The Long and Distinguished Career of Sarah Palin

When John McCain named Sarah Palin as his running mate, the response of the majority of Americans was, “who the hell is Sarah Palin?” This is because, unlike me, most Americans are ignorant swine who don’t keep running tabs on the ever-important world of Alaskan state politics. I was a beat writer for 7 years at an ill-fated Alaskan weekly, The Anchorage Post-Gazette-News-Chronicle and it’s sister paper, Nothing But Snowshoes, which was a tasteful gentleman’s publication showcasing the finest ladies of the great white north. Let me tell you that the public’s lack of knowledge about Governor Palin and the media’s depiction of her as lacking in experience are travesties of immense scope. To rectify these gross misconceptions, I am here to list off the myriad reasons that Sarah Palin is the most highly qualified vice presidential nominee in the modern era.

- A Proven Leader: Sarah Palin was the point guard for the women’s basketball team at Wasilla High School in the Alaskan town of the same name. Her ferocious style of play led her to be nicknamed, “Sarah Barracuda,” which, in the rough and tumble world of the Matanuska-Susitna Borough School District, is saying a lot. As point guard, she led her team’s offensive set plays and was responsible for leading the team’s training program based loosely on the workout montage from Rocky IV.

- A Classy Broad: In 1984, Palin won the Miss Wasilla Beauty Contest and placed 2nd in the Miss Alaska pageant, winning the Miss Congeniality award in the process. Yeah, that’s right. Miss Congeniality. That means Miss “agreeable, suitable, or pleasing in nature or character.” What better way to promote the ideals of modern-day feminism and gender equality than by going along with everything your male superior says in a courteous manner? Also, finishing 2nd in Miss Alaska means a smoking hottie for a VP, which we haven’t had since Dan Quayle. Damn, was that boy dreamy.

- A Commanding Presence: After the Kennedy-Nixon debates were televised nationwide, the presidential race has been as much about poise and composure as policy. Well, Sarah Palin already has her stage chops thanks to her brief stint as a sports broadcaster for Anchorage’s NBC affiliate, KTUU. You think it’s difficult being in a vice presidential debate against Joe Biden in front of millions of Americans? Try reading the prompter for highlights from that afternoon’s Mets-Dodgers spring training game. Do you know how hard it is to just rattle off names like “Orel Hershiser” and “Lenny Dykstra” without tripping over yourself? Leading the Senate should be a cakewalk.

Who needs experience when you can have fabulous?

- Experience, Experience, and more Experience: Palin began her by winning a seat on the Wasilla City Council in 1992 and never looked back. By 1996 she was the Mayor of Wasilla. Does it matter that the city of Wasilla only has 7,000 people and that being elected mayor there is equivalent to being the mayor of less than one-eighth of the student body at The Ohio State University? No. No it doesn’t and if your say otherwise you’re a misogynist prick who hates small town America. Palin also served on the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, and was elected Governor of Alaska in 2006. She’s been governor of the 47th least populous state in the union for one and a half years, which means she’s more than ready to be vice president of America. So what if fellow Republican and Alaskan state senate leader Lyda Green said that, “She’s not prepared to be governor. How can she be prepared to be vice president or president? Look at what she’s done to this state. What would she do to the nation?” That bitch is just jealous.

Now, I hope it is obvious that Sarah Palin is as qualified a vice presidential nominee as you could ask for. And with a 72-year old man with an 800-page medical record vying for the presidency, having an experienced second-in-command to take the reins if he were to fall ill or pass away isn’t terribly important. Besides, Palin is a total MILF. I mean, you could totally bounce a quarter off that ass, which is the main quality I look for first in a vice president. That’s why I voted Nixon/Agnew in ’68.

Not so Simple Jack

Upon first seeing the trailer for the film Tropic Thunder, the prevailing thought that swam around in my head was something along the lines of, “What in the name of Al Jolson is Robert Downey Jr. doing in blackface!” This sentiment was quickly followed by thoughts of how the NAACP and other African-American rights groups would attempt to have Downey Jr. ceremonially drawn and quartered on Hollywood and Vine. But an odd thing happened on the road to politically correct outrage.

