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Rodent Fornication, Past and Present -- and Future?
Echoes of RFs Past Resound in the Events of Today

by Tamara Baker

Mon., Feb. 7, 2000 -- ST. PAUL, MINNESOTA (AmpolNS) -- According to Bill Bradley: "Consistency is the touchstone of honesty."

Bradley, you don't wanna go there. Consistency is NOT your middle name.

In case your memory needs refreshing, here's a little blast from your past, courtesy of the September 1999 issue of The Labor Party Press:

Bradley actually voted in favor of Ronald Reagan's draconian budget cuts back in 1981, citing fiscal responsibility. (As it turned out, debt ballooned in the Reagan years, despite the budget cuts.)

Tamara notes that this was because the budget cuts only occurred with social programs: the military was beefed up obscenely. But I digress.

While he has supported closing some corporate tax loopholes, he also favors lower tax rates, even for the wealthy. He took it personally when Clinton argued that it was good to raise taxes for rich people: "Because you've done well and earned money doesn't mean that you are guilty of something," snapped Bradley.

(Gee, this wouldn't have anything to do with your being worth about $20 million, would it, Dollar Bill?)

Bradley says he's not for Social Security privatization.

But your buddy and favorite attack-dog Robert Kerrey sure is. That's the biggest reason Kerrey hates Clinton: because Clinton refused to go along with Kerrey's privatization plan, and cleverly figured out how to scuttle it.

But he was one of a handful of Democrats to vote for school privatization in 1992, a Bush plan in the form of vouchers.

Now Bradley says he's against them, but the conversion seems only to have happened within the last year or so, coinciding with the realization that his continued support of vouchers would give the lie to his liberal image.

And health care? Here's what you said about it then, Mr. Bradley:

During the 1994 debate on health care reform, Bradley was timid, saying, "Let's not promise more than we can deliver." Bradley now says he wants to "put the doctor back in charge of treatment decisions" instead of "some distant HMO bureaucrat." But he doesn't call for a Just Health Care system that would take HMOs and profits out of health care.

Bradley, for someone who claims to be more "progressive" than Al Gore, sure has odd ways of showing it.

He's for totally unlimited free trade, while both Clinton and Gore insist on protections for workers and the environment.

His health care plan will benefit the insurance industry, which has always been a major backer of his.

And not only did he vote for both supply-side Reaganomics and Iran-Contra, one of his biggest pals and advisors is none other than supply-side promoter and former GOP Congressman Jack Kemp. (Kemp has appeared with Bradley at various fundraisers, where Republicans eager to use Dollar Bill as a club against Al Gore have been happily writing large checks for Bradley.)

A disbelieving reader wrote in to ask me to prove my assertion that Bradley is in cahoots with Jack Kemp and Kemp's supply-sider friends. The reader must not have seen or remembered my December 13,1999 Ampol column, because he would have found all the proof he needed in snippets from a December 8, 1999 Manchester Union-Leader article:

AMONG THE GUESTS at a recent private Bill Bradley fund-raiser on Manhattan's Upper East Side was Columbia University Prof. Robert Mundell, the father of the supply-side movement who won the 1999 Nobel prize in economics.

And further on, we find this:

Mundell has been associated politically with Republicans, especially supply-sider Jack Kemp. But he admires Bradley and asked to attend the money-raiser (though Mundell, as a Canadian citizen, could not contribute to the former senator's Democratic Presidential campaign).
The event was hosted by Republican David Smick, who was Kemp's chief-of-staff and in the 1980s sponsored international monetary seminars that included Kemp, Bradley and Mundell as speakers.

Now ask yourself: why would the conservative Father of Reaganomics "admire" a man who is an alleged liberal? Could it be because this same alleged liberal voted for Reaganomics back in 1981 and is still proud of having done so?

The Democratic race has dark overtones reminiscent of 1972, when Donald Segretti, one of Nixon's "dirty tricks" people, forged the famously vile "Canuck Letter", and used it to destroy Edmund Muskie, who would have beaten Nixon had he been allowed to stay in the race. Instead, Muskie was forced out of the running. George McGovern, a wonderful man but a bad campaigner -- exactly what Nixon's boys dreamed of for the Democratic nominee -- replaced Muskie and was nominated, only to be creamed by Nixon in the election.

