Ed. note: Agent Shrub, having caught the Roots Bug, has traced his lineage back to the 15th century. We reproduce here some press reports credited to his ancestor, one Jorge Arbushto, a journalist accredited to the Royal Court of Spain.
Jorge Arbushto reports from the capital:
An organization of Madrid slum dwellers complained today that the 1479 merger of Aragon and Castile had encouraged corporate raiders to further exploit the poor and to expand their allegedly rapacious activities further afield. Referring to the Royal promise to Christopher Columbus of ten percent of any trade resulting from his voyages, a slum spokesman said Aragon and Castile should be renamed Arrogant and Go Steal. Royal Press Spokesman Rodrigo Fitzwater responded that the slum dwellers should realize their financial woes are caused by Jewish control of the banks, and that the wealth from free trade will trickle down. Queen Isabella says she will press for funding for Columbus’ proposal to bring Western Civilization to the East. The Queen said there will be no new taxes, promising to find funds elsewhere. She said she will immediately commission an Inquisition into the funding question.
Opposition to the voyages has come from some members of the Talavera Commission, who charge that Columbus’ proposed new route to the East will throttle those who believe in the old routes, forcing them to remain silent in the face of new Navigationally Correct orthodoxies that will prevent new generations of students from studying the classics. But supporters of the Enterprise counter that the doubters suffer from malaise and Crusade Syndrome, and that Spain needs a new and weaker adversary immediately in order to once again stand tall. One dissenter decried this analysis as an attack on the vertically disadvantaged. He was denied tenure.
Christopher Columbus and the crew of the Enterprise set sail for Japan and any islands in between today. At a dockside photo opportunity, the captain told the press, “This is our mission: to seek out new worlds and new world orders, to expand the Spanish sphere of influence, to make the World Safe for Christianity, and to put an end to pre-Columbian artifacts.” Some have protested that the proposed voyage is a fraud, a sort of conquest, and could result in not only a war against the indigenous peoples of new lands but also the destruction of Africa through the removal of millions of her people to slave societies to the west. But a recent poll shows 58 percent of the Spanish people are more concerned with gold and spices than with the fine points of a decade-old philosophical debate.
Jorge Arbushto reporting from Cuba: Christopher Columbus continues to maintain that Cuba is the same as Japan, and that even if it is not, both lands are offshore islands full of infidel terrorists, and either one would constitute “a fine distraction from future domestic woes of the citizenry and “a logical focus for communal frustrations and arms industriousness on the part of our noble successors.”
Day 309 of America Held Hostage: Christopher Columbus held a press conference in the Bahamas today and declared the New World Order at hand. Rumors continue to circulate that Columbus altered ship’s logs to give himself credit for sighting land first, but his defenders say he is a national hero, it’s a dangerous world out there, and sometimes you have to go above the written log. Asked by a reporter for a small left-wing Turkish-funded monthly about charges that he had fomented genocide, the Captain conceded that his arrival in these lands had resulted in some collateralizing, noting that “unfortunately, we had to destroy the hemisphere in order to discover it.” At the urging of Ferdinand and Isabella, Pope Alexander VI has drawn a line of demarcation just west of the Azores, separating the spheres of influence of Spain and Portugal. No sooner did the United Papal Service deliver the Bull than Portugal’s King John, acting on a tip that Brazil was about to be discovered, moved to push the line over a thousand miles west. The Brazilians declined to comment until being discovered.
July 2, 1992 The State of California is issuing IOU’s, a toxic cloud is spreading fear in Minnesota, and the pro-choice and pro-life camps are gearing up for a state-to-state fight with no end in sight. But polls show 63% of Americans believe Ross Perot can fix it.
A Senate committee says 60,000 women were raped or assaulted while they were active duty soldiers. The committee has expressed shock and disgust that such violence would take place in the military.
The government of Iran is printing billions of US dollars to pay off its debt and destabilize our country, according to a panel of Republican members of the House. The committee denounced the activity as international terrorism, and added that Iranians may have gotten the idea from a similar campaign the US is currently leading against the government of Iraq. The committee has not ruled out a suit for copyright infringement, but the law on counterfeit counterfeiting is murky.