It looks as though the African-American community and various advocacy groups got a sense of humor. They seem to grasp that the idea of Robert Downey Jr. playing an Australian method actor in a movie, who in turn is playing a farcical black man who is part Uncle Remus and part Dolemite in the movie-within-the-movie, is in fact satire. It doesn’t hurt that Downey Jr. has the chops to pull something like this off or that there is a legitimately African-American character, played by Brandon T. Jackson, there to tell Downey Jr. how fucking moronic he’s being, but it seems as though audiences are able to grasp the idea that Downey Jr.’s blackface is simply a vehicle for mocking the absurdities of method acting. Examples that come immediately to mind are Christian Bale dropping from a healthy 185 lbs. to an anemic 122 lbs. for his role in The Machinist or Daniel Day-Lewis refusing to break character and leave his wheelchair when playing the severely paralyzed Christy Brown in My Left Foot.

However, another character in Tropic Thunder managed to provoke the ire of advocacy groups across the country. Ben Stiller’s character in the film, Tugg Speedman, is an action movie star whose popularity has begun to wane. Before embarking on the absurd movie-within-a-movie around which Tropic Thunder’s plot centers, Hellzapoppin’ Apocalypse Now, Stiller’s character tried to garner an Oscar nomination by playing a mentally disabled man named Simple Jack in a film of the same name (It’s tagline is “Once there was a retard”). In the film, Simple Jack was a failure for Stiller as Tugg Speedman and in real life Simple Jack has become a problem for Stiller as director/actor.

Offensive? Probably... Pickett-worthy? Not-so-much.

Dozens of groups that support the rights of the mentally disabled have been picketing Tropic Thunder for Stiller’s portrayal of Simple Jack and for the film’s liberal usage of the word “retard,” which is thrown around 17 times during the movie. Groups ranging from the Special Olympics to the American Association of People with Disabilities were out to protest this past Monday at the film’s L.A. premiere. The protesters held up signs reading things like, “We have abilities, not disabilities” and “We are people first,” while many of the organizations are calling on the public to boycott the movie.

Before I get to the movie, I have to take umbrage with one of the signs that the protestors were holding. A mentally disabled person saying, “We have abilities, not disabilities” is just ignorant. I truly believe that the mentally disabled community is a vibrant and productive pocket of our society. That being said, the word is part of what your condition is now officially called and is in the title of your largest activist group. You are mentally disabled, thus you have mental disabilities. It would be like a paraplegic man saying, “I have enough upper body strength to crush your head like a honeydew, not the inability to use my legs.” Just because the former is true, it doesn’t mean the latter must be true as well.

That said, I think that the mentally disabled community’s outrage is a little misplaced. Granted, I have yet to see Tropic Thunder because it won’t be released until August 15th and I’m not exactly in a position to nab tickets to any early premieres, but from all of the reviews of the film that I have read so far, it doesn’’t appear to be targeting the mentally disabled community at all. The crux of the argument behind Simple Jack is that the Academy will deliver an Oscar on a silver platter to any actor that “has the courage” to play a mentally disabled character. By my count, 13 actors playing characters who were either mentally or physically disabled have been nominated for the best actor Oscar in the past twenty years. Of those fifteen, eight came home with the Oscar, including 2 mentally disabled characters: Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man and Tom Hanks in Forrest Gump.

There is a legitimate complaint to be lodged against the academy for fawning over actors portrayals of the mentally disabled like tweeners lusting after Zac Efron (hey, I’m hip with the kiddies……I read Tiger Beat). They gave Sean Penn a best actor nomination for I Am Sam for Christsakes. Did you see that movie? It was a Hallmark Channel made-for-TV movie with A-list actors and a big budget. This type of behavior is patronizing towards the mentally disabled because it implies that they are such a sub-class of human being that simply doing a convincing job acting like one in a movie is worthy of an Academy Award.

The usage of the word “retard” in Tropic Thunder could have been insensitive—I don’t know. What I do know is that the mentally disabled community is not the target of these jokes in the same way Robert Downey Jr.’s “skin pigmentation” isn’t a jab at African-Americans. All I’m saying is that the next time some actor wins an academy award for playing someone with a severe learning disorder or down syndrome, the mentally disabled community should take a long look at itself and try to see whether picketing a satirical war-comedy is really that important.

