It's been a news-busy couple of weeks. First, Our Leader went "on the offensive" (my guess is that Iraqis thought he was already "on the offensive" and everyone else just thought he was already "offensive") over his legal right to illegally wiretap anyone he thinks he oughtta. Then, there's been a good deal of focus on how adding a fourth member of a single right wing judicial activist organization to the Supreme Court is OK as long as he seems temperamentally placid and his wife can cry. Then Our Leader explained to us that if the Arabs elect someone he doesn't like, it defeats the whole idea of democracy, which is for the US to get everything it wants all time and for everybody else to just shut the fuck up and take it.
Still, even in the face of these historic events, I was a bit bewildered how Ariel Sharon's minute by minute prognosis has fallen off the charts. So, whenever I can't understand what's really going on, I call on my super high level, totally secret, unnamed source: Rear Entry. As usual, he had some eye-opening information for me. We met over Ben's chili half-smokes in a paddle boat somewhere between Haynes point and Theodore Roosevelt Island.
JP: How is it that we are hearing so little about Ariel Sharon's condition lately?
Rear Entry: (laughs) It's no accident, I can tell you that.
JP: Please don't be coy. It's cold out here.
Rear Entry: The White House is very upset about what Pat Robertson's doing.
JP: You mean saying Sharon's stroke was god's vengeance? He apologized for that.
Rear Entry: Sure, in public. Bush begged him. Robertson wasn't gonna do it even for show, but Bush got Laura to dance with him on Duke of Earl and told him it was OK to cop a feel.
JP: Are you making this up?
Rear Entry: Do you think I could? But the public apology was just a cover. They both knew that.
JP: A cover for what?
Rear Entry: Robertson's preparing a legal assault on the Sharon family to remove the fat man's life support.
JP: What? Why?
Rear Entry: God's will is God's will, man. As badly as God wanted Terry Schiavo alive, He wants Ariel Sharon dead. What I heard was Robertson asked Bush if he didn't believe the courts should do God's work on earth, and before you knew it Condi and Alberto Gonzales had a team of State and Justice lawyers working weekends on Robertson's brief.
JP: That's amazing.
Rear Entry: That's nothing. Hamas is filing an amicus curiae brief to support Robertson.
JP: That should be a powerful alliance.
Rear Entry: Not really. But no one expects their claims to have any standing. They're basing it all on the idea that Sharon having been behind the slaughter and rape of thousands of civilians at the Shatila refugee camp should earn him a death sentence, and that the entire Sharon family having been found guilty of taking millions in bribes over the past few decades should bar them from legal standing. Can you believe that shit? How can you negotiate with people like that? You can't. Where would thinking like that leave Bush and Cheney--not to mention Congress?
JP: I take your point. So what chance has Sharon got to go on living life as a vegetable?
Rear Entry: Funny you should use that expression. One of the first preliminary legal skirmishes has been exactly on that point. The Robertson lawyers kept referring to Sharon's condition as "lying there like a vegetable" and the Sharon family objected. They said they would prefer the expression "lying there like a lox." Not wanting to appear too heartless, the Robertson camp agreed. Same deal with the Hamas suit. They referred to Sharon as the Butcher of Shatila in all their paperwork, the family insisted on the KOSHER Butcher of Shatila, and the court backed them. But to answer your question, there is a shadowy group forming that may make all the legal maneuvering moot.
JP: What do you mean?
Rear Entry: Well, the CIA has noticed that all of Sharon's doctors have a common trait--they're all Russian émigrés who arrived in Israel in the early 80's.
JP: You don't mean...
Rear Entry: That's right... A Russian Doctors' plot to poison the Jewish Man of Steel. The intelligence is solid, I'm told.