The real significance of the situation is a possible Dollar War between the two countries, and voters are not inclined to change Presidents in the middle of a war. One more note: The Iranians are using expertise obtained from the United States during the regime of the Shah, and US trade policy explicitly states that after a US-supported regime is overthrown, all previously supplied expertise is to be forgotten.
In Missouri, a woman is on trial for killing her two children while taking the sleeping pill Halcion. The case is not expected to affect President Bush’s use of the pills, as he has only been charged with killing other people’s children.
The House has voted to kill funding for Vice President Quayle’s Council on Competitiveness. Democrats say Quayle has sought a monopoly on competitiveness.
March, 1993 When the new President gave his first joint address to Congress, I noticed he didn’t inhale. More power to him. The reaction of the leftist-overs to the ascension to power of the Democratic Ultra-Left has divided into two tendencies. One group, exhausted by a twelve-year battle against the Forces of Right, is ecstatic over the ozone-coddling, baby-killing, Metrically Correct forces now hugging and high-fiving their way up and down the corridors of power.
These are the Clintonistas. They salivate over their new-found power to force adopting parents to give preference to gay babies and later, of course, to have affairs with them.
In this Brave New World Order there’ll be no more praying in the schools, except of course by the lesbian priests. The Feminazis are in control now, and let me tell you, those are not the kind of nazis we want in charge up there. The Clintonistas have declared the elections to be a mandate for women. Well, that’s better than a mandate for men, like in the military.
But what’s all this about family leave? How can you have family values if the family leaves? On the other hand, if you destroy some families, I suppose the remaining ones are worth more. That’s supply-side family values as I understand them.
On the other side of the Clinton Divide you have the people who feel that just because a politician has been elected, for some reason he’s not likely to overthrow the government. These cynics like to point out that Mr. Clinton’s group, the Democratic Leadership Council, was backed financially by Georgia Pacific, the Tobacco Institute, the Petroleum Institute, Arco and Dow. In other words, you may have rolled over and voted for Clinton but my boys backed him with a big roll. You may be Greens, but we’ve got the green stuff. You may be Friends of Bill, but I paid the Bill.
It’s often hard to tell which is the real Bill because he has a tendency to be all things to all people. I’ll be only too happy to help him select. Hey, I’m people too. More or less. I may not wear my pants backwards, but I’m still wearing the pants in this country, Hillary notwithstanding. And we’re going to continue pantsin’ the world because, since the demise of the Soviets, we are the world’s only Superpants.
Somalia: With Operation Restore Hype, we are helping the world to realize that we’re actually good guys in disguise. We have every right to go in there and disarm those gangs—after all, we armed them. We’re going to get in and get out. We don’t need a base there. We already have a land-based aircraft carrier, the Kuwait. Having established ourselves as military-civilian humanitarians, we’ll hear no complaints when we save Cuba. There will be complaints, but we won’t hear them.
Gays In The Military: Next thing you know there’ll be gays in the FBI, wearing dresses! Betting on horses! Denying the existence of the Mafia! There’ll be gay privates showing themselves, showing their privates to corporals doing corporal punishment, S&M style with the gay drum majors. Sailors will go out and hook the wrong tail.
Clinton doesn’t get it. He’s never been in the military. He doesn’t know what it’s like to be showering down and have one of your buddies come up behind you and pat you on the back, softly. He doesn’t know the pain.
We will not tolerate sexual harassment of men in the military. And as Chaperon-General Bob Dole pointed out, if gays are allowed in, meaning in and out, there could be loss of life in the military. And we all know that’s not what the military’s for—it’s for the loss of other people’s lives. Friendly fire’s one thing, but gay fire, whoa! On the other hand, if they’re willing to go out there and casualize for America, I suppose they can do whoever they want in their casual time. And I do sympathize: it’s harder to be gay than black. Think about it: if you’re black, at least you don’t have to tell your mother.
February 12, 1993 All you post-80’s Americans, or post-80’s post-Americans, have got your wish: the Ultra-Left is in power in Washington. Draft-dodging owl-coddlers, foreign-named poets, quota’d cabinets, the whole sordid tax-and-spend crowd. But wait, let’s review our accomplishments before we plot the demise of the post-Commies.
