Irony Overflowing

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http://www.alternet.org/columnists/story/22102/

 

Irony Overflowing

 

By Molly Ivins, AlterNet. Posted May 26, 2005.

 

I often complain about the excess of irony in our national life, but

this week, if you're not begoshed by the irony surplus, you haven't

been paying attention.

 

If we could just figure out a way to get energy out of the stuff, we'd

be set for life.

 

Liberals for the filibuster; conservatives against it -- hilarious.

Pentagon loses track of more than $1 trillion, and the Army can't find

56 airplanes, 32 tanks and 36 Javelin missile command launch-units.

Not to mention Osama bin Laden. And more:

 

Right-wing Republicans fight to make the world safe from " judicial

activists " by appointing Priscilla Owen -- the biggest, baddest,

worstest judicial activist Texas ever produced -- to the federal bench.

 

Owen is so notorious for reading her own opinions into the law,

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, then her colleague on the Texas

Supreme Court, described her opinion in a parental consent case as " an

unconscionable act of judicial activism. " (For further irony, see

Gonzales' subsequent attempts to deny that he was describing Owen.)

 

Each Owen aficionado here in Texas has his or her own favorite Owen

ruling, but I always liked the one about the boy rendered quadriplegic

by a defective safety belt, who died waiting for the dilatory Owen to

figure out if a lower court decision that the manufacturer owed him

enough money for his care was constitutional in Texas. Hey, sometimes

it takes more than a year. But she's very pro-life.

 

In Texas, we elect our Supreme Court, which handles only civil

matters. The pattern in Owen's decisions is to favor those

corporations and law firms that contributed to her campaigns for

office. One little gem involved Enron: Owen wrote the decision that

allowed the company to escape paying $200,000 in school taxes.

 

In her 1994 campaign, Owen got $8,600 from Enron and $31,550 from

Vinson and Elkins, the Houston law firm that represented Enron. Enron

and V-E showed up in her court two years later, trying to get out of

paying school property taxes. Not only did Owen not recuse herself --

get this -- she wrote the opinion that allowed Enron to choose its own

method for property tax assessment, and lo, it cut its own assessed

property value by millions of dollars.

 

Another fave: claiming, on behalf of a contributor, that property

owners have a right to pollute the water supply. Moral: Judicial

activism, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.

 

The George Galloway hearing (OK, so it was last week). In addition to

being the funniest biter-bit performance in years (if you missed it,

the transcript and the video are floating around on the Internet), it

was yet another victory for the Brits over the Americans when it comes

to spoken English. Holy cow, what a display of pyrotechnic mastery of

language. The American senators were left with so much egg on their

faces they looked like a bad day at a Tyson chicken plant.

 

As one of those slow-spoken Americans often out-tap-danced on panels

by the nimble-tongued Brits, I defensively assert they don't really

think faster and better than we do -- they just talk faster and better.

 

Galloway, a member of the British Parliament, simply danced rings

around the clumsy Sen. Norm Coleman of Minnesota, and the others. The

hearing bore an uncanny resemblance to the scene in Leonardo

DiCaprio's popular bio-pic about Howard Hughes, The Aviator, in which

the deteriorating Hughes triumphs over a low-rent, witch-hunt committee.

 

In case you missed the flap, Galloway is a way-left Brit M.P. who

actually did defend Saddam Hussein before the war, which may or may

not have been based on his position that the pre-war boycott of Iraq

did nothing to topple Hussein, but was a humanitarian nightmare for

Iraqis.

 

In fact, the boycott, as has long been documented, did kill tens of

thousands of Iraqis, in particular babies and small children. An

insane policy. The United Nations' effort to mitigate it was the Oil

for Food Program, and Galloway was accused of being a beneficiary of

the corruption of that program, via a charitable foundation he had set up.

 

He has won two libel suits over the accusation, against the Christian

Science Monitor and the London Telegraph. The Monitor, by mishap, used

crudely forged documents, later discredited, to go after him. Now,

British libel law is, frankly, hideous. How its press continues to

function in such a lively fashion under that load of legal crap is a

mystery to me: The burden of proof there is on the defendant.

 

Beyond the specifics of those cases, Galloway is generally in bad

smell in Britain. This may or may not be attributable to his political

enemies, but it is certainly attributable to more journalists than the

neo-neo-con Christopher Hitchens, who described Galloway in London's

The Independent as " a thug and a demagogue, the type of

working-class-wideboy-and-proud-of-it who is too used to the expense

accounts, the cars and the hotels -- all the cigars and backslapping. "

(Only a Brit could have written that sentence.)

 

So here is the irony of ironies. Into our midst comes this one Brit,

who deservedly or not carries with him the whiff of bad reputation, to

confront our Puritan-pure, sea-green, incorruptible politicians (Heh?

Our guys never carry water for their campaign contributors, do they?),

and in 20 minutes, he told more truth about our policy and our war in

Iraq than any of our politicians have in years.

 

Reduced to this: George Galloway as truth-teller.

 

Molly Ivins writes about politics, Texas and other bizarre happenings.