Barbra Streisand was never capable of keeping her ample schnozzle out of other people’s business; she has always been the same pushy buttinski from Pulaski Street. The loud mouthed kid from Brooklyn is now a sixty-year-old yenta and as obnoxious as ever.
Perhaps her childhood explains her peculiar bent. Barbara Joan Streisand never had a loving father; her father died of an epileptic seizure when Barbara was an infant. Barbara’s mother, Diana, took her two kids and moved in with her parents. Diana then withdrew emotionally. According to a relative “there was no love in that house.” Little Barbara Streisand subsequently became a hypochondriac; she developed fantastic fears and symptoms; she convinced herself that she had cancer. Then she imagined that she had a heart condition. She developed an hysterical ringing in her ears and began wearing scarves to shut out the sound.
At some time in the early 1950s this screwed-up kid stumbled into a home with a television set. That television was a window that opened onto a world of joy and fantasy that was a world away from the darkness of her mother’s sadness. Barbara decided to seek the spotlight. She began singing, constantly, to the dismay of her neighbors.
When Little Barbara’s widowed mother became pregnant out of wedlock, Barbara’s grandfather gave Diana and her two kids the boot. Louis Kind married Diana in her ninth month of pregnancy, but he had no interest in supporting a second family; he had no love for Barbara. Little Barbara continued to sing and annoy her new neighbors.
Barbara Streisand spent her early school days at yeshiva and did a summer at Hebrew health camp. She attended Erasmus High School in Brooklyn where she was reluctantly admitted to the choral music program. Classmates remember her as “a loner” and “aloof.” Her homeroom teacher described her as “self-centered.”
After high school Barbara persisted at auditioning despite her mother’s repeated admonition that she had no future in show business. Barbara’s big break came when she auditioned for the part of homely, squat, big-nosed and Jewish Fanny Brice in Funny Girl. It was the role she was born to play.
Barbara’s brassy campy deportment made her an instant hit with New York’s gay community. Every time she made an appearance on Mike Wallace’s talk/variety show PM East, the gay clubs would offer 2-for-1 drinks. She was the drag queen’s role model: an inflated caricature of a real woman, a female female impersonator. Gay men love to live vicariously through Hollywood women. Joan Crawford, with her broad shoulders and masculine demeanor captured the up-front assertiveness that gay men longed for. Barbara Streisand offered gays a real-life version of these same deliciously bitchy Crawford characters. Barbara made it onto Mr. Blackwell’s Worst Dressed Women List six times. Blackwell called her “A boy version of Medusa.” He said she cultivated “The Al Capone look with electrocuted hair!” (Footnote: Streisand changed her first name to Barbra just before a talent contest, which she won. After that she superstitiously clung to the variant spelling. Henceforth, I will use her adopted spelling.)
During the filming of Funny Girl, the pushy Ms. Streisand spent way too much time telling the director, William Wyler, how to direct his film. Wyler, who had sixty movies and eight Academy Awards to his credit, tolerated the obnoxious Streisand with good grace. Walter Matthau was not so patient. During the filming of Hello, Dolly! Streisand offered endless acting suggestions to veteran actor Gene Kelly. Finally, Matthau, who was directing the film, shouted at the motor-mouth actress “Stop directing the fucking picture!” Streisand then called the director “Old Sewer Mouth,” to which Matthau responded: “Nobody in this company likes you,” which sent a sobbing Streisand scurrying to the comfort of her dressing room, to everyone’s relief.
So the story goes, it was Streisand who pushed hard to get Robert Redford for the lead in the film The Way We Were. The word is, she just wanted to be near the golden goyboy. Redford is an instinctive actor and he found it heavy going dealing with Streisand’s need to examine and reexamine every move and motivation. Redford later described his experience of working with Barbra as “doing overtime in Dachau.” Barbie is a control freak.