In the eighties we evolved a new, post-Vietnam Syndrome approach to the problems of the Third World that we had created. It was called Low Intensity Conquest. I took the post of Chief Perception Manager for this campaign for Semi-Voluntary Authoritarianism, and we did it my way. Namely, you didn’t hear about it. The goal was to curtail ultranationalism, that is, their national-ism. Oh, there might someday be a country where the people could be independent-minded and democratic-minded and still get along with us. But till now there’s no such place—we’ll see to that.
After an intensive search we found the new enemy: Drugs. But questions were even raised about the drug war: Was it actually a cover for anti-insurgent wars? Well, I would never want to be the one to stand up here and say yes or no to a question that demanded that type of response as such. I would encourage you to have the wisdom to accept that which I will not deny. Remember: No brain, no pain.
After many years of self-styled demonstrations and so-called revolutions in Central America we are now encouraging you to see many changes in that part of our yard. In Guatemala, we are still looking for evidence that the conservative government there supports death squads. And if we find any evidence, we’re going to commission a study, because 70,000 people have died down there, mostly victims of the terrorists and the crossfire, with some 246 killed by the death squads also, and if the toll tops 100,000, then we are going to cut our aid, our civilian aid, because there will be fewer civilians. So you professional protesters will have to find something else to complain about. I’ll try to help.
George Bush may have left the White House with the economy in tatters and the evidence in shreds, but he left with his head held high, his conscience pardoned and his wrists unshackled. He is not a crook. Can we trust Bill Clinton to uphold the same standards? In my next column I’ll take a look at the Clinton gang: the good, the bad and the millionaires; I’ll also detail the role of the new CIA in the New American Order.
February 1, 1993 George is gone. And now we have the ultra-left in power. You just don’t know if you can trust Clinton. With George, you knew.
I don’t know if the Democrats believe in the American dream. Every American has a shot at it, and George Bush had several. Now it’s true, the dream is trickling down. The economy is in transition. And to his credit, Bill hasn’t tried to turn it around on a dime. He knows we haven’t got that. But we’ve got a strong export sector. Jobs, for instance. We do wish Bill well in moving us out of this recession and forward to the next one.
I’m opposed to gays in the military, especially if they’re out as well as in. But I’m not against gays in general. We have some in the Republican party. Phyllis Schlafly’s son John, and also Bob Mosbacher’s daughter Dee. Both are of the avowed persuasion. Now, maybe I’m missing something here, but I think somebody ought to introduce these two young people. They have so much in common.
You know, all over the world, people want what we’ve got here in America. Which kind of makes sense, I guess. It’s theirs, after all.
President Bush is a good man, a kind man—well, he’s kind of a good man. Well, a good man of his kind. He’s the education president: he’s a big supporter of the electoral college.
We have a kinder and gentler empire now, or KG for short. But there’s two kinds, you see: KGA and KGB. So, we’ll see.
As for the Veep, I know a little bit about Dan Quayle—that’s pretty much what there is to know, I suppose, but anyway, Dan briefed me on this controversy—he has a brief knowledge of this—he explained to me that Roe v Wade is really just two different ways to get across the river.
The Democrats as yet have no platform. They’re still shopping.
Ross Perot won’t allow adulterers in his cabinet. Clinton says he’s gonna get the best people, regardless of whether they’ve slept with him or not. You’ve got to admit, he does have sax appeal.
I agree that Ross should make some commitments. Nobody said anything about fulfilling them. I don’t think he’ll win, but it’s a great opportunity to show how the democratic process works. He’ll spend $100 million, or more, and somebody who spends only $50 million will win. So that’s a vindication, you see, of 8 figures over 9.
Hearing Voices The middle class has a voice, but not the lower class, so we’ve been moving some folks over. Which way, I won’t say. We have a very diverse society: various ethnic groups, constituencies ‑ even people of different income levels! There isn’t any one answer to our problems, so it’s clear that what we need is a charismatic leader. Someone who can identify the different socioeconomic groups and their needs, and pick one for a scapegoat.
Unfortunately, we had to destroy the Bill of Rights in order to save it.
There’s a proposal to register voters at the DMV ‑ the motor voter thing. And also register to vote when you sign up for welfare. But as the President has explained, that’ll lead to fraud. Everybody knows about welfare cheats.
I want you to buy American. Maybe you can’t buy an American VCR, all right, so don’t buy so many VCR’s. Buy more MX missiles.
