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[Music clip: From Haydn's Derbyshire March No. 2, organ version]
01 — Intro. So, Mrs Clinton: this plan of your Governor there in New York to issue driver's licenses to illegal immigrants. Do you support the Governor or not? [Silence.] Would you like me to repeat the question, Mrs Clinton? [Silence.] Er, seventy-two percent of your constituents there in New York State oppose the Governor's plan. How about you? Do you support it or oppose it? [Silence.] I'm sorry, Mrs Clinton I didn't quite catch that. Did you say you support the plan or you oppose it? [Silence.] I'm sorry, Mrs Clinton. I'm afraid I didn't catch that at all. Could you, could you just repeat what you said? [Silence.] No, no, still not hearing you, Ma'am. Would you mind speaking up just a little for us? [Silence.] Still not getting it. Could we have a mic test here please? Could you give us a mic test? … It's working? That's great. Okay. Uh, Mrs Clinton, if you wouldn't mind just, just once again, do you support Governor Spitzer's plan to issue New York State driver's licenses to illegal immigrants? [Silence.] Mrs Clinton, are you hearing me? Okay: This driver's license plan, what do you think? [Silence.] Mrs Clinton. I hate to keep pressing the issue, but what do you think of this plan? [Fade out.] |
| 02 — Driver licenses for all! Actually, our state Governor, applying that
first-class, Harvard Law School-trained mind of his to the issue, has come up with a plan that will satisfy everyone.
Under this new plan there are to be 1,243 types of New York State driver's licenses. Type One is for U.S. citizens who are Catholic, heterosexual, and able to drive manual shift, but only those whose first language is Spanish. First language, English? That would be a Type Two. First language Russian, a Type Three, and so on, … all the way down to Andamanese, which is a type 145. Then we have your Episcopalian licenses similarly structured, but with a couple of variants to allow for the different styles of liturgy. Then there are separate licenses, each one a distinguishing color and format, for your Congregationalists, Baptists, Evangelicals, Witnesses, Seventh Day Adventists, Plymouth Brethren, Eastern Rite, Armenian rite, Muslims — both Sunni and Shia, of course — Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, Zoroastrians, and so on, each with a distinguishing type of license. Then here, in a very pleasant pastel series of shades, we have these GLBTQQI-type licenses. That's gay, lesbian, bisexual, transsexual, transgender, queer, questioning, and intersex — all duplicated across the various faith traditions and language groups. That's the citizen licenses. Now for the legal residents, we have to drill down into a bit more detail … er, you know, just so that we can keep track of everyone, right? |
| 03 — Fundraising with Chinese characteristics. From the time of Boss
Tweed — and in fact even before that — every big new immigrant group in the U.S.A. has, as one of those earlier exemplars put
it, trodden the fine line between honesty and corruption.
Americans of Chinese descent have embraced this tradition with enthusiasm. They have also embraced the other grand immigrant tradition of voting Democrat for a half a century or so. Put the two things together and you have a big reception for Democratic presidential candidates in Chinatown with lots of campaign money flowing in from … well, you'd better not look too closely at where it's flowing in from. The Los Angeles Times did, and they found thousand-dollar and two-thousand-dollar donations to Hillary Clinton's campaign when she visited Chinatown, with the cash coming from people listed on contributor forms as "waiters" and "dishwashers." When the Times tried to follow up with these contributors, addresses and phone numbers just didn't seem to work around one time in three. Gosh, I wonder why that could be? Challenged by the John Edwards campaign to come clean on these donations, the Clinton people screamed "RACIST!" and all objections immediately ceased. Still, Clinton fundraising is more discreet now than it was in the Presidency of Mrs Clinton's husband, when generals in the People's Liberation Army showed up at the White House with campaign cash in shopping bags. So I guess there is some progress here. |
| 04 — The Progressive Bag Alliance. Speaking of shopping bags, the campaign to ban plastic
shopping bags is picking up steam.
San Francisco, always at the forefront of social change, already prohibits big supermarkets and retailers from giving out plastic bags. Out beyond America's shores, according to the New York Times, those super-progressive countries Bangladesh and Bhutan have banned plastic bags altogether. Ireland merely taxes them. Back here in the good old U.S.A. — San Francisco aside — ninety percent of all grocery bags are plastic. That's according to an industry group of plastic bag manufacturers whose name trips very nicely off the tongue: The Progressive Bag Alliance. The Progressive Bag Alliance: It sounds like a cabal of homely leftwing women, doesn't it? Anyway, The Progressive Bag Alliance, Honorary Chairman Mrs Hillary Clinton … No, no. Come on, Derb. Let's be nice here. The Progressive Bag Alliance tells us that a standard plastic grocery bag costs about a penny to produce, compared with four cents to five cents for a paper bag. That's why there are so many of them. Well, now the bag fascists are on my doorstep here. New York City Council is pondering a local law that would require supermarkets to recycle plastic bags. The bags that these stores give out would be required to have Please return this bag to a participating store for recycling printed on them in three-inch-high letters. You know, like those big messages about how dangerous cigarettes are printed on cigarette packets. Well, put me down as against these bag banners. If The Progressive Bag Alliance needs a paid shill, I am available. Meanwhile, here are just two words for all you bag banners: dog poop |
| 05 — Economy heading for a fall? Gold is at eight hundred dollars an
ounce. Oil is quivering close to a hundred dollars a barrel, and house prices are in the tank.