Streisand is still trying to direct and control, but now she wants to direct the Democratic Party. Because she is such a productive fund raiser for the Democrats, none of them has the nerve to tell her to shut up; no one wants to send her sobbing to her dressing room where she might just sit and pout instead of raising more funds. Money is, after all, the mother’s milk of politics and Streisand has proven to be one amazing wet nurse. She raised a cool million for Walter Mondale back in 1984, but nothing could save Mondale.
Streisand headlined at a 2002 Democratic National Gala which brought in over six million dollars, providing a boost to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s effort to retake the House in the upcoming November elections. House Minority Leader, Dick Gephardt gave a get-out-the-vote speech. Streisand performed a mutant version of The Way We Were, with twisted lyrics interspersed with political hysteria.
Streisand began: Mem’ries
Light the corners of my mind
Misty watercolor mem’ries
Of the way we were.
She then mouths the words: “When I sing that song now, I can’t help but think about it politically.” It was all downhill from there. Doing what she does best, Babs proceeded to wallow in bathos.
Scatter pictures
Of the House we left behind
Lovely Democratic mem’ries
Of the way we were.
The rest was a sustained whine, interspersed with such paranoiac lines as: “I find George Bush and Dick Cheney frightening . . .Donald Rumsfeld and John Ashcroft frightening.”
Streisand concluded her tortured rewrite of the nostalgic 1973 song with the stanzas:
So on
Next Election Day I pray
That the country will deliver,
A House without Tom Delay!
We need a team change
A definite regime change.
Oh, that would be a dream change
From the way we are.
So, in November
Let’s make the Congress
A Democratic Congress
The way we were
The way we were!
How sad. Nostalgia is a mild form of depression. Barbra’s depression, together with her lifelong paranoia, would excite some sympathy if we didn’t have our own distinct mem’ries of the way we were during Bill Clinton’s eight-year-long betrayal of our trust. Barbra pines for the good old days when Bill was bombing Bosnia, when he was lying to the public (Our troops will be home from Bosnia by Christmas; I did not have sex with that star struck youngster), when he was wasting cruise missiles on empty training camps and an aspirin factory, when Bill turned down three offers to put Osama bin Laden in a U.S. prison cell, when Bill was transferring top-secret missile-guidance technology to China to improve their targeting of American cities, when Bill was accepting political contributions from the communist Chinese (thanks for the technology, Bill), when Clinton was raising the tax burden on struggling Americans to a record high and fending off numerous credible accusations of sexual abuse, including the forcible rape and disfigurement of Juanita Broderick. Billy the Kid turned the White House into a cash-generating Motel Six. He granted pardoned an undeserved pardon to criminal fugitive Marc Rich as thanks for political contributions and many other pardons to scores of other thugs and thieves who had greased the Democrats, all in the final hours of his administration. When they decamped, the Clintons looted the White House, stealing truckloads of publicly-owned treasure to feather their nest in Chappaqua.
That was the America Barbra Streisand longs to return to; she thinks that Republicans are frightening, but then again Babs is a life-long paranoiac. During the filming of Funny Girl, Barbra rejected the substitution of a stunt double in an aerial biplane scene. Her fans would know it wasn’t her! So Barbra went aloft in the rear seat of the biplane. When the plane was denied a swift landing because of airport congestion, Barbra instantly convinced herself that she had been kidnapped. It took William Wyler a long time to soothe the hysterical Streisand and coax her back into her role as a functioning actress.
In his book Unlimited Access, FBI agent Gary Aldrich, who was assigned to the Clinton White House, describes Hillary Clinton’s instruction to the White House staff to never look directly at her. “When ‘Queen Hillary’ walks down the hall, you’re not supposed to look at her. She doesn’t want staff ‘seeing’ her.” Likewise, Ms. Streisand, while staying at the MGM in Las Vegas for her final concert, demanded that all hotel workers who entered and left her guestroom suite do so backwards. No one was allowed to “see” the goddess Streisand. It’s the sort of over-the-top behavior that educated people associate with ancient and far-away potentates, but then again Streisand identified so strongly with Cleopatra that she circulated close-up publicity photographs of herself all dolled up as the Egyptian queen of the Nile. Or is that the Queen of Denial? The sojourning Queen Streisand also demanded peach-colored toilet paper “to match her skin.” Brace yourself. Barbra and Hillary are fantasists who want to shape the future of America.
