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[Music clip: From Haydn's Derbyshire March No. 2, organ version]
01 — Intro. Radio Derb is on the air! This is your ever-genial host John Derbyshire, bringing you yet another week of mayhem and misery. First, the wretched politics, just to get it over with. |
| 02 — Bimbo ad. You saw that John McCain campaign commercial, right? The one
with all the bimbos and the message that Barack Obama is just another airhead celebrity? I think the McCain people are playing with fire there. I
mean, do they have any idea how much we Americans love airhead celebrities?
But then along came the legions of the left to deconstruct it for us. That's what lefties learn in college, see — deconstruction. Nothing is what it seems. You need an expert to tell you. In religion this is called Gnosticism; in philosophy it's called "the hermeneutics of suspicion"; on Radio Derb it's called paranoid lefty fantasy. Anyway, here's what they're telling us. Those blonde white bimbos juxtaposed in the ad with Barack Obama: that's to get you thinking about oversexed black guys violating our daughters. That pointy structure in the background: that's a phallic symbol to reinforce the thought. And did you notice the wording of the ad? I mean, "drilling"? Following right after that phallic symbol and the two white bimbos? And then the charge that Obama will raise your taxes? Huh? And what about those taxes? I mean, "tax" isn't the only one-syllable, three-letter word in English that ends with "x," is it? It's all too easy to see what's going on here. And then a voice-over from John McCain. What does that plant in your mind? Someone wielding a cane in the john? This is sick stuff. And now, to cap it all, in response to Senator Obama's call to us to save gas by keeping our tires properly inflated, McCain's people are handing out tire gauges. Which are, you know, rod-shaped things. You get it? I tell you, these Republicans will stop at nothing. |
| 03 — Paris Hilton for Prez! And then Paris Hilton came back with a mock
campaign ad of her own. I rather liked this one. And let's face it, her energy proposal was hard to fault.
Notice how patriotic the gal is, too. Barack Obama went to Kenya to look for his Dad's family. John McCain went to Bangladesh to adopt a child. But when Paris Hilton wants the best place to get a tan, where does she go? Maui! Which is in which country? In the U. S. of A.! I'm liking this gal. How come this republic never had a bimbo President? Isn't it about time? Radio Derb's been grumbling for weeks about what a lackluster pair of candidates our political process has come up with. Here at last is one who at least puts a smile on our faces — change I can believe in! What kind of harm could Paris do, anyway? Get 150,000 of our troops bogged down in some inconsequential desert Dogpatch for six years while Iran goes nuclear and Pakistan goes belly up? Leave our borders undefended? Bust the national bank with extravagant new welfare schemes? Push a federal law saying that all schoolkids have to be above average? Dump tens of thousands of illterate Muslim Somali goatherders in our towns? Come on. Not even a blonde bimbo would mess things up that badly. I think I've found my write-in candidate. |
| 04 — Hillary's convention options. Meanwhile, what's Hillary up to, eh?
Back in the fifties Britain had a prime minister named Harold Macmillan, a Tory. His big rival for the Tory leadership was a bloke named R.A. Butler. The leader of the oppostion quipped that every time Macmillan came back from one of his foreign trips, there was Butler at the airport, waiting to, quote, "grasp him warmly by the throat." Hillary's a bit the same way with Barack Obama. Now she's refusing to say whether or not she'll allow her name to be put forward at the Democratic convention. Whoa! Behind the united front … … it says here — I'm reading from Time magazine: Behind the united front, says a Hillary adviser, "it's not a great relationship, and it's probably not going to become one." In private conversations, associates say, Clinton remains skeptical that Obama can win in the fall. End quote. Well, I think she's right to be skeptical, but what can she do about it? She can let off stink bombs at the convention, but that's not going to derail Obama, is it? Not unless he's doing really badly in polls and the Democrat big guys are seriously worried. Even then, what could she do? What kind of stunt could she engineer? … Hold on — who are these guys? Heralds? With trumpets? What's going on? [Fanfare.] And who's this guy riding in on a white horse? Al? [Wild cheering.] |
| 05 — Medellín executed. José Medellín was a very nasty
piece of work. An illegal immigrant living in Houston, Texas, in June 1993 he was one of a party of six who gang-raped and murdered two young girls:
Jennifer Ertman, aged 14, and Elizabeth Pena, aged 16.
