BOOK REVIEW

If you like to read about political idiots, Paul Slanksy’s Idiots, Hypocrites, Demagogues, and More Idiots, published by Bloombury, is the book for you. It skewers both Democrats and Republicans, although the latter, for some reason, have a lot more space devoted to their stupid comments.

Former vice president Dan Quayle is well represented among the first group:

Talking about child-care, he told one audience, “We understand the importance of having the bondage between the parent and the child.”

He told another group, “We’re going to have the best-educated American people in the world.”

He referred to members of Bush’s team who had treated him with contempt during the campaign. Now they would have to deal with him. “I’m the vice president,’ he said. “They know it, and they know that I know it.”

Congresswoman Helen Chenoweth is among the hypocrites represented in the book. After strongly denouncing Bill Clinton for his dalliance with the Lewinsky bimbo, Chenoweth was found to have had an affair with a married man in the 1980s. Her indiscretion, however, occurred, she told reporters, “when I was a private citizen and a single woman.”

Loudmouth Rush Limbaugh frequently attacked drug addicts and called for their imprisonment. In 2003 he admitted that he was addicted to OxyContin.

Dick Cheney referred to water boarding as a “dunk in the water.”

Told to put out a cigar in a restaurant because of federal regulations, Congressman Tom Delay, “I am the federal government.”

I chuckled through most of the book, though sometimes I gasped in horror to realize that these were the people running the country. Some of Nixon’s comments revealed on tape were truly horrifying.

The book costs $14.95. It’s worth every penny. Buy it for yourself. Buy it for you liberal friends for Christmas presents.

REPUBLICAN VICE PRESIDENTS

You have to hand it to those Republican presidents. Since Reagan they really know how to pick a vice president. George H W Bush chose Dan Quayle as his running mate. What better insurance could he have against assassination? Who would be wacky enough to try to murder Bush if that left Quayle in charge of the country? The guy isn’t smart enough to run a lemonade stand, to say nothing of the country.

Then Bush junior went dad one better in choosing Dick Cheney as his vice president. Anyone who hated Bush the younger enough to contemplate assassination would have to consider what the country would be like with Cheney at the helm in name as well as in deed.

We might have thought that this weird kind of assassination insurance was just something that the Bushes practiced, but John McCain evidently thinks it’s a great idea too. He chose a running mate who combines Quayle’s cluelessness with Cheney’s ruthlessness. God help the country if she ever had to replace the 72-year-old John McCain.

VICE PRESIDENTS

COLONOSCOPY

Saturday morning, July 21, President Bush was sedated before undergoing a colonoscopy as part of a routine screening for colon cancer. Before he had the procedure, the president wrote a letter to the leaders of the House and Senate, in which he ceded his authority to Vice President Cheney while he was under the anesthesia. While Bush was under, Cheney was acting president.

Now that’s a scary thought! Yet it’s hard to imagine how Cheney could do any more damage as president than he has already done as vice president.

One thing you have to say for the Bushes, both daddy and son: They knew how to pick vice presidents. As bad as George Bush is, we realize it could be worse: What a disaster we would be in with a President Cheney! And Daddy Bush had Dan Quayle. If anything had happened to Daddy Bush, the dumbest man in American politics would have become president.

The good news, though, is that in their exploration doctors found several things that Bush hadn’t been able to find before: Weapons of Mass Destruction.

Democratic candidate Dr. Carl Perrin has not yet chosen his running mate, but he promises it won’t be a Cheney, and it won’t be a Quayle. “Whomever I choose,” Perrin says, “it will be a person of intelligence and integrity, someone who realizes that growing corn for ethanol needs to be balanced with crop supports for barley, so Americans can continue to get cheap beer.”