Barbra Streisand shares much with Hillary Clinton. Both women were judged to be cold and aloof by their classmates, both had cold and remote father figures, both women have an academic grasp of femininity and both women share the same paranoid fixation: neither of them wants to make eye contact with humans.
The kid whose mother always told her that she wasn’t good enough now “identifies” with the people she imagines to be the downtrodden. She thinks that the Republicans want to grind the poor into fertilizer for their plantations. Meanwhile, back in the real world, the real Barbra Streisand hisses “Get away from this table!” to a hapless working-poor waiter at Morton’s Restaurant in Beverly Hills. It was left to Streisand’s second husband, washed-up actor James Brolin, to corral the waiter and the maitre’d and instruct them that “Under no circumstances are you to approach the table.” One must never approach the throne without first being beckoned, and remember, no eye contact with the earth-bound deity. Brolin replaced Streisand’s former husband, another actor who tired of being called “Mr. Streisand.” Their erstwhile marriage has been good for both parties: Brolin got his humongous credit card debt wiped out and Streisand acquired a beard, a tag-along male companion to make her appear more feminine. When last seen, Streisand and Brolin were wandering through the Santa Monica Vintage Expo antiques fair where Streisand browsed for hours, while Brolin followed after her, carrying her purse. (National Enquirer 6/4/02). When Brolin isn’t carrying purses, he busies himself making body contact with photographers who attempt to capture unguarded snaps of “actress, singer, director, activist” Barbra Streisand.
Yentl Goes Presidentl
Two months after Hillary Clinton made the White House her house, her father suffered a massive stroke. Hillary took Chelsea out of her exclusive private school, Sidwell Friends, and together they flew to Little Rock to be by the comatose man’s bedside. Hillary returned to Washington only a few hours before her father died. Upon her return, Hillary discovered that her husband had been entertaining Barbra Streisand in the White House; the trashy songstress had even bragged about spending Saturday night in the Lincoln Bedroom. While Hillary was sitting watch at her father’s deathbed, the lusty songbird had rushed to the White House to play a demo cut of her as yet unreleased album for her favorite president, privately. Hillary was quick to notice the fresh scratch on the president’s face. It was big: Streisand is renowned for her long fingernails. The president’s press secretary had stupidly told Hillary that the wound was just a little shaving scratch, without first seeing it. When Hillary saw the nasty claw mark she banned Barbra Streisand from any more overnight stays in the White House. An appreciative Bill Clinton awarded Streisand a National Medal of the Arts just before he left the White House as a way of expressing his thanks for her very artistic performances.
It conjures up quite an image: the plump songbird from Pulaski Street embracing the former lardlad from Arkansas who once broke his leg skipping rope because he was so plump, each of them star struck with the other. It’s sweet and laughable: two latter day dorks in lust. The fact that both of them had sworn to honor and cherish others in the holy sacrament of marriage simply confirms that they are both untrustworthy and careless of the binding sinews of society. If sacraments aren’t worth preserving, then every lesser social contract is worth no more than dust.
Barbra Lays an Egg
Meanwhile, back at the Democratic Gala, Streisand made a laughable attempt to elevate the tone of the fundraiser by quoting lines from William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Babs meant the quotation to be a barb flung in the face of President Bush. She had just one problem: “actress and director” Barbra Streisand is so unfamiliar with the works of history’s greatest English playwright that she didn’t know that the trashy doggerel she was babbling was just the scribbling of an anonymous Internet prankster. Streisand has played a few roles as Jewish females, but nothing else. She has used her amazing ability to produce the sort of sustained high notes that leave dogs traumatized as a stepping stone to acting roles, such as the Red-diaper-baby Communist in The Way We Were and the stetle-bound cross-dressing bucher boy in Yentl. She is not well-read; she is just doing what actresses do best: she is posing. Streisand is a political poseur.
