Extreme Justice
If you're looking for a good summer read, might I suggest something just published by the Justice Department's Inspector General that has a very boring title but should be called "We Have Met the Enemy and It Is Us"?
It's a 140-page thigh-slappin' laugh riot. It reads like the best of George Orwell: funny and scary at the same time. It describes how the Bush administration gave a 30-something true believer named Monica Goodling the power to hire federal prosecutors and immigration judges only if they espoused hard-line conservative and Christian views.
It appears that Sister Goodling, who bears a striking resemblance to Stacy, Wayne Campbell's psycho former girlfriend in "Wayne's World," was part of a far-right cabal that turned the Justice Department into the Just Us Department, the Us being Bible-thumpin', abortion-opposin', gay-marriage-hatin' Super Christians.
We're in the middle of a war against religious extremism, and it turns out the Justice Department was being run by . . . religious extremists!
This may explain why, despite the urging of that great federal jurist Reginald Lindsay, the Justice Department refuses to do right by the Massachusetts families whose loved ones were murdered by the fugitive FBI subcontractor known as James "Whitey" Bulger.
Now, some of you nonbelievers might say the Justice Department has been heartlessly slow in settling these cases, despite overwhelming evidence that the FBI enabled their rat, Bulger, to murder dozens of people who were impediments to his criminal enterprise. The cynics among you may point out that these government lawyers keep taking the shuttle up to Boston and staying at four-star hotels at taxpayer expense while needlessly dragging these cases out.
But it may be that the government lawyers are doing God's work in refusing to settle with the family of Michael Donahue, a Dorchester truck driver who was riddled with machine-gun fire on the South Boston Waterfront 27 years ago by Whitey's henchmen because he had the misfortune of giving a stool pigeon a ride home. It could be the government is doing due diligence, trying to ascertain whether the three Donahue boys, left fatherless by Whitey and the FBI, subscribe to that heathen-believin' theory of evolution.
No government handouts for evolutionists!
What is it about this country and religion? I keep getting unsolicited e-mails from nuts who think Barack Obama is a closet Muslim. According to these whack jobs, if Obama is elected, the United States will suddenly be converted into some radical, fundamentalist Islamic state. Now, I would object to this in the strongest terms, because I look absolutely terrible in long flowing robes. They make me look fat.
If you believe these strange little people who are sending these strange little e-mails, should Obama get elected, we can look forward to public beheadings in Post Office Square. Teenage girls sunbathing at Revere Beach will have to wear burkas, and women won't be allowed to drive cars.
More worrisome is that under the neoconservative theory of preemptive war that has worked so well in Iraq, if Obama gets elected, President Bush would be duty-bound to launch another preemptive war, against his own country!
Surely God would be on our side as we set out to annihilate ourselves. It would be a righteous war, one to prevent the good ol', God-fearin' US of A from falling into the sinister, non-Christian clutches of them thar bomb-tossers who people the Obama campaign.
We must kill ourselves to free ourselves from the Islamic threat!
Where's Jim Jones when you need him?
Actually, if Jim Jones were still alive he'd probably be the US attorney general.
Now, you'll have to excuse me. I have to go to The
Kevin Cullen is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at cullen@globe.com.