Look, unemployment’s not so bad. It makes it easier for you to get replacement workers. I mean you in the sense of an employer. It’s true that people will lose their jobs at McDonnell‑Douglas, but there’s always McDonalds. The rich and the poor have equal rights to remain rich and poor. Yes, we cut $59 billion in aid for poor. If you give them that, they’re not poor. You’re trying to get us to wipe out the poor.
A lot of people feel the Japanese are taking jobs away from people here ‑ they know they feel this because they read the polls. Blacks did a lot of that, the job‑taking thing, especially before, oh, 1865, but now of course they only take people’s welfare away. Some say all this job‑taking is part of how things are arranged, but consider the alternative. 8 out of 10 spin doctors agree: when people are guaranteed jobs, they won’t work.
And very few people are colorblind. People are concerned about the yellow peril, the red menace, black plague, brown lung. Not white lightning so much anymore. People naturally fear that which is different. They’re naturally attracted to it too, but hopefully it doesn’t get out of hand. Any two people of different races walking down the street in a poor environment will naturally be suspicious of each other, protect themselves from each other, assertively, aggressively, that is, especially if they’re teenage males without jobs. People are just like that.
Women Some of you women keep telling some of us men that women are 53% of the population. And we hear you, sisters, we hear you. We don’t know what you’re talking about, but we do hear you.
I didn’t come here to slight the women—I will do that, of course—but you know they have a lady president over in Ireland now. It’s largely ceremonial of course. The real power lies elsewhere than the presidency. Well, kinda like here, I suppose.
Now I know a bit about this women thing because, well, the other day I was talking with this little girl— sorry, differently-heighted pre-woman—when all of a sudden this thug from the deconstructionist mafia rushed in and made me an offer I couldn’t understand. Well, I grabbed up the gal/woman and started running, but I tripped over this homeless, ah, residentially challenged fellow that was relaxing horizontally there..
But oh, the subsidies! WIC costs more in a year than the Pentagon can spend in four or even five hours. And the AIDS funding they want would cost as much as three, four, even five B1 bombers.
You know, a group of gays and thespians were coming to the capital to put a condom on the Washington Monument—that’s supposed to stop pentagonorrhea, which they say you get from, as I understand it, fucking too many countries.
Rodney King I disagree with the Vice President. Murphy Brown didn’t cause the riots. It’s got the Simpsons written all over it. But once again, they’re burning down their own prisons—ah, neighborhoods. Not their own in the sense of them owning them, or anything in them, of course. But still, these people who say they’re rioting because there’s inequality: Get a life. Do folksingers riot because they don’t have everything Madonna has? Do brunettes riot? No. They get out there and make something of themselves: blondes!
These people are going around looting, taking things that aren’t theirs. Who do they think they are, Charles Keating? Look what they do to their own community ‑ they should leave that to us.
Government alone can’t solve these problems. We’re too busy creating them.
And the people rioting ‑ blacks, Hispanics, whites, all jumbled up ‑they don’t even know how to have a proper race riot. So we’ve got to put more money into our schools. Well, our private schools. I mean, you have a choice. You can go to a public school, or you can go to a good school.
People say this shows we’re still a racist society. But Rodney King was not just black. He was big. Black people should know their size. And their place ‑ on the ground. And their speed ‑ if he would’ve driven slower, they would’ve hit him slower. What do you expect? The police were afraid, ever since they outlawed the choke hold because it turned out blacks are more susceptible to it, because they have a tendency to have it used on them more often.
But really, Black people pulling whites out of their cars and beating them—is that America? No. Whites pulling blacks out of their cars, that’s America.
Anyway, you have to remember the police motto: to serve and protect. And they did protect the community. They protected Beverly Hills from South Central.
I agree that there is racism, and I think we have to show progress, provide better role models, have a black vice president: put Colin Powell on the ticket. President Bush has expressed his compassion, but some people have questioned his commitment: will he act, or willie horton.
Still, there has been a lot of progress. In the 60’s, King was assassinated, and in 1992, he was only beaten. We must have patience, like Rodney King—now there’s a model patient.
But seriously, of course they used force—it’s called the police force, not the please force! And in any case, the jury always knows best. Granted it was not quite a jury of their peers, there being no cops on it. Anyhow, the folks up there in Seamy Valley are well versed in justice; that’s where the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library is.