Change That Ain’t Gonna Happen

Like Roger Daltrey, I would like to talk about my generation, but I’m going to do so in far less communitarian terms and without any melody. I am quite often ashamed of my generation, and with good reason. We are the generation of the seven-minute attention span. We are the generation of instant-gratification, broadband internet, and instant messaging. We are the ego-massagers, the trend-worshippers, and the parental basement dwellers. We are the byproduct of reality TV, MySpace and Napster. We know how to type 100 words per minute, but we misspell about half of them. We are a generation dreadfully ignorant of the past and terribly optimistic about the future. We are overeducated, under-utilized, and we have no identity.

The vitriolic diatribe against my peers that you just read is the byproduct of the candidacy of Barack Obama and my generation’s reaction to it. Now, let me just say before I go any further, that I in no way, shape, or form endorse anything about John McCain’s presidential campaign aside from the unintentional comedy quotient generated by it, which is approaching Dukakis-like levels of hilarity. I am not a Republican, nor am I a Democrat, Libertarian, Green Party Member, or Dixiecrat. However, just because I think McCain is a hobbling, bumbling, geriatric time bomb does not mean I cannot still be slightly nauseated by the Hale-Bop-like fervor generated in college-age kids by Obama.

I don’t hate Obama for what he is or for what he stands for. His policies regarding every aspect of domestic and foreign affairs are much more palatable than those of The Shrub (a moniker W. picked up and somehow shrugged off during the 2000 primaries) or McCain. He’s heading in the right direction on everything from healthcare to the war in Iraq to education, but he’s only heading there. What my generation seems to have forgotten is that this man is a politician, a class of people only a notch above lawyers, hedge fund managers, and date rapists. And yet, my peers eat up every word he says like it was manna from heaven, not taking the time to question whether his rhetoric is simply rhetoric or if it is even feasible.

Obama’s trademark slogans, “Change you can believe in,” “The Audacity of Hope,” and “Yes we can,” are at the heart of my distaste for his followers. They are bite sized and just what the doctor ordered for a generation of kids raised on eight minutes then a commercial break and ideologies that fit on a bumper sticker. We, and I include myself deliberately in this statement, want so badly to believe that there is some sort of objective goodness in the world that we tend to conveniently misremember facts or not search for them in the first place.

I was an Obama-ite early in the primary season. The man is young, vibrant, black, and a brilliant orator. The idea of not only getting Bush out of the White House, but replacing him with a historic African-American candidate who could keep jam-packed arenas on the edge of their seats with his speeches seemed almost magical. I remember listening to his speech after the South Carolina primary in my car and thinking to myself, “he sounds like Martin Luther King.”

I wish that I could say Glow-Bama was satire...

However, as the weeks passed on, his speeches remained the same, delivered like an actor playing in a Sunday matinee of a play’s 4th month on Broadway. It was all style with a substance chaser. He never spelled out any of his actual plans for aiding the failing economy, instituting universal health care, or getting out of Iraq. He simply uttered platitude after platitude as his audiences ate it up. As the primaries ended and he moved on the presidential campaign, I saw him make the inevitable move to the center. He approved letting the phone companies off the hook for wiretapping, said he would have troops out of Iraq in 16 months rather than right away, and supported the repeal of gun control laws in D.C.

All of this happened and my generation is still as giddy for Obama as they ever were, fawning over him like a bunch of teenage girls at Shea Stadium in ’65 with Fab Four fever. This is why I am depressed, discouraged, and ashamed for my fellow Generation Y-ers. They have no depth. They don’t want any depth. We were born post-Watergate and grew up led by one president who was a egotist and a pathological liar about his private life and another president who was foolhardy, ignorant, and wholly incompetent. My generation latched onto Obama like a parasite because we needed something to believe in and we didn’t care much what the validity of that something was.

My ranting and raving aside, I am still going to vote for Obama come November. If you give a man a choice between starving or eating table scraps, you’d be a damn fool not to take the gristle that falls off the table. What I worry about are those in my generation who believe that Obama truly is some sort of secular savior. That the country will radically change for the better if he reaches office. The history of presidential elections is one of false promises and accommodation. Woodrow Wilson promised the nation that we wouldn’t enter World War I. FDR promised us in 1940 that we wouldn’t enter World War II. Richard Nixon promised in 1968 that “new leadership will end the war” in Vietnam. George H.W. Bush told us to read his lips: ”no new taxes.” To believe that Obama is any different than these men is an exercise in naivete and masochism.

