Stillwater: Controversial School Lap-Top Loan Program

Angry missives from outraged citizens denouncing the School Board for implementing its wacko laptop loan program have dominated the Gazette’s Opinion Page lately. The sheer volume of letters received and printed has even (on some occasions) crowded my column right out of this newspaper. I resent this, as it entails an interruption in the flow of the wheelbarrows full of cash and precious stones that I receive each week as remuneration for each piece I publish in these pages.

Since most of the objections about the laptop loan program have been submitted in the form of ‘tough questions that the School Board ought to answer’, I have followed suit and come up with some questions of my own. I respectfully submit them to the School Board for their consideration:

1) What are you S.O.B.s on the School Board going to do if a laptop explodes and bursts into flames, and some kid loses his face and needs millions of dollars worth of reconstructive plastic surgery? Who’s going to pay for that, School Board?

2) What if these punk skateboarding kids you see around town mount wheels on their laptops, and start riding them around and doing all kinds of dangerous stunts on them? Double-reverses, loop-de-loops, stuff like that. When they land with a crash on the pavement, they will probably damage the delicate circuit boards in the laptop--and a kid could break his neck or something on one of those things, how about that, School Board?

3) I recently saw a film in which a scientist was exposed to radiation and ended up turning into a huge, dangerous green monster every time he got angry. What if these laptops we’re getting have been accidentally exposed to radiation? It isn’t hard to imagine the havoc that a mutant laptop might wreak on school grounds if it suddenly swelled to ten times its normal size and turned green, flinging kids around like they were so many toy dolls. What will the School Board do then?

4) What if there is some person living here in town that, unbeknownst to the rest of us, is driven into a homicidal rage by the mere thought of a laptop? It’s not hard to imagine some lonely, anti-social type, taunted when he was a kid at summer camp because he had no laptop, growing to loathe the sight of a laptop as a reminder of his humiliation, sharpening an old lawnmower blade in his garage, brooding, day after day, month after month—and then he reads in the Gazette that the School Board is going to go around giving out laptops! To all kids! But not to him, oh no, he’s too old now, he won’t get one. Everybody else can have one, but not him—all he’s got is his rusty old lawnmower blade—but he’s sharpening it, honing it to a finer edge, each day, every day it gets sharper, sharper… And he hears the voices, the voices in his head, mocking him… The laptop loan program could send this guy over the edge, turn him into a deranged serial killer in a hockey mask, with our kids at the top of his target list. Has the School Board even considered this possibility?

5) What if aliens from another world land in Stillwater, and they just happen look exactly like laptops? I mean they are another life form, non-human, from an alien civilization far more advanced than our own--but to all outward appearances they look like laptops.

They land their spacecraft in Stillwater, and immediately seek out some of our leaders to establish some intergalactic treaty of peace and friendship, so they go into a school, that’s a good place to ask for directions, and what do they see? A bunch of kids, apparently ‘fondling’ their people! The aliens will be outraged, and who can blame them? What will the School Board do when they turn their death rays on us, in a misbegotten attempt to ‘free their people’? Well, School Board? How about that one?

Well, you can just forget about me voting another red cent for the school levy, if that’s your little game, School Board.

These are just some of the questions the School Board needs to answer before they charge ahead with this fuzzy-headed, irresponsible scheme. How about it, School Board? Eh? Eh?

William Prendergast is the author of the crime thriller ‘Forbidden Hollywood’, and he isn’t one to panic, but frankly, this laptop computer loan program thing scares him witless.

Rush Limbaugh’s Been Hooked on Drugs Since 1998?

Rush Limbaugh is on drugs!

Rush has been hooked on illegal drugs for at least four years, at least since 1998!
All this time we were listening to him, the man’s been out of his mind on drugs! America’s foremost conservative! Wasted! Baked to a crisp!

Limbaugh’s former housekeeper has told Florida prosecutors that for years she has been supplying him with hundreds of thousands of illegal painkillers—hydrocodone, Lorcet, and Oxycontin. She says that during one four-month period alone, Rush bought 11,900 pills from her!

America’s conservatives will now have to face up to the fact they have spent years following the advice of a man who is out of his mind on drugs!

All the time he was covering the Clinton-Lewinsky affair, and accusing the Clintons of complicity in murders, and howling for Clinton’s impeachment—He was getting’ high! He was ‘wack’ on ‘painkiller crack’! And we were all saying that Rush speaks for us!

Wack! On the ‘painkiller crack’!

Rush had to go to de-tox to save his life! Twice! Who knew? Why didn’t he tell us? Why didn’t he ask for help? He was meeting his dealers at the parking lot at Denny’s or at the Amoco gas station, in the middle of the night--so he could give them a cigar box full of ‘cabbage’ (that’s Rush’s drug slang for money) in exchange for a cigar box full of—‘hillbilly heroin’!

And other drugs! “Enough to kill an elephant!” says his dealer. He was doing so many drugs, the dealer was worried about him! That’s a lot of drugs. And the dealer also says that in spite of all the cash payments--to this day, Rush still owes her $80,000—for drugs! Illegal, addictive drugs!

For years, Rush fans thought they were tuning in to hear their hero articulate the conservative philosophy in his own inimitable, outrageous way—but all that time what they’ve actually been listening to are the paranoid fantasies of a confirmed drughead!

The man was a berserker! A hopped-up pill-popper! And we’ve been taking his advice on politics? We’ve been taking his ‘marching orders’ on how to vote? He’s been hailed by the right as the foremost conservative in America? He’s been made an honorary member of the Republican Congress? What does that say about us? What does that say about conservatism as a political philosophy?