We’ve had two decades of affirmative action and it hasn’t worked. So obviously someone’s at fault. Now I hate to blame the victim, but sometimes you have to do things you don’t like.
The Chicago flood was completely unavoidable. I mean, unless you want to go around fixing your infrastructure. That would take planning, which is Socialism.
Red Canada The Northwest Territory is being divided in two, creating a new Eskimo territory called Nunavut, which is an Inuit term meaning “Our Land.” In the spirit of the anniversary of the Rescue of the Red Hemisphere, we’re going to make a similar deal and give our Indians none of it, an American term meaning “Our Land.” But despite the late unpleasantness, we’ve got the Indians on our side now. That’s how we got Apache and Kiowa helicopters and Tomahawk missiles. And now Japan has a car called the Mazda Navajo. They come in here, they take our Indians, I tell you.
Red Cuba In Cuba you get to be leader by being the President’s brother. So wrong. Supposed to be his son.
Lavender America Clinton is a Rhodes scholar, so he’s building a bridge to the Congress. They’ve developed a good chemistry, but I understand he didn’t inhale. He’s a coalition builder. He doesn’t want any yes-men—sorry, yespersons around. He wants them to tell him the truth, even if it costs them their jobs.
Now there will be gays in the army: gay privates showing their privates, gay S&M corporals doing their corporal punishment, gay majors, gay drum majors… But I do sympathize with their predicament. It’s easier to be black, for example, than to be gay. Think about it: if you’re black, you don’t have to tell your mother.
To solve these problems, Jesse Helms has introduced a new constitutional amendment to change the name of our species to Heterosapiens.
Why are we so dead set on changing the regime in Cuba? What threat are they to the U.S.? None, not to the united ones, but to the state of Florida. They are out to dominate the good Cubo-Floridian citizenry. But Florida will resist, and defend their tradition of free—of elections. Cuba is jailing dissidents who happened to have had several chance encounters with some guy around the United States embassy who was just exercising his freedom to speech by saying hey, so what if there is money around here for destabilizing the Cuban government. Studies show that all Cubans would rather live in the U.S., because it’s permissive and secure. No coup.
For a decade or two (he’s a bit secretive about the details) George Shrub (*The M.D. stands for his Monroe Doctorate) has provided what he calls “the Right point of view” across the US and its commonwealths and protectorates. He’s known as the “singing CIA agent,” a functionary of the Committee to Intervene Anywhere (an equal opportunity destroyer). Some say Shrub is actually Dave Lippman, a folksinger and political satirist who puts a humorous spin on current events. When we caught up with Shrub recently, he would neither confirm nor deny that rumor. But he did consent to provide his “objective opinions” on a wide variety of topics.
George Shrub relaxing at home in an undisclosed location
TF: So, what have you been doing since the Cold War ended?
Shrub: Well, in the 80s we evolved a new, post-Vietnam Syndrome approach to the problems of the Third World that we had created. It was called Low Intensity Conquest. I took the post of Chief Perception Manager for this campaign for Semi-voluntary Authoritarianism–and we did it my way. Namely, you didn’t hear about it. The goal was to curtail ultranationalism—that is, their nationalism. Of course, there might someday be a country where the people could be independent-minded and democratic-minded and still get along with us. But so far there’s no such place. We’ve seen to that.
After an intensive search we found the new enemy: drugs. But questions were raised about the drug war. Was it actually a cover for anti-insurgent wars? Well, I would never want to be the one to stand up and say yes or no to a question that demanded that type of response as such. I would encourage you to have the wisdom to accept that which I will not deny. Remember: No brain, no pain.TF: Did the revelations about death squads in places like El Salvador set you back?
Shrub: In this country we’re lucky to have a wide-open democratic system where the various parties and candidates compete freely and vigorously debate the best way to make it appear that we have a wide-open democratic system. As a result, things occasionally come out. Now it came out that the Reagan and Bush administrations, in regard to the alleged participation of the Salvadoran military in the putative death squad activities, were economical with the truth. They withheld information; that is, they dissembled. That’s a post-modern term indicating there isn’t any one particular precise truth, but rather many perspectives.