We are forty years removed from the Summer of Love and a political climate unlike anything in our nation’s history. There was a counterculture back then as opposed to the fragmented, commercialized excuse for a counterculture we have today. If there is anyone from my generation who is laboring under the misapprehension that there will be change with Obama in 2008 like there was in ’68, I implore you to consider this. The Democratic candidate for president in ’68 was Hubert H. Humphrey. The counterculture showed its overwhelming support for Humphrey by rioting at the Democratic National Convention. Their change they could believe in was anti-establishment, grassroots change that was practiced not orated. Change never comes from within a government. Its always comes from without and it doesn’t come easily. When Obama delivers his State of the Union Address three years from now promising the same things he is today, my generation will realize they blew their wad on the wrong guy.

Side Effects May Exclude Sex

In a very widely marketed ad for the anti-depressant Zoloft, a melancholy, yet adorable, anthropomorphized cartoon egg is stuck underneath a rain cloud. A voiceover laments that:

“You know when you feel the weight of sadness. You may feel exhausted, hopeless and anxious. Whatever you do, you feel lonely and don’t enjoy the things you once loved. Things just don’t feel like they used to. These are some symptoms of depression.”

The voiceover than goes on to explain that Zoloft can help, turning the morose egg into a joyous egg that bounces about the screen like all the other chemically balanced eggs. However, while the egg is frolicking on his Zoloft high, the voiceover man takes about 10 seconds to describe the side effects of Zoloft in little detail. What are these side effects, you ask? They’re nothing to write home about. It’s just that you may experience nausea, insomnia, diarrhea, drowsiness, dizziness, dry mouth, tremors, Akathisia (an inability to sit still or remain motionless), increased risk of birth defects if taken while pregnant, increased suicidal tendencies in people under 25, and the piece de resistance, a general sexual dysfunction which can manifest itself in the form of decreased libido, sexual arousal disorder (the inability of women to become lubricated and men to get wood) and orgasm dysfunction. Well, shucks, that’s enough to make someone, I don’t know, depressed.

The Zoloft Egg used to have an active sex life. Now it looks at butterflies

It’s a bit of a catch-22 when it comes to anti-depressants. Neurologically speaking, they do increase the amount of serotonin and norepinephrine in your system, which is thought to stabilize one’s mood. However, once you take this medication you might spend your days on the toilet, feeling like you’re going to chunder, drinking unhealthy amounts of water to get rid of your cotton mouth, and finding yourself unable to have sex because the only way you can become erect is to wrap a splint around your cock. Now for men, there is, and has for quite some time, been a logical solution to relieving the depression of one’s sexual organs: take more drugs. Just pop a couple of Viagra and you’re good to go. However, there is the little caveat of having an unwanted boner for about 3 hours post-coitus, which would leave you under voluntary house arrest if you’re not comfortable walking around your local IGA with a raging hard-on showing through your slacks.

On the other hand, women who take anti-depressants have been left to suffer from sexual malaise while their male counterparts prance about the apartment, seeing how many coat hangers they can fit on their erection, which, for your information, is totally normal and in no way perverted or distressing as my girlfriend and my therapist claim. But now women too have the ability to offset the sexual side effects of anti-depressants with…Viagra.

How physicians and researchers discovered this gem of a cure is truly beyond me. The idea that a drug that cures male impotence would work with female impotence is so far-fetched that you’d have to be a true pharmacological visionary to come up with it. According to a study published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association regarding women experiencing sexual dysfunction due to anti-depressants, three times as many women taking Viagra had orgasms compared with women who were given a placebo.

Huzzah! Men and women are now cured of at least one of the side effects of anti-depression medications so that the drugs can work as they were intended to. Oh, hold on. It appears Viagra has its share of side effects too. The quicker, picker upper can cause sneezing, headache, flushing (redness of the skin), dyspepsia, palpitations, increased sensitivity to light, and, in rare cases, priapism (the never-ending hard-on), heart attack, severe hypotension, ventricular arrythmias and stroke. So, if you take some Afrin, a couple Advil, go to a dermatologist, down some Pepto Bismol, wear light clothing, stay in darkened areas, and have no history of heart problems, then you’re good to go, depending on the side effects of all the medicine you just took.