What does that tell you about your political thinking, if your chief advisor, ideologue and spokesman is taking an average of ninety three pills filled with illegal narcotics--every day? (The dealer’s ledger shows that in the first 47 days she delivered drugs to Limbaugh, she delivered 4,350 (sic) pills.)

Drugs affect your brain, you know. Popping ninety three pills a day; that’s got to mess you up, man. It’s gonna change your behaviors; you’ll go around blabbing nonsense to anyone who’ll listen, going on and on about fantasy, delusions of grandeur, the whole bit. It’s sad. And because he’s a hero to so many Republicans, you know that those drug-induced behaviors are going to be unconsciously imitated by Rush’s fans—especially those in Congress—and the White House. A lot of behaviors by conservatives in office that made no sense to us before suddenly make sense now!

I am not suggesting that the conservatives in the White House and Congress are on drugs, too. (Although—after Rush, who can say? Maybe we should require some kind of urine test at the Republican Convention, next year.)

What I am suggesting is that many of the behaviors we’ve observed recently among conservatives are like those of people who have a drug problem, and that these behaviors have probably been adopted by conservatives in unconscious imitation of their totally baked hero, Rush Limbaugh. The Republican Congress’ out-of-control spending habits, the President’s outbreaks of paranoia and irrational violence, the lies, the constant need for ‘more money, more money’—all classic drug addict behaviors, carried out by the conservatives in unwitting imitation of their drug-addled hero.

Maybe now that Rush got ‘narked’ on, the other Republicans will clean up their act.

My sympathy goes out to Rush and his wife. Let’s hope that the Biased Liberal Media’s coverage of this tragic story is fair; that they don’t go wall-to-wall with lurid hourly updates on this and drag it out for months, like they did with the O.J. trial.

Or like Rush did with the Lewinsky story.

Why do you think they call it ‘dope’, Rush? Why do you think they call him ‘Rush’?

William Prendergast is the author of the crime thriller “Forbidden Hollywood” and he doesn’t want you doin’ that stuff, man, because he loves you, man. Increase the peace.

Novak Should Go To Jail For The Plame CIA Leak

Who will take the rap for leaking American agent’s identity

Another bad week for us conservatives. All this big ruckus about somebody in our White House intentionally revealing the identity of an American CIA agent. The White House insider who did it was probably trying to discourage other agents from expressing public doubts about Saddam having weapons of mass destruction.

Now it turns out that blowing an American intelligence agent’s cover is some kind of ‘big crime’. Somebody’s got to take the fall, and it can’t be the President. Who should we prosecute? Who is going to take the rap? Here are the scenarios.

1) Karl Rove, the President’s top political advisor, takes the fall. Although Rove denies having anything to do with it, he is the most likely suspect because he’s made a career out of ruining other people’s careers and reputations. In fact, that’s one of the reasons he was hired; he’s very good at dirty tricks; in fact, I heard his resume lists “Ruining other people’s reputations” under “Skills”.

The problem with this scenario is that the President needs Karl Rove to get re-elected. And Rove is one of those guys who knows where the bodies are buried, if you know what I mean. He knows all the dirt about Bush; all the skeletons in the closet. In fact, in many cases, Rove is actually the guy who buried the bodies, shoveled the dirt, and put the skeletons in the closet. If he’s indicted he might talk; and when Karl Rove starts telling the public all he knows about the President, it’s goodbye, White House and hello, Geraldo.

So we can’t let Rove take the fall for this one. He knows too much.

2) Some administration flunky takes the fall. There’s always some poor Young Republican slob who’s running around the White House in a suit and tie, wandering the hallways with a piece of paper in his hand, trying to look important when he’s really clueless as to what’s going on.

The reason they keep guys like this in the White House is so that they can go to jail instead of the administration bigwigs. Remember all those Watergate presidential aides who actually ended up doing time? There are plenty of guys like that around the White House right now. They’re easy to frame, and they look guilty as hell when they’re accused of something, because they’ve all done something they’re ashamed of to get into the White House, anyway.

Perfect for taking the rap. The only trouble is, will the public buy it? Will they believe that some low-rent White House flunky took it upon himself to start calling all these newspapers around D.C., breaching security and blowing the cover of one of our agents? The public probably won’t believe it. The public realizes that flunkies like that don’t know anything and aren’t told anything; those guys don’t even go to the bathroom without an order from Mr. Rove or a senior administration official.

So that won’t work.

3) Robert Novak takes the fall. After all, he is the one who actually revealed the woman’s identity to the public, after a bunch of other columnists apparently refused to do so. We accuse him of breaking the law by blowing the cover of the agent. When he tries to defend himself by saying he got the story from two senior administration officials, we say he’s lying, and he just made that up about his two senior administration official sources.

My personal pick for a ‘fall guy’ is Novak. He is expendable, because he is old and easily replaced. Practically anybody could do his job as a political ‘expert’; we could find a younger, more attractive Anne Coulter to take his spot. But when he is convicted, Novak should go to a minimum security prison. He has always been loyal to the Bush Administration, so we shouldn’t let the judge sentence him to a real prison where he would probably be slapped around, and bullied into being some bigger prisoner’s ‘girlfriend’.

The only trouble is, Novak might not go for it. But we could probably—oh, my God, what’s this? This news headline, someone just put on my desk! Oh, no! No!

Rush Limbaugh is ON DRUGS! Rush has been doing illegal ‘hillbilly heroin’ in secret for years! It can’t be—It-- No! NO! NOOOOOO!

William Prendergast is the author of the crime thriller “Forbidden Hollywood” and advises the Bush White House on how to handle all the scandals and stuff.