What would the corporate media say if a powerful Democrat wrote a novel about children having sex with animals? Thanks to that party’s incompetence there aren’t any powerful Dems these days, but we can imagine the outcry. Fox News would have a week long expose on Democratic depravity. Potentate pundits would lament the Democrats inability to connect with Christians in the heartland.

Lewis Libby was until recently a very powerful Republican. He was Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff until he was indicted for obstructing justice and lying to a grand jury. He also fantasizes about little girls and bears.

In his novel, The Apprentice, Libby imagined a caged bear having sex with children.

Libby is obviously a freak. Only a freak would be able to imagine girls and bears and then put pen to paper and write about it. Libby is clearly a sick, depraved man who shouldn’t be trusted around children, or bears either for that matter. It isn’t surprising that people who fantasizes about a combination of bestiality and pedophilia are also intent on waging an endless war on the rest of the planet and another war on the dispossessed here at home.

Lewis Libby has exposed some very disturbing themes that are always present in right wing thinking. This is a group that is obsessed with sex, and that has very strange issues with women. Dr. W. David Hager was the Bush appointee in the Food and Drug Administration responsible for reproductive health issues. He held that position until his ex-wife revealed that he forced her to have anal intercourse over a period of many years.

Is the U.S. at war because of sexual depravity and sexual repression? What does the mind of Lewis Libby tell us about the actions of the Bushmen? Will bear sex be the new method of torture at Guantanamo?

The Bush administration is perverse in so many ways it is difficult to count them all. It is allowed to be perverse because the corporate media allow them to lie. Libby’s novel has been described as “racy" or “steamy." Those words are woefully inadequate in describing pedophilia and bestiality. The same people who couldn’t tell us enough about Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton are oddly silent when the right wing put their sickness in print for all to see.

The freak show doesn’t end with Libby. There is a cabal of closeted gays in the White House who get gigs for gay prostitutes but who also craft anti-gay political strategies. The Bushies claim to be good Christians but also proclaim their intention to keep killing in an endless war and argue in court to maintain the right to kidnap and torture.

The sick freakishness of Libby and whoever put a gay prostitute in the press room makes one long for a more basic, semi-logical insanity. Donald Rumsfeld recently exhibited the most typical Bush team craziness on ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos.

STEPHANOPOULOS: If you had known that no weapons of mass destruction would be found, would you have advocated invasion?

RUMSFELD: I didn't advocate invasion.

STEPHANOPOULOS: You didn't?

RUMSFELD: No, I wasn't asked.

Just to make sure he left no fanciful stone unturned, Rummy added, “I agreed completely with the decision to go to war and have said that a hundred times." 

Rummy is running for cover because only the right wing base are still true believers in the neocon plot to occupy Iraq. It is crazy for the Secretary of Defense to say that he was against an invasion that he publicly called for many times, but at least he hasn’t come up with any bizarre sexual fantasies. In the face of grotesque sickness we must now praise Rummy’s butt-covering delusions.

The Bushies have proven their disdain for people of color, whether they are in New Orleans or Iraq. We also know that they hate women and aren’t terribly fond of children either. If people of color, women, and children are all considered inferior beings, then only white men are worthy of consideration. Everyone else gets screwed, hopefully not by bears.

Libby’s fantasy world may be among the most extreme, but then again perhaps it isn’t. The actions of his clique indicate that they all pine away for the days when they could dominate whomever they wanted in whatever way they wanted. His novel is just another way to express the awful fantasies they have managed to make real.

Margaret Kimberley's Freedom Rider column appears weekly in BC. Ms. Kimberley is a freelance writer living in New York City. She can be reached via e-Mail at [email protected].