When Internet columnist Matt Drudge caught her with her pretentious political trousers around her ankles, Streisand responded lamely that the anonymous author of the Internet was “damned talented.” She said he should write his own play. She also posted a “Truth Alert” on her political website wherein she shifted all blame for her stupid blunder onto one of her underlings. The queen is never wrong.
Drudge had previously toyed with the celebrity songbird. She had sent an urgent message to House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt urging him to flog his fellow Democrats into militant opposition to the Republican administration. Drudge had a romp pointing out the numerous misspellings in Streisand’s manifesto, which included the misspelling of Dick Gephardt’s last name. If Barbie needs a new battle cry, then how about “Bad spellers of the world UNTIE!” Streisand scurried to her computer and fired off another signature “Truth Alert,” once again blaming everything on a careless underling. Barbra, it seems, can’t be bothered actually reading the missives her name is attached to.
Just in case he hadn’t tweaked Queen Streisand enough, Matt Drudge informed his millions of readers that the Streisand Foundation had eagerly purchased 800 shares of Halliburton stock when now-Vice President Dick Cheney was the company’s chief executive. Streisand responded by launching another “Truth Alert” in which she whined “How low will Republicans stoop to try to stifle the voice of singer, director, actress, activist Barbra Streisand?” Stifle? Not a chance! She’s just the sort of rich dopey Democrat who must be kept in the spotlight as a cautionary example of clueless celebrity. Streisand made a point of telling everyone that her Halliburton stock was sold at a loss of $1288, as though the loss had restored to her some sort of virginal status.
Our leap-before-you-look “activist” was soon in the news once again. Streisand was livid that a Republican had misrepresented “Ms. Streisand’s deep opposition to the Iranian dictator, Saddam Hussein. . .” Our language-challenged Barbie seems to have a problem with geography. After Drudge spotted her latest gaff there was a scramble to substitute the word “Iraqi” on Streisand’s website.
At the September Democratic Gala, Dick Gephardt had put on a game smile. “Eat your heart out,” Gephardt had shouted to Republicans from his spotlight moment in Hollywood. “I get faxes from Barbra Streisand.” That’s right Dick, we will eat our hearts out because we don’t get blistering critiques from Babs Streisand. Barbra the “activist” had insisted that Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle and House Minority Leader Gephardt stop being passive wimps: “It is time for the Democrats to get off the defensive,” declared coach Streisand. Was Gephardt about to contradict Ms. Moneybags? Of course not. For a bucket of soft money Dick Gephardt would probably carry Barbra’s purse all afternoon, just like James Brolin. Dick was eager to please Ms. Streisand; he said he was grateful for her appearance at the fundraiser; he said that he and Streisand spoke regularly about politics.
Streisand and her follow Democrats are quick to portray President Bush as a moron, but George Bush is the first American president with an MBA degree; he understands what makes an economy robust. Al Gore, Jr., on the other hand, flunked out of more than one college and is now huddling with Rob Reiner for guidance. Who would you rather have advising the President of the United States, Colin Powell, Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice, or the former Funny Girl and the guy America once knew as Meathead? Is our country well served when one of its most influential political parties is under the influence of political dilettantes and posing faux intellectuals?
If Barbra Streisand thinks that the president is frightening, then she should grab a mirror and take a gander at a sixty-year-old yenta stuffed into a forty-pound $8000 sequined dress and spouting hysterical paranoid nonsense to an audience of like-minded Hollywood leftists. That’s frightening . . .and pathetic. Despite her pretensions, Barbra Streisand is not an activist; she is just a rich celebrity who headlines an occasional fundraising gala. That she embarrasses Dick Gephardt and Tom Daschle with her kick-ass memos is comical. That Tom & Dick must pretend to be flattered to receive her advisories, which she also shares with the entire world, is hilarious. Streisand the “activist” is clueless, but Streisand the actress has grasped one true thing: the Democrats have a trashy script and they are in dire need of some artful stage direction. After all, when the Hollywood masters of illusion tell the Democratic Party that it lacks even the illusion of competence, why should Americans take the party seriously?