Speaking as a person who owns no gold, has two cars and an oil-fired central-heating system, and whose only big asset is his house, I am unhappy. I'd be a lot unhappier, I guess, if I worked for Chrysler or AOL or Wall Street, who are all laying off workers. And yet the amazing American economy keeps growing, and even growing faster. Growth rate for the third quarter looks like three point nine percent, annualized, as against three point eight percent in the second quarter and only zero point six percent in the first quarter. Are we heading for a fall? Don't ask me. Here's a guess, though. Oil prices aren't going to go down much, if at all. Our economy will adjust to this fact, but not very quickly. And six months from now the Democrats will be dusting off those old signs that say It's the Economy, Stupid. |
| 06 — Dumbledore is gay. J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter books have brought
harmless pleasure to countless children, including my children.
Nobody can take that away from Ms Rowling and nobody should. She has done good in the world: more good than I shall ever do, probably. So the following is kind of mean-spirited. But hey, this is Radio Derb — Mean Spirited Central. If it's nice that you're after, go listen to NPR. So here's the thing. If if you read the Harry Potter books with an adult eye, you know they were written by a liberal. I don't mean an ideologue determined to pump poison into our kiddies' brains, nothing like that: just an author who has never really thought much about public matters, has idly soaked up the vague, unreflective liberalism of the British and European educated classes, and can't help but approach human affairs from that viewpoint. People like that only know one thing about the 20th century, and the name of that thing is Adolf Hitler. The great Communist despotisms and the mountains of corpses that they produced somehow escaped the attention of these dimmer kinds of European liberals. Not only was Hitler evil, which he surely was, but his evil was the only kind of evil, which it surely wasn't. So in the Harry Potter books, you have characters like Malfoy, who boasts of his purity of blood. Purity — Evil! Evil! Malfoy, by the way, is played by an actor, Tom Felton, who is — oh no! — blond and blue-eyed. The highest value here is diversity. There has to be one of everything, especially one of everything that Hitler persecuted. Well, naturally, that means there has to be a homosexual somewhere. So … who is it? Professor McGonagall would have been my bet. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised to see her out on the golf course with Billie Jean and Ellen. Nope, it's Dumbledore. Ms Rowling revealed this at a public event in New York's Carnegie Hall. Dumbledore is gay. She later told us that one member of the audience came out right then and there, pulled off his cloak of invisibility and put on an entirely new cloak — a fetching little Versace number with frogged buttons and a Tiffany clasp. Well, Hallelujah! Hard to imagine any of the great children's story tellers of the past pulling a stunt like that. Mark Twain, Louisa May Alcott, L. Frank Baum, Lewis Carroll … well, perhaps the less said about him, the better. It's a shame, though, that kids can't be left alone with their childish things to enjoy, but have to have all the weird fads and obsessions of the adult world dumped on them. Leave them alone, for goodness' sake. They'll grow up soon enough. Too soon — any parent will tell you that. |
| 07 — John Edwards shills for Ed Biz. Every political campaign needs some
light relief. On the Democratic side of the 2008 campaign we were looking to Dennis Kucinich for that; and to be fair to the guy, he's doing his best,
telling us about his encounters with UFOs and his plans for a Department of Peace.
The real comedian of the Democrats, though, is shaping up as John Edwards. Every time John-boy shows up on TV I find myself smiling in anticipation of some new level of absurdity, some new bizarre permutation of reality, some new proposal to make wishful thinking the law of the land and give real life a good sharp kick in the teeth. Well, John-John certainly delivered this week with his spiffing new plan titled College for Everyone. College for everyone. As our own Mark Krikorian pointed out, three-quarters of the people currently in college don't belong there. Most people would be much better off learning some useful skill on the job, rather than putting themselves in college-loan hock for twenty years so they can attend lectures where aging hippies try to brow beat them into hating their country and despising their parents. The Democrats are reliably the party of special interests, though, and there is no interest more special, more ruthless, more dishonest, and more willing to play the emotional blackmail card than Ed Biz. Who would be so hard-hearted as to deny the kiddies their college education? And how are we going to produce the next generation of knee-jerk liberals if we don't put the coming generation through four years of intensive training in knee jerking? Somebody — come to think of it, this may be my mission in life — somebody should organize a boycott of the American higher education system. Let's starve the beast! Let's see if we can shut down a few of these indoctrination mills. Oh, wait a minute, though. What would we do with all those laid-off professors of Media Studies, Women's Studies, Queer Legal Theory, and Post-Colonial Studies? Hire them as landscapers and fruit pickers, perhaps? Hey, maybe there's a solution of the illegal immigrant problem staring us right in the face. |
| 08 — Dress Up As a Muslim Day. An elementary school in England has ordered all its students
to dress up as Muslims for a day to celebrate some Muslim festival.