I can't give you the exact term Nixon's boys in his CRP (Committee to Re-elect the President) used to describe this maneuver of theirs, as it might offend tender sensibilities. But a suitable euphemism would be "rodent fornication". See page 126 of the hardcover edition of All the President's Men for the unexpurgated original term.

That's the eerie feeling I get nowadays when I see Republican columnists like William Safire (who, by the way, got his gig with the New York Times as a craven form of appeasement after Nixon had won his first term back in 1968) talk about how nice Bill Bradley is and what a nasty, Clinton-fatigue-laden, unelectable guy Al Gore is... even though "Unelectable" Al Gore has just pulled within three points of GW Bush according to the NBC/WSJ polls, thus making him suddenly very electable indeed. This has been reinforced by the latest Newsweek poll, that taken on February 3 and 4, which shows Gore within two points of Shrubya. Even
better: in a head-to-head versus McCain, Gore does even better, edging McCain by a full percentage point.

And just as suddenly, Bradley's biggest selling point -- the idea that only he could beat Dubya or McCain -- is rendered useless.

Because of this, the word has gone out among conservative circles to pump up the Rat-F-ing volume. The extremely right-wing Manchester Union-Leader (the very paper that printed the "Canuck Letter" back in 1972 as part of the Nixon Watergate Rodent Fornication!) has semi-endorsed Bradley. They didn't say why, but I think I can guess.

It's already filtered down to the GOP rank and file, especially the ones who call up C-SPAN on the "Independent" and "Liberal" lines pretending to be such, as part of the ongoing Republican RFing. Two weeks ago on C-SPAN, one GOP caller exhorted Independents to vote for Bradley in the primaries because it was the best thing the alleged "Independents" could do to help conservatives in the general election: keep Bradley alive while Gore spends his cash on hand, and Dollar Bill does the Republicans' oppo work for them.

I thought the caller was being surprisingly honest. Helping out Dubya seems to be Bradley's only reason to hang in there, since he has utterly scrapped any pretense at being 'a different kind of politician'. Instead, he's just another Republican RFer.

Here's what a friend of mine, "Dr. Planarian", has to say about the situation:

I cannot come up with any reasonable explanation for Benedict Arnold Bradley's behavior beyond your basic ratf***. When you accept the proposal that Bradley is taking his marching orders from the RLC, however, EVERYTHING falls nicely into place; you no longer ask, as I have so frequently done about Bradley's utterrances over the past month, "Why did he say THAT?" because the reason becomes obvious and logical.
I saw Bradley's absurd demand for an apology about the crowd's heckling of Bob Kerrey on the NBC Nightly News with Tom Brokaw. Bradley accused Al Gore (not isolated individuals in the crowd) of calling Kerrey a "cripple," which they did not do, saying instead "Quitter" relating to his resignation from a Senate seat that may go Republican in the fall. Bradley also said that they threw mud at Bob Kerrey and even spit on him, two wholly false allegations (as Kerrey has, and I believe already had, pointed out to him).
The funniest thing, however, was when Tom Brokaw, who bears an absolutely frightening resemblance to George W. Bush, asked Bradley why he was bringing this matter up now instead of four days earlier when it was first reported in the press. Bradley's answer was that he "had to confirm the details of the incident."
So, it took Bill Bradley four days to "confirm" an INACCURATE account of an event he could have found out about in detail by picking up the phone and calling a supporter.
It's been a while since I've heard Bill Bradley tell the truth, even about the most minor events that don't even matter. The bigger the topic, the bigger Bradley's lies.
I'm sick of him. He is, intentionally and with malice aforethought, damaging the Democratic party.

Speaking of rodent fornication, let's talk about Bob Kerrey of Nebraska, the phony Democrat. Kerrey, as you probably know, has been doing Bradley's dirty work for him, bashing both Gore and Clinton every chance he can get while allowing Bradley to look noble and restrained.