Answering Silly Barbra
Before an audience of thousands, Streisand said of our president: “I saw him on television say, ‘If this were a dictatorship, it would be a heck-of-a-lot easier, just so long as I’m the dictator.’ And he laughed. You know, people never really joke. . .” It was Babs at her most bogus; it was Streisand doing liberal shtick. She then burbled some paranoid silliness about George Bush “wanting unlimited executive power.” People never really joke? This was Funny Girl talking! Streisand made a sweet living for years as a jokester . . .as a clown.
Streisand did, however, capture the neediness of the intellectually bankrupt Democrats. As Thomas L. Friedman remarked in the New York Times, “The problem is that the Democrats have nothing compelling to say on all the issues besides Iraq. Iraq is winning control of the agenda by Democratic default, not by Republican design.” The time-worn Democratic agenda had been eclipsed by ominous world events. Polls showed that voters had as much confidence in Republicans to improve the economy as they did in the Democrats. More respondents believed that Republicans are superior at managing domestic terrorist threats (44% compared to 28% for Democrats). More Americans believed that Republicans would more wisely respond to the crazy atomic wannabe in Baghdad (46% to 30% for the Dems). Americans did not blame their president or his party for the strangely fragmented economy. Most Americans understood that recent economic events were the result of the Islamabomber attacks on September 11, 2001 and the historical cycling of business activity.
When confronted by the people’s common sense, a loud mouthed far-left fringe of Hollywood fundraisers and pundit wannabes mounted a charm offensive on behalf of the idea-deficient Democrats, so let’s take another moment to torpedo some of their fear mongering and nonsense.
Streisand introduced her anecdote about George W. Bush lusting for unlimited power with the line: “Shortly after George W. Bush was elected. . .sort of. . . I saw him on television...” The words “sort of” are meant to suggest that Mr. Bush was not really elected by the people in a close race, but was “selected” by a Supreme Court that intruded on the election process. This is nonsense. The Supreme Court simply said that the standard for what constituted a properly cast ballot in Florida would be the clearly stated instructions that were posted in plain sight at every polling place in the state of Florida. Every voter, whether Democrat or Republican, was presented with the same instructions and with the same printed ballot. The ballot had been designed by a Democrat. Voters were told that if they “spoiled” their ballots in any way, then they were to ask for a fresh ballot.
When it became apparent that Mr. Bush would win the national election by winning Florida, the Democrats strove to change the rules: they wanted to include ballots with “hanging chads” and “dimpled chads,” even though the posted instructions informed voters that such ballots were void. The Democrats sought ballot recounts only in carefully selected areas with anticipated heavy Democrat turnouts. The Democrat-friendly Florida Supreme Court allowed these recount. With every recount Gore’s count remained the same, or Bush gained a few more votes.
The Democrats sought to discredit absentee ballots cast by American military personnel because servicemen tend to be patriots and tend to vote Republican. Then the Democrats got a boost from their friends in the media when media announcements of a predicted victory for Al Gore discouraged many thousands of Republicans from voting in northern Florida polling places which were in a later time zone than the southern part of the state, where the polls had already closed. The Democrats also lost an estimated 40,000 Cuban-American votes in Florida because of Janet Reno’s directive to seize a small Cuban refugee and return him to the island of brainless Marxist utopianism as a personal favor from Bill Clinton to Fidel Castro.
