Theobertarian Dictionary Part3

First off, I was surprised that the president accepted some responsibility for the government’s failures with Katrina. What he really means by that, I don’t know. In regular life, it means that you’ll pay for the damage, fix what you broke, or resign from your job as a gesture of contrition. I just don’t realistically expect the President to offer to do any of those things. They got Bill Clinton to give up his law license. Perhaps this President can give up saying the word “Freedom” in public for six months or making references to “Accountability” or the “hard work” of being president and keeping the country safe. What are you supposed to say when you’ve got a leader who sold himself as the guy who’ll keep America safe who lets the department of homeland security look like the Baylor men’s basketball team of three years ago. Mmmm….that coach got fired, but he later got a job coaching minor league basketball. Okay, wrong comparison. How about Enron? Kenneth Lay’s not running Enron anymore, Uncle Ken is just waiting to be indicted. Another wrong comparison I guess. Maybe we should compare him to the guys who advocated for the war in Iraq based on false information about WMD, based on grossly inaccurate resource estimates, and based on underestimating the possibility of an insurgency. I have it, give the president the Medal of “Freedom” and have him resign or give him a job at Halliburton. Of course, corporations probably won’t hire a guy who routinely won’t cut short a vacation in the middle of a major emergency. They will hire guys who find ways to circumvent accounting rules or shortchange stockholders and I suppose if you look at the history of Harken oil maybe he does qualify.

Wow, I’m being way too negative. I am pleased at this first step towards reality by the president. I just want to be clear though that in the Chancelucky dictionary “responsibility” is not something one says, it’s something one does, that’s why you take it or accept it. Real responsibility might have consisted of convincing his own party’s senators to approve a Katrina Commission to look at what really did go right and wrong in responding to the disaster.

I did promise some definitions of my own and as soon as I can think of a name for the point on the political compass they represent, I’ve fooled with “loony left”, “everyday fairness”, “chanceluckyism”, etc. Nothing yet strikes my fancy. As soon as I find a label, I’ll have counter definitions for some if not all terms in the Theobertarian dictionary.

Accountability: Theobertarians often talk about “Accountability” but they never actually write it down or even spell it out. The simple reason is that they indeed do spell it differently. When they say they believe in “Accountability” they don’t mean the one that means taking direct responsibility for one’s actions, they mean “AccountaBILLity”.
All things that go wrong in America and that have ever been wrong are on account of Bill.
If you were from Mars, you might ask which Bill, do you mean Bill Bennett, that nice man who wrote that book on the Virtues between betting more than most people make in their lifetimes at casinos in Las Vegas? Of course, the confusion is understandable, Bill Bennett’s account with the casino is in great shape, which may make you wonder how a man whose career was in public service and with Universities happens to have three million dollars to gamble away recreationally, but we’re not talking about that Bill when we talk about AccountaBILLity. By the way, the Book on Virtues is +7 and we understand that if it rains, it’s good for an overlay.

They mean Bill Clinton, the president who allowed a female intern to perform oral sex on him and who did strange things with cigars that may have even come from Cuba. At least that’s according to Kenneth Starr who took more than a hundred million dollars in public money to actually prosecute virtually no one and write a report which if there were a video version would have to be rented in a back room behind a curtain in your local video store. The Independent Prosecutor did such a remarkable job that the Republicans discontinued the position after he was done with it. Because Bill Clinton did this terrible thing while keeping the nation at peace, running budget surpluses, etc., it is clear that 9/11, the flood in New Orleans, the lack of Medical insurance for ordinary Americans, the inability to find Osama, and the breakup of Jennifer Anniston and Brad Pitt’s marriage are all a matter of AccountaBILLity.

This explains why the President says he takes “responsibility” for the Federal failures in Katrina, but is proposing to investigate himself instead of letting or encouraging Congress to do it. On AccountaBILLity, he has learned the lesson that Independent Prosecutors, especially incompetent ones, can be a pain. That, of course, wasn’t his first time around an independent prosecutor. If you remember Lawrence Walsh, the very good prosecutor, and Iran-Contra, George the less Abysmal responded by pardoning everyone before the independent prosecutor could actually bring charges against anyone significant. After all, they were simply selling drugs through the Contras and selling missiles to the Iranians out of a deep sense of patriotism to the United States.

Oliver North didn’t get pardoned, he got immunity from Congress. After he was convicted for misappropriating money, he appealed based on the grant of immunity and got off. Right after that, the Theobertarians wisely nominated him to run for the senate in Virginia. That was even before they had AccountaBILLity on their side.

As Karl Rove put it so eloquently,”I never actually said that and you can quote me on it.” If you looked in a regular dictionary and looked up “accountaBILLity” it would probably list “accountability”. “responsibility”, “honesty” all as possible antonyms.

A Theobertarian joke told to me by my friend Bud,

John Roberts won't tell anyone what he thinks of Roe versus Wade, but at least we know what George Bush thinks.

What's the president think about Roe versus Wade?

He doesn't care how anyone gets out of New Orleans.

hit cymbal with drumstick.