Here's some excerpts from an October 1995 American Spectator article by Fred Barnes on Kerrey:

...Were it not for Nixon, Kerrey might have become a Republican in the early 1970s. "He really disliked Nixon because of the war," says Senator McCain...
Let the private payers and providers negotiate the price," he says. The Clinton plan, he maintains, was "coercive." Not surprisingly, he's also in sync with Republicans on Medicare reform. "Democrats ought to say to Republicans: 'You've got the right idea, but you're not going far enough.'" Kerrey prefers privatization through vouchers for everyone in government health-care programs.

And from the October 26, 1998 National Review, a mash note written by conservative rodent fornicator par excellence, Robert Novak:

...It is not the quantity of Kerrey's defections from the liberal line that is important, it is their quality. Genuinely the "New Democrat" that Clinton has professed to be, he is an outspoken advocate of "entrepreneurial capitalism" and in that role has broken party ranks to propose taking the first steps toward privatizing Social Security. That fits his insistence, ignored by the White House, that something must be done about runaway entitlements.
His was one of the arrows shot through the heart of the Bill and Hillary Clinton health care plan. On August 5, 1994, Kerrey took the Senate floor to declare his opposition and say: "I do not want America to go down the road the President is asking us to travel." He issued a press release asserting that Clinton care would "centralize health care decision-making in Washington and lead to skyrocketing entitlement spending by the federal government."....

And what the heck was Kerrey doing in a Bush camp soiree two weeks ago? Right before Kerrey made that big "festering" speech designed to shiv Al Gore? Was he getting Gore smears from them, or giving them to them?

But enough of Kerrey. The most ominous RF happening right now looks like a reprise of the one played on us back in the 1970s.

Remember how we had a big gas crunch, even as full-to-the-brim oil tankers were stacked up like cordwood in East Coast and Gulf Coast harbors like Houston, waiting to unload their cargoes but not being allowed to do so? And remember how the gas crunch was blamed on OPEC?

Many folks thought at the time that certain Texas oilmen might have had more to do with this than OPEC.

Now, we are faced with yet another gas crunch, or so we are told. The explanation for this one is that the combined effects of Saddam's finally cutting back oil exports, plus a sudden cold snap in New England which forced refineries to turn lots of crude oil into heating fuel and not gasoline, led to a 40% jump in the prices we pay at the pump.

There are a few problems with this scenario:

The first is that Saddam's exports weren't that extensive; we were without his oil for a large part of 1990 and 1991, and prices didn't spike upwards nearly as sharply as they have now. Plus, they didn't stay spiked upwards for very long at all, while we are being told over and over nowadays that we must get used to the new prices because they aren't going down anymore.
The second is that we've had a fairly mild winter, even taking the recent cold snap on the East Coast into account. The demand for heating fuel shouldn't be that great. In addition, people don't travel as much in the winter months, and gas prices are generally lower, not higher, during those times.

My friend "Dr. Planarian" suggests that this could be yet another RF, courtesy of the Bush family. Since the economy is the largest indicator of how well an incumbent President (or his hand-picked candidate to succeed him) is likely to do, and energy prices are the single biggest factor in the health of the economy, it stands to reason that someone who wanted to injure the party controlling the White House would have the greatest success by monkeying around with our oil supply.

However, the good Doctor P. also suggests that this alleged monkeying around with the nation's oil supply may well come back to bite Dubya on the buttocks.

As Dr. P. states,

The oil price ratf--- might boomerang on Bush badly. After a stunning defeat in New Hampshire and defeats by what I believe will be even larger margins in South Carolina this coming Tuesday and Michigan next week, he faces New York, California and the rest of the New England states on March 5.
In New York 'Bush' is now a four-letter word and McCain is viewed as the courageous intended victim of George W. Bush's strongarm tactics. In California they have a long history of favoring mavericks, and McCain benefits by the fact that he is from neighboring Arizona.
But in New England this oil price thing may bite Bush badly. Increases in the price of heating oil do not make New Englanders feel particularly charitable toward Texas oilmen like Bush.
Two thirds of Bush supporters do so because of an amorphous feeling that 'he can win.' That will be a difficult feeling to maintain following loss after loss after loss after loss after...

The Bush campaign is rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic when they speak about changing their 'tactics.' They have always had one problem with their 'tactics' that is uniquely difficult to overcome -- their candidate is unfit for office, and no campaign tactic can affect this unavoidable fact.