Last-Minute Gift Ideas
by Bill Shein

With only a few days left for holiday shopping, it's time for our annual guide to last-minute topical gifts. This year, the recommendations all share a single theme: The slow, incremental arrival of the new American police state!

Baby's First Illegal Wiretap Kit — Set your infant on the road to the presidency with this warrantless eavesdropping kit from Fisher-Price. Now any future lawbreaker-in-chief can secretly listen to baby monitors in nearby homes and report any "suspicious" conversations, like, "Goo, goo, ga, ga, Iraq, war, historic, mistake." Includes a push-button labeled "Checks and Balances," but like those found on other Fisher-Price toys, pressing it does absolutely nothing. Comes with a free box of "Amerika"-brand disposable diapers, each pair printed on the inside with phrases like "Civil Liberties" and "The Rule of Law."

Legal Advisor Hand Puppets — Now administration flunkies like Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and Harriet "You're the best usurper of (un)constitutional authority EVER!" Miers are always "on hand" to help you construct amusing "legal" rationales for just about anything. Great for getting speeding tickets dismissed or those times when you need to justify torture.

"A Cheney Family Christmas, Volume II" — The follow-up to last year's hit CD ("Expletive Deleted! A Cheney Family Christmas"), the singing von Cheneys are at it again. This year's original tunes include "Cruel! Inhuman! Degrading!", an infectious pop song that makes prisoner abuse, like, totally danceable; the country-western twang of "Don't Let Katrina Derail Your Wyoming Hunting Trip"; a highly partisan "O Come All Ye Faithful (Republicans)," and, with wife Lynne, "Ivory and Ivory," a Cheney-style re-imagining of 1982's "Ebony and Ivory," the Stevie Wonder-Paul McCartney song about racial harmony.

"The New York Times for Dummies" — Know someone who wants to understand why the world's best newspaper seems to have lost its way? Have a friend who wonders why The Times held the story about illegal wiretaps for a full year, or why it permitted Judy Miller's "reporting" on Iraq's nonexistent WMDs to bolster the administration's pre-war propaganda machine? This would be just the book for them, but unfortunately, "The New York Times for Dummies" won't be available for at least a year, because like the illegal wiretap story, this information must be buried until after the next election.

Creeping Tyranny: The Board Game — Now you can take the reins of the executive branch and undermine American democracy, but without threat of impeachment! You'll start by allowing big-money contributors, religious extremists, and corporate lobbyists to hijack elections and lawmaking. Then, to score the big points, you'll chip away at long-standing American values with secret CIA prisons and illegal domestic spying; deliver partisan political speeches at military bases; use the Pentagon and FBI to secretly collect information about activist groups (including those dangerous vegetarians), and, to create an atmosphere that makes all this possible, launch military invasions of foreign countries, regardless of their meat-eating habits. "Creeping Tyranny: The Board Game" is terrifying fun for the whole family — and an ironic way to pass the time in the re-education camps!

"Quotations from Chairman George" — While requesting a copy of Mao's famous "Little Red Book" through an inter-library loan program will these days earn you a visit from the Department of Homeland Security (see, "Agents' Visit Chills UMass-Dartmouth Senior," New Bedford Standard-Times, Dec. 17), this new volume of "patriotic" Bush quotations will soon be required reading for all citizens. It includes rhetorical gems like the dissent-stifling, "You're either with us, or you're with the terrorists"; the dead-foreign-civilians-don't-matter credo: "We're fighting the enemy abroad so we don't have to fight them here at home," and, featured on the book's cover, the president's now-epic Freudian slip from May 21, 1999, "There ought to be limits to freedom." And, increasingly, there are!

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Bill Shein will soon be writing from an undisclosed location.

(This column originally appeared in the Berkshire Eagle newspaper on December 21, 2005. Join a discussion about this column in Bill's blog. And read Bill's previous column, "2006: The Year in Review").