Crocodile Rocky Road, Dick Being Dick, and more…

Here is This Week in What the Fuck for the 3rd week of July, 2008:

• Bust out your hairspray: VH1, the network that seems to be vying with MTV for the title of “least culturally redeeming network” just gave the green light to Rock of Love 3 starring the ever-so-dated and syphilitic Bret Michaels. If you’re keeping count at home, the tally of reality unerotica shows on VH1 is up to 9, with three seasons of Flavor Flav tossing clocks and cock in the faces of fame-starved hussies, two seasons of the trashtastic Flavor of Love reject New York getting her toes hoovered, three seasons of an aging hair metal rocker using cable TV to get groupie love from women born after Poison stopped being relevant, and the refreshingly frank I Love Money, which contains a hodgepodge of sex-crazed rejects from the previous eight shows and is guaranteed to be at least mildly revolting. In somewhat related news, the stock of pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline, manufacturers of the Herpes management drug Valtrex, jumped up 15 points today.

• Honky Cream: In keeping with their trend of naming Ice Cream flavors after past-their-prime rock stars, Ben & Jerry’s has created “Goodbye Yellow Brickle Road” in honor of Sir Elton John. The limited edition flavor, with its mix of chocolate ice cream, peanut butter cookie dough, white chocolate chunks, and some toffee-like substance called “butter brickle,” will donate all proceeds to the Elton John AIDS Foundation. As far as new partnerships for Ben & Jerry’s, here are some of the new flavors in the works:

- Milli Vanilli Swirl: Chocolate ice cream with vanilla swirls and little bits of chocolate in the shape of cassette tapes and dreadlocked heads. All proceeds would go to the “Ashley Simpson School of Lip Sync Design and Bad Dancing.”

- Sweet Berry James: This new flavor is a unique blend of fresh strawberries, peaches, marshmallow, and James Taylor’s own tears. Any proceeds from this product will go to the first douchebag we find playing an acoustic guitar underneath a tree and telling girls about how much he’s grown as a person

- Zappa Zappa Ripple: We don’t really know what the hell’s in this ice cream. Frank Zappa just locked himself in our factory for a month and came out with a pint of something that was warm and smelled like Head & Shoulders. That was 17 years ago. We still haven’t sold any pints, but we’re too afraid to touch it.

• What’s in a name? In news of the entirely expected, Andy Dick was arrested yesterday. But, pray tell, what for? At about 1:00 in the morning, a very intoxicated Mr. Dick proceeded to urinate outside the bar of a Buffalo Wild Wings, following this performance by yanking the tank top and bra off of a 17-year old girl and fleeing to the parking lot of a Sam’s Club. Police found Dick, “extremely intoxicated” and with weed and Xanax in his pants. They then escorted him to the station where they took this picture, which is sure to go down in the Celebrity Mug Shot Hall of Fame beside photos of Nick Nolte, Rip Torn, and any picture ever taken of Gary Busey. Now, if that picture doesn’t scream sexual predator, then I just don’t know what does. At the very least these charges should keep Dick off of the streets, and more importantly off cable television, for some time.

• Extreme Makeover: Recession Edition: Today over 2,500 people showed up to the unveiling of a newly built home in West Chester for the ABC show Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. People began showing up as early as 6:30 in the morning for the opportunity to yell the show’s tagline, “Move that bus!” at the home’s unveiling at 12:30 in the afternoon, thus proving unequivocally that there is nothing to do in West Chester. Sadly, the new owners of the house will have no neighbors as everybody else on their street took out sub-prime loans and had their houses foreclosed.

That’s all for This Week in What the Fuck. I leave you with an excerpt from a textbook used to teach 1st graders in Saudi Arabia:

“Fill in the blanks with the appropriate words—(Islam, hellfire)_’Every religion other than ____ is false. Whoever dies outside of Islam enters ____.’”

The Week in “What The Fuck?!”

Here are just a few of the things this week that make me want to rip out my entrails and lash my backside with them to distract myself from the intense throbbing in my head.

• 50 gets medieval on the Middle East….virtually: Apparently 50 Cent isn’t content to just chill out with Timbaland, smoking blunts, cutting shitty rap albums, making wretched movies and promoting Vitamin Water. The man has decided to pursue a career in the world of video games as well. Granted, this shouldn’t be a surprise as he has already released one game in 2005, 50 Cent: Bulletproof, but at least that was set in New York. This new offering will take place in the Middle East. The plot of the game centers around 50 Cent doing a concert in a “fictional Middle Eastern setting,” where he and his G-Unit group don’t get paid in cash for the gig. Instead of monetary payment, the promoter gives 50 a diamond-encrusted skull, which is promptly stolen in an ambush, leading 50 and his G-Unit crew to go on a shooting spree, killing Arabs left and right to find the skull.