Once again, this was 1993 — over fifteen years ago. The girls were making their way home when the gang came upon them. The girls were gang-raped for over an hour. Then they were strangled, one with a belt, one with her own shoelaces. When they still showed signs of life, they were kicked in the head and their necks were stomped on. As Medellín complained: "The bitch wouldn't die." When the bitches finally did die, Medellín and his chums stripped them of their watches and jewelry which they later gave as gifts to their girlfriends. This week, fifteen years after this appalling crime, José Medellin was finally executed. What took so long? Well, in part it was the attempted intervention of the so-called International Court of Justice, who said that since Medellín was a Mexican national, he should have been allowed to contact the authorities of the U.S.A.-hating narco-state to our south when he was arrested. President George W. Bush naturally took the side of the rapist and his Mexican enablers. As columnist Ilana Mercer says, and as we saw in the case of border agents Ignacio Ramos and José Compean last year, George W. Bush would wrestle a crocodile for a criminal alien. He ordered Texas not to execute the vermin. The Supreme Court overruled the President and Rick Perry, the Governor of Texas, who can have my vote any time he wants it, refused a stay. José Medellín's worthless life was ended August 5th. I hope they dumped his remains in the garbage, and not for recycling either. Medellín was sitting in his jail cell doing crossword puzzles for longer than Jennifer Ertman lived on Earth, in part thanks to the keen efforts of our President on his behalf. That's what passes for criminal justice in the U.S.A. today. Should your teen daughter be raped, strangled and stomped by an illegal alien, settle down for a 15-year wait for justice, and be ready to watch your President — President Bush, President Obama, President McCain, it makes no difference, they all dance to Mexico's tune — be ready to watch him step in on behalf of the killer. |
| 06 — Tyson favors Muslims. [Factory sounds.] I'm on location out
here, folks, at the Tyson Foods poultry-processing plant in Shelbyville, Tennessee, just fifty miles southeast of Nashville, in the heart of
country-music, red-state, Scots-Irish America, in the lovely wooded foothills of the western Appalachians. I've come here to …
Wait, hold on a minute here. Everybody's stopped work, and they're all looking expectantly at the PA speakers. Looks like there's going to be some kind of company announcement. [Muslim call to prayer.] Right, that's the Muslim call to prayer. See, this is a union plant. That would be the RWDSU, the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, and they've negotiated this contract with Tyson's to scrap Labor Day and replace it as a company holiday instead by Eid al-Fitr. That's a Muslim holiday, celebrating some Muslim event or other, I don't know what, the fall of Constantinople, perhaps. Anyway, Tyson's, well known for their humanitarian concern towards all the poor people of the world, brought in 250 Somali Muslims to do the jobs we lazy, spoiled Americans won't do for 85 cents an hour and no benefits. Hold on, though: Isn't this the kind of thing that American workers have unions for, to stop the bosses bringing in cheap foreign labor? Well, back in the day, perhaps. Nowadays a union is a career vehicle for leftist race-lobby politicians, and all they care about is the number of warm bodies on the union's books, the more illiterate and obedient, the better. When the story about Eid al-Fitr got out, the national president of the union, a chap named Stuart Appelbaum, said that people who objected to dumping Labor Day in favor of Eid al-Fitr are, quote, "bigots." There's the true spirit of American Unionism, a sentiment to gladden the heart of poor Joe Hill — or, as he is nowadaysreferred to by historians of American labor, Yusuf al-Jabal. |
| 07 — Anthrax nutter. This Bruce Ivins was a piece of work, wasn't he? After
toiling away for 28 years there at our government's top biological-warfare research lab, Ivins killed himself July 29 and it is now pretty clear that
he was responsible for the anthrax attacks of 2001.
To describe Ivins as being nutty as a fruitcake would be unfair to fruitcakes. A year and a half before the attacks, Ivins had told a psychiatrist that he was planning to kill a young woman with poison he had mixed up himself in his lab. The psychiatrist talked him out of it, but Ivins' employer, a kindly old fellow named Uncle Sam, took no action against him. Ivins was left in his lab, mixing up poison while muttering quietly to himself. He'd been nuts for years before that, though. He nursed the belief, for example, that the college sorority Kappa Kappa Gamma was persecuting him, and broke into one of the sorority houses to steal their code book. Not only was Ivins nuts, he knew he was nuts, and boasted about it to colleagues. Quote, from an email to one of his colleagues: It's hard enough sometimes controlling my behavior. When I am being eaten alive inside, I always try to put on a good front here at work and at home, so I don't spread the pestilence. I get incredible paranoid, delusional thoughts at times, and there's nothing I can do until they go away. End quote. Still nobody did anything. Moral of the story: If you are crazy as a coot, and would like to be left alone to cultivate your insanity, get a government job, preferably with the Department of Defense. |
| 08 — Venezuela. Venezuela, Venezuela — that country that sits
right on the top of South America, hang a left at Colombia.
