"No Lead in the Pencil" - Commentary by Tony Seton

No Lead in the Pencil

I wondered aloud to my pal Joey about what motivates the Bushies. The conversation came about with the death of Rosemary "The Stretch" Woods. Joey compared the patently-corrupt Nixon administration to the current bunch. Ever the optimist, he’s not sure the Bushies don’t have Hitlerian intentions of dominating the world.

Sure, Bush is just a hood ornament who reads from cue cards with pathos instead of integrity. If it were he making the decisions, there would be a serious cause for concern. Bush is an emotional wreck who lacks the basic moral and intellectual foundation to do what’s right. He doesn’t even seem committed to providing us with a safe future.

Of course, Cheney is running things and has been for years. But what drives him? Dunno, but the Dick Cavett line comes to mind about eating at a Chinese-German restaurant and an hour later he’s hungry...for power. In fact, Cheney is a spiritual degenerate who’s politically effective, thought mostly because he’s been working with a disastrously prostrate press and half a voting public with their heads up their, um, clouds.

Motivations be damned, reality will eventually assert itself. The piper is going to have to be paid. And hopefully in time for an awakening before the 2006 elections. Maybe even dramatically enough to shift at least one chamber of that Twain-marked house of inherent criminals on the hill.

‘Cause there’s still the fact of the economy, stupid. This nonsense about a crisis in the Social Security system just ain’t gonna fly. The Bushies, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear but smack of greed, are saying it’s collapsing. It ain’t and won’t even soon. The American people know that, though they are swayable through media campaigns of the sort the Bushies are preparing.

But the Republicans in Congress, as obsequious as they tend to be before the White House, are a little more grounded. They know that the $6.6 trillion-with-a-T privatization price tag over the next twenty years would devastate our economy. They also see the Euro climbing against the free-falling dollar and note that our Asian banker pals are shifting away from the greenback.

Plus, health care costs continue to soar, our schools are failing, the infrastructure is crumbling, the homeland is insecuring...and there’s still pesky Iraq sucking $5 billion a month away from our own growing needs. How will it all pencil out? Not well.

And that’s SetonnoteS...I’m Tony Seton.