Well, our perspective was that we had to work with Mr. D’Aubuisson, to be a moderating influence on him, and as we now see he has in fact curtailed his death squad activities quite a bit. In fact, he is no longer living.
But now we have–sorry, they have–a democracy down there, and if they get fed up with those death squads, they can replace them with other, more modern, or even post-modern ones.
George Shrub getting ready for work
TF: Let’s talk about health and welfare reform.
Shrub: I don’t believe in government handouts. Well, not to the poor.
TF: What about a single-payer health care system?
Shrub: Granted, the Canadian system provides equal care for all, but to do that here would cost $500 billion. Nobody has that kind of money these days, aside from the insurance industry.
TF: You do have to admit that things aren’t perfect. There are hidden costs to our system.
Shrub: Our system does casualize, collaterally, through malnutrition, homelessness, etc., some 40 to 80 million people, including large numbers who are neither terrorists nor drug lords. But we’ve come a long way. We have a pluralist system—some would say two-faced. I myself am of two minds about this. Perhaps that’s why I speak with a forked tongue.
TF: Anything new on Cuba?
Shrub: The people of Cuba are growing restless under the yoke of Fidel Castro’s increasingly isolated regime. That’s from a study issued by a group of scholars in the White House press office. We’ll keep you posted as the details are made up.
TF: One last question. I’m sure you have something to say about the Left and “political correctness.”
Shrub: I don’t know if you ever noticed, but PC is just CP spelled backwards. Little trick by the Marxist-Lentilists there. But now, in the continuing Politically Correct assault on traditional values, leftists are trying to rewrite school textbooks to say that Columbus didn’t discover America, but rather, invaded it. Fortunately, the National Council of Social Studies has countered that saying Columbus didn’t discover America is like saying there’s no Santa Claus.
George Shrub is also a consultant to the League for the Imposition of a Male Bulwark Against the Underclass, Gals and Homos (LIMBAUGH).
Q: Before we get into the cultural questions, can you tell us why you’re selling wheat to traditional Australian markets?
A: It’s a free taste of free trade. The first one’s always free.
Q: Can you explain your destabilization of the Gough Whitlam government in the Seventies?
A: Well, we found out Mr. Whitlam was about to sell our military bases to someone else. I assume he was, otherwise why would he want us out—just to have them for himself? No. So we were forced, with a heavy heart, to assist in a structural adjustment of Mr. Whitlam and rescue Australia from its better judgment.
Q: In your view, was there a culture in Australia in the first place, before the one you’re now Coca-Colonizing?
A: Yes, but of course the immigrants took care of that. They brought their own cultures with them, in case there was not sufficient culture there when they arrived. So they should be no strangers to cultural invasion, although we prefer to think of it as a cultural rescue, just as Columbus rescued the Western Hemisphere from the Red Empire.
But I think Australia has a lot to offer, with its many different ethnic groups all, shall we say, full of ideas about each other. I think of it as a beacon to the world, in this day of increased contact with so many cultures. It’s critical that we develop critiques of each other’s cultures so we can decide which one to keep. And which ones to abridge. A Readers Digest of culture, that’s the goal. For people who don’t have the time or patience to plough through the whole gamut of cultures.
Q: Is it a question of cultural bombardment, or are people lapping it up?
A: To re-spin the question: Does the cultural rescue take the form of a bombardment, through superior financial firepower, aircraft carriers loaded with the latest products made fashionable by the infantry squads of advertisers? Or are we just giving the people what they’ve been informed they want? We’re going to help you out with your archaic expressions by standardizing the International American language. No more of this gooday and goodag nonsense. We’ll teach you to say “Hi, how ya doin?” and “Gee, sure, wow, gosh” and other useful greetings.
And of course, you’ll all buy American, for instance, cars made in America, like Toyota. You already use the dollar, that’s good, though it’s got some funny pictures of foreigners and foreign animals on it, so we’ll have to straighten that out.
You see, traditionally, culture is handed down. It’s not genetic, but it’s in your jeans, so why settle for hand-me-down culture when you can buy new jeans, a new culture, being invented as we speak in the cultural meccas of Wall Street and Disneyland. Yes: Euro-Disney promises to open new vistas of culture to the backward peoples of Europe, mired in traditions that no longer strengthen the cultures there, and steel them for expansion and, well, stealing.
