FIXTURES: MAKE THEM GO AWAY!

This is as good a time as any to compile an “If I Never Saw Them Again It Will Be Too Soon List.” My intuition tells me I’m not the only person who has one.

Some years back, the New York City Department of Sanitation went on strike. One of the ways people managed to get rid of their garbage was to gift wrap it and leave it in the back seat of their car. In NYC it was a sure thing someone would smash a window and steal it. No comparable way has been found to get rid of the politicos, journalists, academics, and the other public pests who presume on America’s patience. There is no gift wrapping this human bric-a-brac, these celebrated dust catchers. They have made themselves fixtures in the public consciousness, white elephants without portfolio. They are people who are drawn together by a common need to duck each other at cocktail parties.

Journalism, government and universities are garages full of junk personalities that no one ever gets around to cleaning out. The nation has become a landfill of gaudy notables whose only gift is to be conspicuous. The public arena has become a commode rattling its own handles to let us know they have gone too long un-flushed.

These people have become fixtures that create culture clog, a condition brought on by too many familiar faces in too many familiar places. They are grindingly tiresome and relentlessly unoriginal. They are carriers of chronic déjà vu. Most of this is due to the singular faculty of television that enables us to hate people we’ve never met, keeping them always at eye level and within earshot. They are a class of hangers on. Saloon proprietors call them “regulars,” and when they get too regular, they have the bartender pile the stools up on the bar and yell “Last call!” The question that comes to mind on meeting them is, “Don’t I want to not know you from someplace?”

They are an epidemic of being present, and their omnipresence has given ubiquity a band name. They are permeating, pervading, pervasive, and universal. They are a public relations equivalent of genital herpes, and their intrusiveness reminds us of the old drinking song with the self-justifying lyric that chafes, “We’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here ad nauseum.” It is as though someone fastened them in place with a staple gun.

They are a plague of triviality, a video game that can’t be turned off. They are guests who don’t know when it’s time to go home. Throw their hats and coats on the front walk and they still don’t take the hint. America needs a national bouncer.

Here is a list of people in that category and who are prime candidates for exile:

To find people who urgently require deportation, one need look no further than the U.S. Senate, that talking shop where politicians go to have great ideas escape them. Its most characteristic member is Richard Byrd, an outpatient from the West Virginia State Home for the Chronically Monotonous. It is his modus operandi to keep talking until he thinks of something to say. The ancient Egyptians who built Khufu’s pyramid came to the point faster than he does.

Who has not wearied of Joe Lieberman, the Conscience from Connecticut, whose demeanor has transmogrified from holier-than-thou to holier-than-anybody? Lieberman is confident he will become the first Jewish President, and to celebrate he has already reserved a table at his favorite night club, the Koshercabana.

John McCain, the chronically disaffected Senator from the land of disenchantment, is pissed off about everything that happens during any week with a Thursday in it. His inability to get America’s adulation has made him perpetually cranky. He reminds one of popular musical lament whose title rebukes, “Just Because You’re Not in Love Don’t Throw Shit at the Moon.”

The last time I saw anything that looked like Jim Jeffords, it was hanging upside down in the window of a poultry shop. Then there is Patrick Leahy whose face is identical to its reflection in the fender of a car. Both represent Vermont, a state where a bad case of hemorrhoids can end your career.

The Democrats keep asking Trent Lott to surrender, but he keeps holding out for total capitulation. He’s like a quarterback who always wants to throw in the towel but can’t get it away.

Consider that study in hideous bloat, Teddy Kennedy. Kennedy has proven himself ignorant of a basic rule safe driving – that is, to turn the steering wheel when you see yourself coming to an ocean.

Massachusetts environmentalist, John Kerry, is vehemently against drilling for oil in Alaska. Kerry, who is married to the heiress to the Heinz Company, feels the government should fund a research program to invent an automobile that runs on ketchup.

Strobe Talbot started calling himself “a consultant” ever since he tired of hearing giggling when he referred to himself as “an expert.” He has re-emerged in a new unimproved mucosa consistency from the cavity in which he has been congealing. This officious coxcomb has been anointed the CEO of the Brookings Institution and is now the measure of just how much smarminess the Brookings Institute will brook.

Senator Biden periodically stops in at the Sears Automotive Center to have his hair plugs rotated. Biden carries a Zip-Loc bag full of dandruff in his attaché case as confirmation should anyone question whether his new hair is genuine.

We are painfully bored with Professor Cornel West and that pretentious nonsense he teaches called “Black Studies.” What are Black Studies, anyway? Ebonics? Intermediate Watermelon? Dribbling 101? (In my estimation Political Correctness is more menacing to America than Islamic Fundamentalism.)

Somehow Nature’s push broom accumulated Madeleine Albright into an unattractive heap of overripe femininity. She is the paradigm of an eccentric piano teacher, who her pupils at any indication of her approach, try to hide the Steinway under their bed.

Al Gore is currently teaching at Columbia University. In order to disassociate himself from the depravities of Bill Clinton, he is trying to convince his students that Fellatio was the name of a Roman emperor.

Jesse Jackson: At this point in time big business executives no longer consider Jessie Jackson’s repetitive demands for money blackmail – but only junk mail. In return for a few hundred grand he will drop all charges of racial discrimination against a company and even squeegee the CEO’s limousine windshield.

Robert Reich, Clinton Administration mascot, is running for Governor of Massachusetts. If elected, because of his diminutive proportions, he will probably be sworn in with his teeny tiny hand placed on a copy of TV Guide.