Let me just bypass the obvious racist and xenophobic themes infesting this premise because, quite frankly, discussing American antipathy towards Arabs is a little old hat. My main question is, “what the shit is 50 Cent doing putting on a show in a war-torn Arab country?” The only place that anyone famous ever goes in the Middle East to do a concert is Dubai and no one in Dubai would EVER stiff you if you’re wealthy. The second your plane lands you are instantly greeted by three buxom Persian “masseuses”, a bottle of Dom Perignon, a hotel suite, and your own private island. They may give you a diamond encrusted skull just because they have one laying around and it would be a nice gesture, but they certainly wouldn’t ambush you for it. I would suggest that 50 was doing a U.S.O. show in Iraq or Afghanistan, but Uncle Sam doesn’t pay you for those. 50 don’t do charity events.

I also have some suggestions for in-game content to spice things up a little. First, I think that 50 cent should use his body as a gun. Since the man has been shot 9 times and presumably still has some bullet bits riddling his body, he should just be able to shoot those things out of his body to kill a terrorist or two. If he ever runs out of body bullets, he can just eat some ammo to reload. Also, for a nice cross-promotion deal there should be bottles of Vitamin Water Formula 50 lying around that he can drink to restore his health. Of course, his enemies wouldn’t be able to drink it because they are terrorists who, as we well know, are deathly allergic to the wonders of capitalist enterprise and Coca-Cola products. Finally, I think the end game boss should be Osama Bin Laden, whom 50 Cent can only kill by defeating him in a freestyle battle broadcast live on Al-Jazeera.

• Bra Bats: You heard me…Bra Bats. A nineteen year-old woman in Norwich, England felt a vibrating sensation on one of her breasts, but thought that it was just her cell phone vibrating in her jacket pocket. When she decided to investigate the matter further, a full five hours later, she discovered a baby bat nestled in the padding of her bra. How could you go this long without realizing that you have a tiny mammal on your teet? Well, the woman wears a size 34FF bra, so I suppose the bat just had a lot of room to hide. The woman said that the bat, “looked cozy and comfortable” and that she, “was sorry for disturbing it.” Although this whole matter is a bit unsettling, I am quite certain that MTV will turn the idea into a hidden-camera reality show where male contestants vie for the affections of a woman, woo her into the back of a party bus and then get ambushed by a flock of bra creatures when they try to sleep with her. Tila Tequila is seeing how many bisexual fruit bats she can fit down her shirt as we speak.

• Finally, at the crossroads of politics and prostitution lies a TV deal: Ashley Dupre, the call girl who oh-so-lovingly ended Ex-New York Governor Eliot Spitzer’s political career, has abandoned her dream of being a hussy-for-hire turned musician for her other dream of being a whore turned reality TV show star, which is a tad redundant. She is teamed up with the production house Reveille to pitch a show that, according to a close source, “is the story of a woman who is desperately seeking a second chance, and is willing to put her life under the microscope on national TV to try to redeem herself.” Clearly a reality TV show is the best way to redeem yourself in the eyes of the public. Just look at the immense respect that we as a nation now feel for Flavor Flav, New York, the bitch who spit in New York’s face, and that creepy Italian guy who tried to sleep with Tila Tequila, got rejected, but eventually got his own reality TV show complete with tons of hanging meat and a discothèque that he could invite sluts to. I’m sure Ms. Dupre will be vindicated in no time.

A Fitting Tribute

It is a long-standing tradition in the U.S. that our fearless leaders build their own Presidential Libraries after their time in office is over. These are not libraries in the traditional sense of being repositories of books that people can check out and read, but are instead a vast collection of Presidential documents and historical materials that no one in their right mind would want to check out, even if they were allowed to. The first President to create a library to house his Presidential papers and historical materials was Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1939 and Presidents have been doing it ever since, in large part because the government foots the bill for these architectural representations of egotism.