The Democrats were frustrated by America’s Electoral College system, which has ensured the political health of our nation from the very beginning. The existence of the Electoral College ensures that the winning presidential candidate has the greatest appeal to the most diverse population of Americans; the Electoral College ensures political diversity; it ensures that the greatest number of perspectives and interests are represented by the single winning candidate. Hillary Clinton has been vocal in her call to abolish the Electoral College system. If the Hollywood left had their way, presidents would be elected by a simple majority, which would mean that the most populous areas along both coasts, in the biggest media markets, would elect every president from now to eternity. All of America that lay more than eight miles from a coastline could pretty much abandon all hope of any meaningful representation at the presidential level. This would be Hillary Clinton’s fantasy America, a place where all issues of water resources, land use, property rights, wildlife management, firearm ownership, forest management and a thousand other matters of grave importance to millions of Americans, would be decided by those votes cast in a few densely populated narrow geographic areas. This is not what the Fathers of the American Revolution intended. George Bush was the legitimate winner of the 2000 election because he won the greatest number of diverse regional contests all around America. That’s what the Electoral College is all about. George Bush won because he appealed to a more diverse range of American interests; he represents a more authentic spectrum of American interests. So President Bush wasn’t elected “sort of”; Barbra Streisand and the Democrats are just, sort of, having difficulty engaging reality.
The 2000 election was pretty average in every way except the level of emotion. About four percent of all ballots cast in the election were spoiled by voter incompetence, which is typical of every election. The big Democrat get-out-the-vote push swelled the number of people at the polls and increased the proportion of first-time inexperienced voters. Democrat voters, in general, are younger and less educated than Republicans which would have increased the number of spoiled Democrat ballots.
It was the Democrats who put the election before the courts by manufacturing voter hysteria. First they made an emergency call to a company in Texas that specializes in push-polling. Then this company flooded Florida with calls to elderly Democrat voters and planted the idea in their minds that they may have accidentally voted for Pat Buchanan instead of Al Gore because of the way the ballot was designed. This produced a wave of “concerned” calls to Democrat representatives who, on cue, demanded that the courts save the election from attempted voter fraud. There was no fraud; the ballot had been designed by a Democrat, for Democrats. There was no windfall of misplaced votes for Pat Buchanan. The voters of Florida were not disenfranchised. A police roadblock two miles from one polling place was not an attempt to suppress the black vote; it was just an effort to catch a robbery suspect. The Supreme Court of the United States did not select George Bush; the court simply told America that the rules of voting would not be changed in the middle of an election, no matter how much one candidate wanted to change the rules for his personal benefit.
Streisand echoed the chosen Democratic Party line on the economy: “We had a Democratic Congress that put the country on the road to prosperity. . .The American dream was alive and well. . .As long as Democrats were in the majority, I could sleep nights” and so on. Or, to quote Tom Daschle, “You’ve got an economy that is in shambles as a result of decisions made by this administration.” Daschle also called the economy “tragic, deplorable, abysmal” and “atrocious.” Daschle’s sidekick, Sen. Harry Reid, called the economy “stumbling, staggering and faltering.” Al Gore said that Mr. Bush’s economic policy was ruinous. Wow! That’s a lot of tough talk. But is it true?
The heart of the Bush economic program is a 10-year, $1.35 trillion tax cut. Please note that Al Gore tiptoed silently past his opportunity to call for the repeal this popular tax reduction. In any case, over 91% of these tax cuts still lie far in the future, so blaming the tax cuts for any problems today makes the Democrats appear ignorant to knowing people. They are not ignorant, we know; they are trying to deceive an ignorant electorate.
In 1992 Bill Clinton misrepresented economic conditions; he said that things were awful. The media followed Clinton’s lead; they said the economy was horrible, the worst in thirty years. In truth, the economy had grown for six consecutive quarters before Clinton was elected. Two weeks after Clinton’s election the media began to run stories about how the economy was improving even though Clinton’s budget proposals would not be in effect for months to come. The media simply promoted the Democrat vision of America, whatever it happened to be. During his run for president in 2000, Albert Gore, Jr. kept pumping the lie that back in 1992 America was bogged down in “the worst recession since the 1930s.” In truth, that recession was the second mildest recession since the Second World War. In any case, that recession had officially ended in March of 1991.
Our most recent recession was officially the mildest one since 1945, yet the Democrats are toiling like Trojans to create an atmosphere of pessimism and dread. After all, if things are as good as can be expected during this time of crisis, then who needs a regime change? The Dow recently closed at 7528, which is over eight times what the Dow averaged in 1982. By falling down to 7528 the Dow has simply returned to what it was in 1998, a time the Democrats have painted as the Glorious Time of Clinton. It’s just another example of how morally bankrupt the Democrats have become.
