Our bad guy

By Michael Moriarty
web posted May 17, 2004

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt listened utterly unmoved as
one of his advisers regaled him with the awful exploits of a
certain Latin American dictator.

"He's a bad guy," agreed FDR, "but he's our bad guy."

Now decades later, the children of Roosevelt's party are listing in
bold print the awful exploits of President George W. Bush.
He's an American tough cop, for sure. Following what was more
of a police action than a war, an operation that culminated in the
arrest of a known, homicidal tyrant and collaborator in the
assault on the Twin Towers, President George W. Bush hung in
Saddam Hussein's own territory a little too long. There's a price
when the police reveal the unappeased rage beneath their
exploits.

This rounding up of the rabid Osamists is more like a barroom
brawl than conventional warfare. Having been on the short end
of a few saloon punch-ups, I can tell you it's not very pretty. You
use all the weapons you can find, including humiliating the guy
who just disfigured your face. My only highly functioning
weapons of self-defense are my words. They'll echo a lot longer
in the memory of wannabe Billy the Kids and kangaroo courts
than the marks on my face, which have healed.
Following the walloping I received at the hands of four young
punks in the parking lot of a bar in Maple Ridge, B.C. —
punched repeatedly and then thrown over the top of a car to
land like a sack of potatoes on the asphalt — I found the
deepest injury was delivered by the Crown Attorney's Office.

"We suggest you relocate, Mr. Moriarty."

Sounds like a bad western, eh? "Be out of this town by sunset,
bo-ah."

Well, I'm here to tell you that I'm still here. 

In my contented moments, I feel like Gary Cooper in High
Noon. In my fretful moments, I just feel like the fool they want
me to be.

American Liberals want George W. to feel worse than a fool.
Without once referring to the exploits of Osama bin Laden, they
want to make George W. look like the "bad guy."

Alright, Liberals, let's say he's a bad guy. However, he's our bad
guy. The tough cop on our police force, okay? He's working to
save our ass from the barbarous hordes. At the polls, Americans
might think it's time for the nice cop, Senator John Kerry, to run
the interrogation. We'll know that on November 23.

Unfortunately, the roundup of our enemy's rabid pit bulls is not
over. Osama's still at large, albeit under self-imposed house
arrest, and Kim Jong Il, the most dangerous of our enemy's
attack dogs, is still running sullenly through the North Korean
woods. When a dog bites you, you don't talk to the dog; you
talk to its owner.

After William Clinton's florid appeasement of Red China, do we
really want Senator Kerry talking to Beijing?

Well, say the Liberals, Clinton's policies got us a one-thousand-
point growth on the Dow-Jones index, and did so without
inflation. He also lowered the crime rate miraculously.

Crime rates dropped in 1930s Rome and Berlin at about the
same tempo. There's nothing like criminals with badges to get the
job done. The whole shift in NYPD policy occurred under the
Bill Clinton/Rudy Giuliani crime bill, around the time I was
playing Assistant DA Ben Stone on Law and Order. Read
investigative reporter Bob Herbert of The New York Times and
you'll see a record of police brutality that makes the American
guards in Iraqi prisons look like boy scouts.
As for the prosperity pick-me-up, Alan Greenspan himself said
he could not explain the miraculous vitality of Wall Street under
Clinton.

The secret was neither trigonometry nor Viagra. The only
possible way to get growth without inflation is to cut the
overhead. Same price, bigger profits. Nothing like slave labor
out of Communist countries to give Dow Jones that powerful
thrust.
The "sucking sound" of the sudden loss of jobs that Ross Perot
predicted was delayed in deference to President Clinton, who
sold the big corporations a sea of sweatshop labor in the first
place – all in the name of peaceful relations, of course. The
inevitable domestic fallout was then released during George W.
Bush's watch. He now has to account for an exploding,
unemployment landmine that was set by the Clinton
administration to blow up in his face.

All's fair in love, war and politics, I guess.

Is there a "good guy" somewhere in here? Where's Ronald
Reagan or Abraham Lincoln when we need them?

The earth is so small these days that any war is a civil war.
Regarding China, the only Communist monolith left, we need a
miracle like Reagan's. He dismantled the entire Soviet Union
without firing a shot. He was "cunning as a snake and as
harmless as a dove."

Freeing the Chinese, which is the only glorious task ahead of us,
cannot and will not be done as President Reagan did it when he
freed the Soviet Union. Russia's self-image is that of a bear.
China's is that of a serpent, a Red Dragon, a flying snake with
fire passing over its forked tongue. Russians finally discovered
that they'd rather hang out with mammals like us than reptiles like
China.

What's ironic is that the United States' own self-image was that
of a snake, a serpentine mascot on a flag that simply said, "Don't
tread on us."

Since then, we have ascended through the entire evolutionary
ladder to the aerial heights of an eagle. Everything between the
eagle and the snake is at our disposal.

Call it zoological warfare; the animal self-image of a nation is
profoundly important. The mascot of the International
Communist Party is a COW. That acronym stands for
"Communists Own the World."

Check cigarette lighters out of Beijing and you'll see COW
engraved in metal. There's a COW ice-cream chain. There are
bronze cows all over Calgary, a city known for bulls and beef.
The entire concept of socialism being maternal — Big Mamma
and not Big Brother, as we mistakenly supposed — a cow could
stand as a perfect symbol for the mothering state. It leaves all the
citizens big babies to be strapped into their high chairs and safety
belts; and since babies shouldn't be raising babies, the state,
obviously the only adult on earth, has its day care centers and
social workers to do the job.

There are over 300 such mothering, socialist federations ruling
society. So, indeed, they're right. Communists Own the World.

"Well," cry the Liberals, "a socialist federation is not
Communism."

The socialist federation is the economic foundation upon which
Communism is laid. Martial law or a War Measures Act can turn
a socialist federation into a Communist state in less than 24
hours. You can't be a little bit pregnant with socialism. The Beast
will be born, slouching all the way to Bethlehem.

Well, the World — like Society — is an illusion, according to
Margaret Thatcher. In other words, society is a delusion faced
with the reality of individual freedom. Yet our college graduates
enter the world utterly convinced that the human race can be
codified by statistics, millions of them run across the desks of the
United Nations and, after a few genocides, considered, in the
light of population control, just that many fewer to worry about.
Is it any wonder that the human race feels so small and
cowardly?

The fall of the Twin Towers was a barroom assault by a gang of
suicidal psychotics, drunk on Osama Jihad Juice. It made the St.
Valentine's Day Massacre look like Cupid's Arrow. The whole
earth witnessed it. However, like the witnesses of my own brutal
assault, society says, "I can't testify. I have to live here."
However, they can go on and on about how corrupt the victim
is.

Yes, I suppose that George W. is a bit of a bad guy, but, at the
risk of repeating the obvious, he's our bad guy. He's also our
tough cop and the interrogation of the owners of the rabid dogs
is not over. Do we really want the "nice cop" to enter the
interrogation room to paddy-cake the neighbor who let the dog
off its leash?

We've got dogs of our own. Even Texas rattlers, if we need
them. Here's my anthem for the coming years of war:
 
We're North American eagles
And we fly like Canadian geese
But on the ground
We're anything we have to be
To protect our freedom.
It's a mere warm-up for The Battle Hymn of the Republic.

Michael Moriarty is a Golden Globe and Emmy Award winning
actor who has appeared in the landmark television series Law
and Order, the mini-series Taken, and the recent TV-movie The
4400. He has just been nominated for a Leo Award (celebrating
excellence in British Columbia film) for best supporting actor for
his work in the film Mob Princess.

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