This is a majority Christian school — I think I want to add "of course" there — it's a majority Christian school with only two Muslim teachers on the forty-one teacher faculty. Whispered a relative of one of the non-Muslim teachers to The Sun newspaper, quote: "Staff have got to go along with it or, let's face it, they would be branded racist." End quote. Now, wait a minute. I'm not too clued-in on the philosophy of multiculturalism, but as I understand it, all of us white folks are ipso facto racist, aren't we? So what's the downside of being called racist? Oh, right: You lose your job. No, no, wait a minute, again: How is Islam a race? Isn't it a religion, actually? Yeah; but, you know, we're not in the world of reason here, where words mean what the dictionary says they mean. We're in the world of fanatical ideology, where two plus two makes five, war is peace, freedom is slavery. ignorance is strength. The headmistress — which is the principal, more or less — the headmistress of the school explains it all. Her name, I can't resist telling you, is Sally Bloomer, and here's Sally Bloomer's explanation of the Dress Up As a Muslim Day for the tots at her school, quote: "It's all part of a diversity project to promote multiculturalism." There you go; and if you object to that, you're a racist … which, if you're a white Christian, you are anyway. |
| 09 — Okies try to stem the tide. [Sings] O-o-o-oklahome, where the
wind comes sweeping down the trail …
Well, that's an intro for this story from The Tulsa World. That's the hometown newspaper for Tulsa, Oklahoma — a city I've never been to, but have heard good things about. Now, of course there are serpents even in paradise, and they usually work as reporters for the local newspaper. In fact, if I remember my Milton, the first thing Lucifer did when he arrived in the Garden of Eden was to flash his journo-school diploma and land a job reporting on the local apple producing industry at the Paradise Gazette. Anyway, the news from Tulsa is that the state of Oklahoma has passed strict laws against aiding and abetting illegal immigration. Hire an illegal alien, you can be sued by any other employee for taking a job from a lawful resident. Rent property to an illegal, and you've committed a felony. This has the usual suspects absolutely furious, so they held a rally. Quote from the Tulsa World Report, quote: Hundreds of opponents of Oklahoma's new immigration reform law gathered at the state capitol on Thursday to renounce the bill. Okay, just pause here a minute. They surely mean "denounce," not "renounce." And it's not an immigration reform bill: States have no power to reform immigration. It's a bill to deny state benefits to people resident in Oklahoma illegally and to punish people who aid and abet their violation of federal law. All right, let's continue, quote: "Today our children cry," Pat Fennel of the Latino Community Development Agency told the group, "but tomorrow our children vote." End quote, end quote. I'm not sure who "we" is in that sentence. I suppose it's some ethnocentric appeal. God forbid anyone should consider himself just an American any more! You have to belong to some "we," some hyphenated-American group. Fortunately actual American citizens have the vote, too … for a little while longer, anyway. So let's see who out-votes whom. More from the Tulsa World report, quote: The crowd, waving American flags and many holding signs, recited the Pledge of Allegiance, sang the national anthem and stood for a moment of silence. End quote. Oh, yeah: Waving the Mexican flag, as the crowds did in those first demonstrations last year, proved to be seriously counterproductive, didn't it? It woke up the dragon, didn't it? So now we all pretend to be American patriots, right? Those dumb Gringos will think we mean it. Some cat called Reverend — why are these people always Reverends? — Reverend Don Wolf referred to Steinbeck's novel The Grapes of Wrath thus, quote: The most famous book about Oklahoma is about Okies who become economic refugees. End quote. Well, yes, that's right, Reverend; but you see, they were refugees from one part of the country to another, not the same thing as coming into someone else's country for the welfare benefits. You see? But no, of course he doesn't see. He doesn't see anything but a sea of smiling faces looking up at him, hanging on his every word, looking to him to help them live where they have no lawful right to live, to use services paid for by other people — services they have no right to use — taking jobs they have no right to take, claiming the glorious prize of U.S. citizenship when they have no right to claim it and no intention of giving up their heartfelt allegiance to a different country. The hell with you, Reverend Wolf. And thanks to the good people of Oklahoma and their legislators for standing up against the nation-wreckers and bleeding hearts. |
| 10 — Signoff. Oh, Mrs Clinton, er, I have this news item just in from your
campaign people saying that, yes, you do in fact, support Governor Spitzer's program to give a driver's license, a Lexus, a beach house in the
Hamptons, and a pot of gold to every illegal immigrant in your state.
Is that right? You support the Governor's plan? [Silence.] Is that right, Mrs Clinton, do you actually support the Governor's plan? [Silence.] Er, could, could you go on the record right here and tell us all that you support the Governor's plan, Mrs Clinton? [Silence.] Or oppose it? [Silence.] I'd really appreciate it if you could just give us a response on this one, Mrs Clinton. [Silence.] Mrs Clinton? [Silence.] I do appreciate your need to avoid taking positions that are too controversial, but I think voters would like to know if you support or oppose … [fade out]. |
[Music clip: More Derbyshire Marches.]
[Clip of Hillary cackling.]