How much longer must this nation endure Janet Reno, the Paul Bunyan of lesbianism? Reno bears a remarkable resemblance to the sister of Osama bin Laden, aptly named Unsightly bin Laden.

Bob Dole’s defeat for the Presidency did not banish him from public view. Instead he emerged in the unseemly role as pitchman for Viagra, the pill for married men who have reached an age when they are too old to fantasize. I do not expect to live that long.

Al Sharpton has seemingly announced he’s running for President. Martin Luther King had a dream. Al Sharpton has a hallucination.

Maxine Waters’ beauty consultant must be the same guy who drew up the plans for strip mining in the Mesabi.

Barbara Mikulksi is available if they need a door prize at Attica. Solitary confinement, where is thy sting?

Gary Condit has given the Democrats another chance to say "It’s only about sex," an expression popularized by the Marquis De Sade, explained by Sigmund Freud, and made an object of derision by Bill Clinton.

Helen Thomas may be the first person ever to require a cosmetic autopsy. She already looks like a first attempt by a student embalmer.

Judy Woodruff, also, has a kind of post mortem charm characteristic of the main focus at a very boring coroner’s inquest.

California Governor Gray Davis looks like he made a U Turn on the way to becoming an albino.

Susan Estrich has got to be a running joke among rapists. On her best day she looks like Quasimodo’s passport photo. She always sounds like she has a frog in her throat and lately she sounds like it brought along a friend.

It is hard to believe Missouri could produce a socialist hot air merchant like Richard Gephardt after having giving America Stan Musial.

Hillary Clinton, the Wellesley Medusa, can trip a burglar alarm with her smile. It’s said, Hillary has recently had breast augmentation surgery. A Senator who got pushed up against her in a crowded elevator believes they gave her concrete implants.

Alan Dershowitz, in a burst of nostalgia for the Inquisition, is advocating the return of torture. His torment of choice is the thumbscrew which he thinks of as something Clinton forgot to try on Monica. After being forced to sit through one of his lectures, any student would have revealed the few nuclear secrets Clinton neglected to sell to the Chinese and offer to give any Gestapo agents still alive in Argentina the names of the leaders of the French underground.

This brings us to the ever-obtrusive Geraldo Rivera, current media trans-journalist and noted political cross-dresser. Now that the Democrats have self- proclaimed Hillary “the smartest woman in the world,” they also have Geraldo Rivera, “the bravest man in the world” – although it is difficult to take seriously someone reporting on the carnage of war while sporting a Jerry Colonna moustache. The question arises, how is it Geraldo is so good at ducking bullets and so lousy at ducking chairs?

Inside every Colin Powell is a Warren Christopher trying to take a nap. Bush selected him as his expert on Middle East affairs because when Powell was in the army he thought Snafu was the name of an Egyptian Pharaoh. Powell is a chocolate soldier whose resolve melts at room temperature. He is a proponent of squandering America’s largesse on people that hate us. Left to his own devices, in Afghanistan he will give away more shit than Bob Barker. Presently he argues that the terrorists in Guantánamo should be granted the protected status of Prisoners of War. The fact that Powell advocates any position is sufficient argument to doubt its wisdom.

Monica Lewinsky, the Washington “come and get it girl,” was ambivalent about having sex with Bill Clinton. At moments of her greatest emotional conflict she was reported to have exclaimed, “Take it out deeper.”

Margaret Carlson exhibits a positive genius for having nothing to say - but saying it anyway. Seeing Carlson on television is like having a hair in your mouth and trying to back away from it.

We do not know how many millions of dollars Fox is paying Greta Van Susteren, but chances are it will cost more than that to get her teeth straightened.

After the interminable whining by that sallow yenta, Patricia Ireland, one deduces all sexual encounters are accidental and all aborted fetuses are collateral damage. If she’s correct, sex is just another pile up on the Freeway – or perhaps it may be just the way Ms. Ireland goes about it.

Increasingly more irksome than perksome, Katie Couric seems determined to convince her viewers that Andrea Yates murdered her five children in a fit of uncontrollable motherly love.

Khofi Annan’s ascent to the high office of Witch Doctor General of the United Nations should be credited to his tailor who convinced Annan he would look more civilized in pinstripes than he does in feathers.

What could Dennis Rodman and Chelsea Clinton possibly have to say to each other after, “Who does your hair?”

Tim Russert thinks his balanced fawning over both Democrats and Republicans makes him objective. One can admire objectivity and still distrust people like Russert who traffic in it. Accuse anyone in the media of being objective and he’ll be complimented. Accuse anyone outside the media of being objective and he’ll dare you to step out in the parking lot and say it to his face.

William Jefferson Clinton remains the ultimate intruder in America. He is the unchanging and complete heretic. There is no god to whom he cannot be false, no slattern with whom he cannot commit adultery, no nation to which he cannot be disloyal, no secret he cannot betray, no code to which he cannot be duplicitous, no discipline he cannot fail, no art he cannot debase, no standard he cannot compromise, no principle he cannot subvert, and no friend he cannot double cross. His idea of salvation is to be reincarnated as a tampon.

We finally know what made the good old days good. These people weren’t around. As it was said in vaudeville, it’s time to “give ‘em the hook”- get them off the stage and out of the public arena. We need them to vanish. So, Mr. Stage Manager, cue the magic act and tell the magician to take all these rabbits and shove them up his hat.

One way to get rid of him, FLUSH, Let's just hope he won't clog the sewer system.

Richard Byrd, an outpatient from the West Virginia State Home for the Chronically Monotonous.

Um, who the heck is Richard Byrd?

I believe that should be Robert Byrd!

Well, I guess old Norm made a mistake...LOL

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