The humongous speculative bubble of the Clinton years has burst, letting $8 trillion in wealth out of the tires, so to speak. Even so, this year’s first quarter growth was a brisk 5%, real disposable income is up 3.6%, and future predictions are optimistic. Productivity is rising which, in our deregulated economy, means that lower production costs are being passed along to consumers. In the month following the Islamabomber flying fuel-bomb attacks on New York and Washington, DC, we recorded the best sales ever for automobiles. Zero percent financing overcame all fears.
Today’s average interest rate on a 30-year mortgage is at an all-time low: 5.84%. Three quarters of all mortgage applications are now for refinancing as borrowers help themselves to a self-serve tax cut, which gives them more disposable income to pump back into the economy. Government and consumer spending are increasing; unemployment is declining. The July slide in stock prices caused fretful investors to withdraw $52.6 billion from the stock market. Tom Daschle may call this “tragic” and “atrocious”, but it was a mere 1.7% of the total stock fund. A whopping 98.3% of investors wisely left their investments in place because long-term economic pessimism in America is always wrong headed. Talking down the economy is just a Democratic Party ploy to garner votes. In the short run, this tactic can only maliciously harm our economy.
They’re Just Sore Losers
Tom Daschle says: “You have a far greater, more poisoned political environment than we had two years ago.” He’s just pouting. Daschle himself poisoned the political environment by repeatedly subverting political diversity and representative democracy by limiting congressional consideration to only Democratic versions of proposed legislation. Repeatedly, on sensitive issues such as energy and Medicare, Daschle bypassed committees that might have drawn up compromise bills and instead brought Democrat versions of bills directly to the floor. These sneaky end-run tactics were a virtual declaration of war against the Republicans.
It didn’t help that the Democrats gained control of the Senate when Sen. Jim Jeffords of Vermont, who had been elected as a Republican by voters who wished him to remain a Republican, declared himself to be an independent in mid-2001. Jeffords, not the voters, shifted power in the Senate to the Democrats. Thereafter, the Democratic majority in the Senate carried with it the stink of illegitimacy. Stranger still, the Democrats are chagrined that Mr. Bush, who ran as a conservative, is actually promoting conservative ideals and conservative solutions. The Democrats say the president caught them by surprise when he moved ahead with his conservative agenda and conservative appointments. The poor babies!
What took the Democrats by surprise was the sudden need to justify their time-worn liberal agenda. Thinking is more difficult than sloganeering and Democrats are experiencing a painful new need to justify their lavish tax-payer-gouging, vote- purchasing, big-spending programs.
Barbra Streisand: Celebrity Gasbag
Back at the Gala, our plump songbird interspersed her nine vocalizations with personal notes about her many fears: her fear of Mr. Bush and Mr. Ashcroft and Mr. Cheney and Mr. Rumsfeld. She worried about the ozone layer and the ice caps; she fretted about the folks who keep us supplied with needed timber and gasoline and heating oil; she was afraid that the companies that spent millions producing new medicines might someday make a profit selling them; it bothered her that people who worked hard and got an education might keep too much of their hard-won earnings; she wailed about “poison in the water, salmonella in the food, carbon dioxide in the air. . .” She’s fearful of conservative judges and the wrong kind of Christians. Barbra would do us all a favor by returning to more personal terrors, such as her imaginary cancer and her imaginary heart condition. Perhaps she could just sit perfectly still and search the sky for those frightening biplanes that might someday return to kidnap her.
What she should not do is confuse her popularity as a performer with the popularity of her political ideas. Her ideas are trash. If Barbra needs proof of this, then she need only announce another big Democratic gala and then not sing. She should announce that tickets will sell for $500 to $250,000 but the only entertainment will be Barbra Streisand sharing her fears and her five-watt intellect. She could hold that gala in a telephone booth.
Thomas Clough
Copyright 2002