The reason that I bring up the Presidential library is that our current Commander-in-Chief will be leaving office soon, which means that in 195 days or so President Bush will be given loads of cash to go out and build his own library. It almost goes without saying that this is a patently silly idea as President Bush is very much opposed to reading documents of any kind and not fond of writing them either. As for his cabinet, they have a tricky little habit of “misplacing” or deleting documents that incriminate them in any wrongdoing, which leaves very little to put into a Presidential library. What we would end up with is a 150,000 square foot library holding about a hundred or so e-mails from Bush to various staff members about how he was going down to Crawford for the weekend and archived video clips of him doing African Tribal Dances on goodwill missions.

An enterprising group of young men and women calling themselves The Presidential Memorial Committee of San Francisco have come up with a rather ingenious solution. They have decided it would only be appropriate to change the name of the Oceanside Water Pollution Control Plant to The George W Bush Sewage Plant. So far, the group has collected over 12,000 signatures to have the initiative put on the ballot in the Bay Area for this year’s elections. Petition organizer Brian McConnell told reporters that, “In President Bush’s case, we think that we will be cleaning up a substantial mess for the next 10 or 20 years. The sewage treatment facility’s job is to clean up a mess, so we think it’s a fitting tribute.”

This idea of creating unflattering memorials for President Bush to reflect his time in office, while comic in nature, might actually lead to the first productive thing to come out of the Bush presidency, even though it would come after he had left office. I like the Committee’s initiative and sense of irony, but I think they’ve only touched the tip of the memorial iceberg. I propose that we spend the money that would have been used by President Bush on his Presidential library–$165 million based on what Ex-President Clinton spent in 2004–to aide some of the people that he has fucked over in his eight years in office.

Enter The George W. Bush Presidential Library of Casualties. This facility would be the size of a Presidential library, about 150,000 square feet (based again on Ex-President Clinton’s library), and would be used to help every man, woman, and child that was directly hurt by President Bush’s policies. The 2,000+ Homeless Iraq and Afghanistan War Veterans would be housed there. Any Veteran injured, either physically or mentally, in those wars will get treatment there which VA medical centers like Walter Reed failed to provide. And, the countless thousands whose lives were destroyed by Hurricane Katrina and by FEMA’s sheer ineptitude will receive all the monetary reimbursement and proper housing that these funds can provide. The Library of Casualties would use every penny of that $165 million to try and help right the wrongs of the past eight years. President Bush might be upset about the usage of his name on sewage plant, but the fallout from his presidency should be far more embarrassing.

Never Say It Can’t Get Any Worse.

This past week may well have been too depressing on a global level to produce a solid article, much less one that’s replete with the requisite amount of Swiftian satire and jokes about people’s naughty-bits that you, my loyal 20-25 readers, have come to expect from me. However, I’m going to take a stab at it anyway and therefore, without any further pomp and circumstance, here is the week in review:

On Wednesday, the U.S. Supreme Court slashed $2.9 billion in damages against the Exxon Mobil Corporation for that little tanker spill the Exxon Valdez had in 1989. The oil giant now only has to pay $507 million in punitive damages to meet the amount of compensatory damages that they have already paid to “fix up” the 1,200 miles of Alaskan coastline they drenched in oil. Is the legalese getting to you a little bit? Let me put it this way: Before Wednesday’s decision, every one of the 32,000 individuals whose lives were directly and drastically affected by the spill would have received $75,000 in compensation from Exxon Mobil. With this new settlement everybody gets about $16,000 in compensation. Did I mention that the region’s fishing based economy is still irreparably damaged and that everyone in the area is fiscally fucked? God, don’t you love it when Big Oil wins. It’s just so heartwarming to see the little guy get knocked on his ass by the highest court in the land and a massive corporation at the same time. Oh, also on Wednesday, the Supreme Court ruled that giving the death penalty to child rapists was unconstitutional. When the Supreme Court vindicates child rapists and Exxon Mobil on the same day, that means it’s time to head over to Wal-Mart and grab another red, white, and blue magnetic ribbon for your Chevy Silverado. Ain’t this country the shit?

Then, on Friday, the Supreme Court ruled with a 5-to-4 majority that the right to bear arms is not a collective right, as has been the prevailing wisdom for the past seventy years, but is an individual right. This of course makes perfect sense when you hear the majority’s explanation, written by Justice Antonin Scalia that says, “The Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia, and to use that arm for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home.” This is only logical coming from Scalia, a man who claims to be an Originalist who views the constitution as a document that should be interpreted as if it were being read by reasonable persons alive at the time of its inception. Clearly, a reasonable man in 1787 would read the Second Amendment (which for those of you with hazy memory of high school civics and U.S. government, states that, “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed,” ), ponder it over for a moment, and reasonably conclude that it meant that all citizens had the right to a .357 Magnum, and that the whole bit about militias didn’t much matter.

