chief Executive. Since we’ve been at war, it has often been wondered what would be happening if Gore were commanding our military instead of Bush. There’s no way to know, because Gore doesn’t have any idea himself. In 1991, he voted in favor of the Gulf War, after auctioning his vote to whichever side would yield him more floor time in front of the cameras. He later defended the decision to end the war instead of pressing on toward Baghdad, because the mission to repel Saddam’s forces from Kuwait had already been accomplished. He changed his mind, though, and criticized the elder George Bush for not ridding the world of the Iraqi threat once and for all. When he was vice president, he supported the use of military force in Iraq to gain access for U.N. inspectors. Now that G.W. Bush wants to get rid of Saddam and destroy Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons, Gore is opposed.

But then, what kind of decisiveness would you expect from a man so thoroughly silly that he collects polling data in order to determine whether or not he should shave? This is a man whose decisions are so poll-driven that, when he kisses his wife, he does it as part of a meticulously planned campaign strategy. When he decided that he needed to take man lessons, he went to feminist author Naomi Wolf (also silly), who treated him as her very own Dressy Bessie doll, wrapping him in casual earth tones so that he would look like an "alpha male." He probably spent weeks practicing his kung-fu grip.

When Gore lost the 2000 election, his minions in Florida tried to reverse the result, by "interpreting" ballots in an effort to determine who won the "intended" vote. Leave it to the Sillys to put the election of the Leader of the Free World in the hands of a bunch of psychics. Representatives from the Silly Party wondered aloud how the rest of the world could possibly perceive Bush as a legitimate president, when he didn’t win a majority of the popular vote. Well, the concept of the electoral college wouldn’t be all that difficult to explain to foreigners, but what would be is the idea that Al Gore’s sycophants on the Broward County canvassing board have the ability to find votes for their candidate with a magnifying glass. They weren’t making votes up, one might try to explain, they were merely "liberally construing" them.

That terminology comes to us compliments of the New Jersey Supreme Court, which ruled that Sen. Robert Toricelli could be replaced on this year’s ballot, despite his having missed the legal deadline. Toricelli has been entangled in a bribery scandal that has caused him to plummet in the polls, so the Silly Party persuaded him to quit the race so that they could replace him with a candidate who would stand a better chance of winning. Their problem is that New Jersey state law says that a candidate can’t be replaced on the ballot within fifty-one days of election day. The state Supreme Court ruled that this law should be "liberally construed," i.e., broken. It cited as justification the voters’ "right" to a choice between candidates of both major parties, as if each party were compelled to field a candidate by law.

Upon his … oh, let’s call it a "resignation," for lack of a more accurate term, Toricelli maintained that he was innocent, but then implied his own guilt by railing against America for being "too unforgiving" a society. Then he lamented that he lacked the strength of Bill Clinton, a.k.a., King Silly, who survived his impeachment trial with the unanimous and unconditional support of the Silly Party.

What an ideal role model for the Democratic Party: King Silly, who pretended to look across the Korean DMZ through binoculars with the lens caps on, because he was too arrogant to admit he’d forgotten to remove them; King Silly, who said the one thing he’d miss most about being president was the White House movie theater; King Silly, who once responded to questions from Washington Times reporters by turning his back to them and breaking wind; King Silly, whose idea of diplomacy was to tell portly German chancellor Helmut Kohl that he looked like a sumo wrestler, and to present diminutive Argentine president Carlos Menem with a souvenir basketball; King Silly, who earned a law degree from Georgetown, and attended Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship, yet claims not to understand the meaning of the word "is"; King Silly, who … aw, you know.

King Silly’s crowning moment came at a 1996 fundraiser, when he decided to loosen the crowd up with a "joke." This event was held shortly after a 500 year-old mummy, nicknamed the "Ice Princess," was found in Peru. According to archaeologists’ best guesses, the Ice Princess was sacrificed when she was somewhere between the ages of twelve and fourteen. Leave it to the leader of the Silly Party (or its "titular head," when he was president, although reporters seldom called him that because they couldn’t say it without snickering) to commit two perversions simultaneously.

"I don’t know if you’ve seen that mummy, but you know, if I were a single man, I might ask that mummy out," he said. "That’s a good-looking mummy. That mummy looks better than I do on my worst days. I’m telling you, you need to go see it. If there’s ever an argument against ageism, it’s that mummy. I mean, really, you need to go see it." With one single flick of the tongue, he confessed to tendencies toward pedophilia and necrophilia, and he still managed to react with indignation when his press secretary, Mike McCurry, told him that it was a stupid thing to say. The Sillys in attendance howled with laughter, and then coughed up their money as expected. After all, they weren’t about to look like a bunch of fuddy-duddys who were incapable of getting the hots for a decomposed child. Not in front of their friends, anyway.

Naturally, the Sillys found this kind of man to be indispensable. When King Silly was impeached on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice, every single senator from the Silly Party voted to acquit him, despite his videotaped testimony, which revealed that he’d lied under oath literally dozens of times. As if to deliberately, inextricably link their reputations with his, the Sillys went so far as to accept the aid of sadistic, slobbering pervert Larry Flynt, who investigated the Republicans in an effort to extort them into leaving King Silly alone. Flynt, for those who don’t know, is the publisher of Hustler, an ultraviolent, misogynistic smut rag, which Clinton press secretary Joe Silly Lockhart respectfully referred to as a "news magazine." Note that the Flynt apologist Lockhart replaced the overly-judgmental McCurry, who had the nerve to object to the idea of lusting for dead girls.

And to think that the Sillys now tell us that they’re the ones best equipped to lead us in times of national and international crisis. This is a party full of people whose logic is so perverse, their behavior so erratic, and their morality so scrambled, that they can scarcely be trusted with sharp household objects like forks and pencils, let alone tanks, missiles, and the authority to levy taxes. They crave power, but don’t seem to know or care how to use it properly. As a result, they find themselves absurdly demanding that we give them responsibilities that they really don’t want and definitely can’t handle.

It would be far easier to justify voting for Mr. Fin-Tim-Lin-etc. and his fellow party members from the Python sketch. Sure, they’d make a ridiculous mess of things, but at least they wouldn’t bore us with a bunch of lies about how sober and responsible they are, while giving it to us with the seltzer.

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