Well, Venezuela's in the hands of a crazy leftist, name of Hugo Chávez. They're supposed to be having elections in Venezuela this November, but Comrade Chávez is taking no chances. He has just got his Supreme Court, whose members were hand-picked by him, to ban most of the opposition candidates. He's also pushed through a whole raft of socialist laws, in spite of those laws having been rejected by Venezuelan voters in a referendum last year. One law establishes a civilian militia modeled on the community patrols that enforce Party rule in Cuba — or, to put it another way, like the, quote, "civilian security force" that Barack Obama proposed in his Colorado Springs speech last month. Another law allows the state to take over private businesses any time it wants to. You get the picture. One reason Chávez can get away with this stuff is, Venezuela has lots of oil. You remember oil; that's the stuff the world is getting kind of short of. Discussing Venezuela with a colleague, my colleague said it was turning into, quote, "Cuba with oil." Given that Chávez rose to power partly on racial appeals, as part of the "brown revolution" of resentment by Indian peoples in South America against the European-descended types who own most of the wealth in these countries, I suspect Venezuela will turn out to be more like Zimbabwe with oil. Perhaps the ChiComs will show up to build Chávez a new presidential palace, like they did for Cap'n Bob in Zimbabwe. |
| 09 — Conservative movies. You're going to need to be sitting down for this
one, it's a bit of a shocker. You okay? Right, here you go: there are conservatives in Hollywood!
Yep, and not just Bo Derek and Tom Selleck, either; there is a conservative director and he's making a conservative movie. In Hollywood. Did you feel that icy breeze wafting up from the nether regions? I guess hell just froze over. The director here is David Zucker, who made Kentucky Fried Movie and Airplane back in the seventies. I'm getting this from an article by Stephen Hayes in the Weekly Standard. Apparently there's this group of Hollywood righties calling themselves "Friends of Abe," which Stephen Hayes helpfully tells us refers to Abe Lincoln, not Abe Vigoda. They've been meeting regularly, I suppose in some abandoned back lot at one of the studios, to discuss how to get conservative movies out there. Wow — who knew? Conservatives in Hollywood! Dorothy Parker famously said that the only "-ism" movie people care about is plagiarism, but the attacks of 9/11 seem to have changed some minds, as David Zucker says they changed his. Good luck to these Hollywood righties, but they have an awful lot of ground to win back from Oliver Stone, Warren Beatty, Barbara Streisand, Spike Lee, and the rest. How about a remake of Stone's movie JFK, where the president is assassinated by a communist? Nah, nobody would believe that … |
| 10 — Miscellany Running out of time here, folks, so just a quick roundup of the rest of the
news.
Item: Quote of the week: Nancy Pelosi, tackled by George Stephanopoulos on her refusal to allow an up-or-down vote on offshore drilling, said drilling wouldn't have any immediate effect of gas prices. Well, said George, if you've got good arguments against it, why not have a debate? Replied Nancy, quote: "We have a debate every single day on this subject." End quote. Where, Nancy — in the ladies room? You're supposed to debate national issues on the floor of the House. Item: What else? Death of the week I guess was Solzhenitsyn, undoubtedly a great man with a great spirit, though I seem to be the only conservative willing to confess that I found his books tough sledding. And then there was that peculiar beard — what was up with that? Item: Let's see … Oh, researchers at Microsoft Corp. have confirmed the thing we've all heard about six degrees of separation. That is, any two human beings in the world, taken at random, are separated by just six acquaintances. Put it another way, you know somebody who knows somebody who knows somebody who knows somebody who knows somebody who knows somebody who knows Osama bin Laden. So why is the guy so difficult to find? Item: Oh boy, really running out of time here. Last items: Pakistan's president is facing impeachment, the leader of Malaysia's opposition party has been arrested for sodomy, and down in Dallas, 26 cheerleaders got stuck in an elevator. That's it! |
| 11 — Signoff. Yes folks, that's it — all the news you can drown
with a couple of shots of Old Crow.
When will it all end? Well, in September, quite possibly. That's when the Large Hadron Collider starts full operation over in Switzerland. The Large Hadron Collider; that's h–a–d–r–o–n, need to be real careful with that word. Well, they're running a test this weekend, just shooting some protons through the thing, to see how it stands up, you know, to check out its performance … no, this is sophomoric stuff; from now on I shall eschew double-entendres when talking about the Large Hadron Collider — whose erection, I should say, was financed by the European Organization for Nuclear Research. … What? What did I say? Oh, for heaven's sake. Come on, this is important — a seminal event in particle physics. Anyway, when this gadget really gets going, it will generate weeny little black holes that will drop right through to the center of the earth, up to the antipodes, then back and forth in harmonic oscillation gradually sucking up all the Earth's substance until the whole planet collapses to the size of a walnut. It may take a while, but there won't be a darn thing anyone can do about it. So the word from Radio Derb is: Don't buy any green bananas! |
[Music clip: More Derbyshire Marches.]