“He’s a gentleman, maybe that’s his problem; he’s such a beautiful man.”
—Sen. Alfonse D’Amato, R-N.Y., describing Sen. Terry Sanford, D-N.C, New York Times, April 3, 1987
Hubert Humphrey would have crawled all the way to Camp David for a compliment like that—but it never came to him, because he was not a beautiful man . . . And neither is Terry Sanford, who was one of Hubert’s favorites.
Alfonse was lying, but he did it with a certain cruel grace that made Sanford seem like a churl. In truth, the 69-year-old freshman senator from North Carolina was the ugliest thing in Washington last week. He made a whimpering fool of himself on the floor of the Senate and shamed the term “liberal” so badly that even Patrick Buchanan felt sorry for him.
Buchanan, the new eminence horrible of the swaggering, bull-fruit far-right wing of the GOP, was quoted earlier in the week as saying: “This Democratic Congress lacks the stomach to go in for the kill.”
It was one of those lines that will come back to haunt a man in Washington—and in Patrick’s case the words were barely out of his mouth when they came back around on him like a boomerang.
On Thursday the new Democratically controlled Senate voted 67-33 to override Ronald Reagan’s veto of the federal highway bill, and to give the silly old fool a taste of the whip that he will not forget for a while. He is finished in politics now, and he has Buchanan and Terry Sanford to thank for it.
On Saturday he ran off to Canada like one of those Vietnam-War draft resisters from the ’60s and hid his head in the snow like an ostrich. The hog had died in the tunnel, and the “Reagan Revolution” was over.
Buchanan wept the real tears of a gut-shot warrior, but Sanford only giggled and flapped his hands like a eunuch. They were lily-white hands, soft and plump—the hands of a failed Southern liberal who had some-how voted three different ways on the same bill within the space of 24 hours.
Even Hubert Humphrey was shamed, all alone in his unquiet grave down in the depths of the River Styx. Not even The Happy Warrior had ever tried to vote three ways all at once. Any good liberal could handle two, he often said—but not three. It was a crime against nature, like sodomy.
There was a whole crop of new members in The Losers Club last week: Along with Dutch and Patrick and Dumb Uncle Terry, there was also Mary Beth Whitehead, the U.S. Marine Corps, Dwight Gooden, Jimmy Carter, Pope John Paul II, Howard Baker, Derrick Coleman, Terry Waite, Michael Deaver, William Rehnquist, and the Rev. Gary Heidnik from Philadelphia, who was busted on something like 55 counts of rape, murder, kidnapping and forced cannibalism.
It was a bad week for ministers. Heidnik’s basement in midtown Philly was found to contain two mentally retarded black women chained naked to sewer pipes, and another one trapped in a slimy concrete pit . . . They had been living for months on “cheap dog food and minced human flesh,” according to Newsweek. The reverend was hauled off to the downtown Philadelphia jail, where he was brutalized by angry inmates, who said there were some crimes they could not tolerate.
The erstwhile George Shultz and his shattered Department of State seemed to feel the same way. The new U.S. Embassy in Moscow was revealed as a snakes’ nest of sex, violence and disastrous treachery— mainly on the part of trusted USMC security guards, who ran utterly wild at all times on booze and marijuana with women of any persuasion they could get their hands on, including female KGB agents who gained access to everything in the building, from the ambassador’s safe to the CIA code room and the station chiefs top-secret list of every Russian in Moscow on the payroll of U.S. intelligence. All were doomed instantly.
“Our people kept disappearing and our codes were constantly being broken,” said one diplomat, “but nobody could figure out why.” Every time one of the red-alert, fail-safe burglar alarms in the embassy was set off by KGB agents getting into TOP SECRET files, the sex-crazed Marine guards on duty explained it away as just another routine glitch in the brand-new, high-tech, maze of incredibly complex wiring systems.
“Don’t worry about it,” the Marines told the nervous staff investigators. “We have everything under control. All we need is to work out a few bugs, just a few little kinks in the system.”
It was the state-of-the-art electronics, which the hapless Republican ambassador couldn’t quite understand. He was just another one of Reagan’s rich pencil-necks who didn’t want trouble.
Not even the White House could handle it. The whole squadron was recalled at once and locked up in brigs from Camp Pendleton to Quantico, the main Marine base outside Washington. Two were charged with “espionage,” a death-penalty offense, and the others were busted down to latrine scrubbers and sent off to the same federal prisons that will soon welcome ex-Marine Corps heroes Oliver North and former National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane (USMC-Ret).
The whole Marine Corps should be disbanded, finished off with other useless relics like the Sea-Bees, Hitler Youth and the Lafayette Es-quadrille. The USMC has been useless as tits on a boar hog since 1951, when they led the famous “Inchon Landing” for Gen. Douglas MacArthur and saved America from total disgrace in Korea.
That was 36 years ago, and since then they have done little more than hang around foreign embassies like drunken peacocks and get the nation in trouble. The U.S. Army’s 1st Airborne Division could eat the whole Marine Corps for breakfast and take the rest of the day off for beer and volleyball. The only solution to the “Marine problem” now is to croak the whole corps.
Abolishing the Marines would have no real effect on national military preparedness, and it would cut $10 billion or $12 billion off the bloated national defense budget—which now must include the almost $4 billion it will cost to raze the entire new U.S. Embassy compound in Moscow and build another one—a huge concrete igloo with no windows, or maybe a deep underground bunker like the ones Albert Speer used to build. All we really need over there is a roomy place with no bugs or spies or sex-crazed whiskey-wild whores from the KGB, or even the ghost of a U.S. Marine. Res ipsa loquitur.
April 6, 1987