The International Writers Magazine: REALITY CHECK

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The Vacuum of Journalism • James Campion " Rage is the only quality which has kept me, or anybody I have ever studied, writing columns for newspapers." - Jimmy Breslin

Who is the cheap whore who sandbagged George Pataki? He is a friend and a warrior, if not dumbfounded by party politics and bad associations with stammering trolls like Al D'Amato, but we’ve long forgiven him his deviances here. Heck, we’ve known the governor, more or less, since he stood on the platform of the Peekskill train station one late July dawn hawking votes for mayor. We’ve worked with his daughter and hung with his campaign rubes, and we like their demented ilk. So when anyone railroads our kind, like these recreant piss boys trying to play Linda Tripp with the suddenly lazy-ass NY Post, we arm for war.

I guess this is what passes for front-page dirt in the once gloriously primal NY Post now. The halcyon days are officially over. What happened to the kind of world-class yellow journalism that had W. R. Hearst spinning happy in his eternity box like "Tea with Son of Sam" or "Ed Koch Steals Money from the Federal Government", "Uncle Rudy’s Trigger-Happy Blue Line Guns Down Delivery Boy", or "Donald Trump Caught in Plaza Bathroom Snorting Coke Off Corpulent Hooker’s Cleavage"?
They should be ashamed of themselves over there. I mean, really.

Who the fuck cares if Libby Pataki thinks the Giulianis are publicity hounds? They are, and they love it. And what if a dime-store widget gaffer like this Wall Street groupie, Thomas Doherty is pissed about his seating at the state’s GOP fundraisers? I know Doherty. Republican insiders laugh at this idiot. It would not surprise me if he leaked these tapes.

Perhaps if Pataki were getting Hummers from chubby interns or building tennis centers with firemen funds, we’d have something here. But this meaningless nonsense is wrong and fucked and needs to be settled in a court of law, especially in a nation where journalists are routinely being jailed for protecting sources while mutant vermin like Robert Novak run free.

We absolutely cannot have civilians running wiretaps while the FBI has the type of Gestapo freedom international law enforcement creams over. If anyone was to know what was going on through these phone lines over here at The Desk, we’d be deported or worse. I do not, under any circumstances, want to end up in a pile of naked POW’s in Guantanamo bay, pal.

Wait a minute. Fuck this. Was I just at a diner in Wayne reading a scroll on CNN that claimed that Pat Robertson, voice of the Christ Incarnate, just called for the assassination of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez? How beautiful is that? I nearly choked up my mediocre veggie burger on the spot. He’s got to be kidding, right? Was he in a Jesus trance, calling on the Lord’s vengeance for the evil darkies? What a terrific monster this guy is. Not Chavez, although he is an annoying twit, but Robertson, once a candidate for president, now reduced to a graying freak show, curing brain cancer victims BEFORE they contract cancer; a thing of beauty, really.

PT Barnum’s adage is as true today as the day he burped it at McSorley’s Bar on the Lower East Side nearly 150 years ago. There is a sucker born every day, and they vote in South America and they listen to Christian Evangelists and buy stories of laundry lists for the NY Post. Perhaps we can put Pat and his God Boys on the Pataki Phone Tapes case. Weed out the chickenshit buggers like Chuck Colson once did for Nixon, before Liddy and Hunt and the CIA boys screwed it up by leaving White House checks with the valet at the Watergate. Those guys knew how to play it, not like Doherty or Novak. These hacks couldn’t make Nixon’s starting line-up. That took balls, and an utter lack of respect for places like heaven. Doherty just wants to be loved, and Novak is a whiney bitch, who walks off television debate shows after being verbally horse-whipped by a lame pansy like James Carville. I think if Pat Robertson is going to blather stupid shit like murdering presidents, like my irresponsibly professional pitch for Castro’s head a few weeks back, he should be on some kind of ticket come 2006. Get in the arena, and stop hiding behind the hem of the Virgin Mary. I might join him. We need his kind to show us the festering boils beneath the pomp and revelry of democracy, where anyone with half a brain can ramble on for a thousand words and get paid.

God Bless America! This brings me to this Cindy Sheehan person, who doesn’t get paid to make a spectacle of herself like me, Novak or Robertson. But she has done a fine job of it, and although the war propaganda hounds over at FOX NEWS like Brit Hume have decided she is a misguided fool, she gets plenty of liberal press. And none of it is good for this aborted war effort, now reduced to the foulest kind of bloody suicide for the poor suckers who joined the armed forces.

Believe me, there will be more like her to come, even though, bless their wounded hearts, they will have all left the barn door open, and be far too late to bemoan the loss. If Sheehan really loved her son, she might have talked him out of joining this folly more vehemently. But, then again, he was a big boy. He wanted to be a soldier, and soldiers die. Presidents send them there. This was the case hundreds of years before any of these kids marched to the firing squad. Hey, PT Barnum was right about another thing: No one is forced to come into the tent to see the show, you know.

© James Campion September 2005
www.jamescampion.com
realitycheck@jamescampion.com

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