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The Chickenshit Brigade: Lake County
Conservatives
By Philip Murphy
4-4-05
Sometimes it takes a tragedy like the death of Marla Ruzika to get people to show their true colors, and this seems to be the case with the four local mouthpieces for the so-called conservative movement in Lake County. The gang of four (Darrell Watkins, Randy Ridgel, Adrian Vance and Jim Wilson), have all been totally silent on the advent of the first Lake County resident to die in the Iraq war. Sure, they'd all go ape-shit if the casualty had been a US serviceman or woman, but since the American in question was someone who didn't go to Iraq to find WMDs or a high-paying job repairing the destruction the US has wrought there, not a peep has been heard from our four self-styled paragons of patriotism.
Never mind the fact that Ruzika's presence there probably did more to make Americans safe than the work of any other person dispatched by uncle Sam has managed to do, Marla gets the GOP/rightwing/Christian zealot cold-shoulder due to her consistent opposition to the war. So Marla, with no flak jacket, Kevlar helmet or bodyguards, goes to do good deeds in places the GIs fear to tread and she still isn't a patriot in their eyes. There you have it, raw-naked proof that these cowardly shills have no sense whatsoever of what honesty or patriotism is, not that any sane person would have doubted that in any case.
Take Randy Ridgel, who did a long hitch in the Navy during 'Nam, the only known veteran in the bunch. Randy did his wartime tour aboard a guided missile cruiser, always out of sight and reach of the enemy with three hot meals a day and a warm, dry place to sleep every night. So with never having seen the actual carnage of war, Randy has as much idea of what it entails as the rest of the civilian population does, who's perception of armed conflicts is mostly shaped by watching decades of Hollywood's sappy versions of events. For many years Randy has been at the top of the local GOP apparatus, and shortly after 9-11 publicly stated his belief that anyone suspected of being Arab or Arab-like in appearance should be demoted to a status beneath that enjoyed by the rest of us civil rights-wise, an unsurprising position to take given his upbringing in Jim Crow's Louisiana. You couldn't get away from Randy when his boring series of dogpatch-dispatches from the 2004 Republican convention were run in the Record-Bee, but now that one of his fellow Americans has fallen because of his fearless leader's half-baked plan to leverage the world oil markets, Ridgel goes AWOL. The sad part with Ridgel is that he isn't like the people who really run the GOP, the rich. Randy is just like tens of millions of other fellow middleclass Republican dupes who are told the GOP is saving them from the democrats, but who are in reality getting a grand old screwing from them far worse than the bumbling alleged opposition party manages to pull off. Randy further disgraced himself by publicly referring to Social Security as "Soviet Security", then grudgingly admitted that he wasn't about to give up the monthly checks that he and his wife were totally dependant on, more proof of his hypocrisy and lack of honesty .
Darrell Watkins has also been mum on Marla, and has returned to his constant theme of how he and Jesus Christ want the world to function when Darrell puts his thoughts down on paper to share with the rest of us. Never mind that Jesus would have likely done Marla's job had he been alive today, Darrell doesn't have a problem with killing innocents (especially those heathen A-rabs) in droves as long as the GOP is calling the shots. Besides, Darrell has plenty of work to do as God's right hand, in addition to being a slumlord and real estate parasite. If Darrel had any military experience of consequence we surely would have heard the old blowhard brag about it by now, so we can safely assume that Darrell is another long-distance armchair warrior for God and country (which are one in the same to Darrell).
Jim Wilson is only known to most people by his crackpot letters to the Record-Bee, which tell us several key things about this reclusive dingbat. First, Jim doesn't know jack about jack, which puts him at a big disadvantage in his editorial page debates. Second, Jim doesn't have a full string of fish, probably as a result of the onset of senility, which also handicaps him in his literary duels. Third, Jim shows his hypocrisy shared by his fascist brethren by not publicly expressing his sympathy for Lake County's most patriotic citizen.
Adrian Vance can't claim senility as his excuse for being a lame-brain, or for his glaring cowardice. The uncontested local king of crackpot schemes and self-interest, Vance's torrid love affair with himself apparently wouldn't permit him to spare enough time to grieve over our local dearly departed hero, Ms. Ruzika. Vance was recently kicked off the air by KPFZ because of his on-the-air sexual harassment of a fellow programmer, complete lack of sensitivity toward or compassion for anyone who disagreed with him (which is almost everybody), and his frequent racist remarks and writings. The "content"of Vance's on-the-air ramblings consisted basically of Mr. Know-nothing regurgitating whatever Limbaugh, Hannity or some other rightwing whore had been spouting off about, so Vance didn't cover much in the way of local issues or come up with much new material. The best part of Vance's radio show was when liberal callers would oftentimes win their debates with him, prompting him to holler "You just hate America" and then hang up on them, a sure sign heŒd lost the contest. Vance wouldn't think twice about sending your kid of to die in order to stabilize the world's oil markets, or any other American economic interest for that matter. But according to Vance, when his time came to defend America against the Vietnamese the Pentagon told him they needed his genius back at the lab and turned down his offer to slog through a rice paddy full of leaches and landmines! Other claims publicly made by Vance that didn't pan-out are that the American economy would totally collapse if oil hit $50-a-barrel, and that Iraq was chock-full of WMDs. Add in some 100% crackpot theories on social security and global warming and you have a good idea of how Vance became such a loose cannon and embarrassment that even some fellow Republicans would distance themselves from this reckless narcissist.
So next time we find ourselves in time of military need, we know that we can count on these four sorry excuses for men to offer up the flower of our youth (as long as it's not their kids), to defend American capitalist's right to enslave the rest of the world in order to fatten their investment portfolios, just like any true patriot would.
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