Finally, today marked the end of the presidential run-off election in Zimbabwe, where the incumbent Robert Mugabe won a landslide victory with 85% of the vote and has been sworn in to begin his sixth five-year term. Of course, the outcome may have been slightly affected by the somewhat unorthodox campaigning strategies of Mugabe’s party officials against Morgan Tsvangirai of the Movement for Democratic Change. Mugabe only drew 43% of the vote to Tsvangirai’s 48% in the first election, so, the question that gets raised is, “how did Mugabe gain 42% of the electorate in under four months?” Well, this picture from the front page of this Thursday’s New York Times says it all:

That is an 11-month old boy whose legs were broken by members of Mugabe’s ruling ZANU-PF party to force citizens into voting for him in the run-off election. If you didn’t know, Tsvangirai officially dropped out of the race last week to prevent the killing and abuse of his supporters and fellow countrymen. He watched the “election” take place from the safety of the Dutch Embassy in Harare.

And, that was a brief week-in-review from yours truly. It might seem a tad grim, but don’t worry. With any luck, next week we’ll be authorizing some serious offshore drilling that not only won’t have an effect on the price of crude oil, but will destroy the environment as well.
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Editor’s Note, July 10th, 2008: It turns out, according to the corrections department at the New York Times, that the photograph seen above and on the front page of their June 26 publication wasn’t entirely factual. Yes, the 11-month year old Zimbabwean had casts on his feet and, yes, his mother and he were targeted by Mugabe’s ruling party because her husband was a supporter for the opposition party of Morgan Tsvangirai. However, the mother did keep mum about the fact that her child was wearing the leg casts before the incident with Mugabe supporters due to the fact that the child has club feet. The New York Times discovered this when they took the child to Harare to get medical attention and found that he had no bone fractures. The mother hid the information from reporters in an effort to get help in curing her son’s ailment, but she still maintains, bolstered by some shaky testimony by people near the attack, that her child was harmed by youths supporting Mugabe.

George Carlin: It’s About Time you Septuagenarian Motherfucker

“Fuck you, you motherfucking cunt, I hope your funeral consists of a steady stream of crusty old syphilitic cock-suckers shitting and pissing in your open casket, and then slapping your bloodless face with their floppy pancake tits.”

There you are: the perfect obituary for George Carlin, which not only uses all of his seven words that you can never say on television (even though this is, indeed, print), but does so in a joyously obscene and scatological fashion. But, quite honestly, I say good riddance you crazy old coot. You might have been funny once (god knows when, but it was certainly before I was born), but for the past two decades or so you’ve been nothing but a geriatric waste of TV space, taking up countless hours in HBO’s programming schedule that could have been much better served with re-runs of The Chronicles of Riddick and documentaries about the 1980 U.S. Men’s Olympic Hockey Team. Oh Lord, and the books…the pages and pages of material that you just had to put into book form even though we’d already heard about 90% of it in your stand-up special that aired last week. Do you have any idea how many trees you butchered, you hypocritical hippie-dippie bastard? You were responsible for more literary abominations than the illegitimate love child of Nora Roberts and Dean Koontz.

I would also like to extend a giant fuck you for subjecting me to what is bound to be at least a month solid of inane fucking retrospectives about how revolutionary a comedian you were and how many boundaries you broke down. I’ll have to watch countless hours of obligatorily tearful remembrances from whatever-the-fuck-number wife you were on to when you went six feet under and from the kids that you no doubt neglected, but who forgave you when they realized you’d be dead in a couple of months and they’d get all of your cash. Not to mention the other comedians talking about you like you were Sojourner Truth or something when all they’re really thinking is, “Thank God that cunt-rag is finally dead. If I had to see him bitch about backwards baseball caps one more time I would have killed him myself.”

I think what it comes down to is that you were just a lazy son of a bitch who couldn’t wait to kick the bucket. And yes George, I realize that when you die you don’t literally kick a bucket. You probably had an entire routine about that shit? “What fucking bucket? I’ve never seen any fucking bucket. Are you born with this bucket or do you have to buy one when you get old and start shopping for caskets. And do you actually kick this bucket while you’re dying or just before you go to meet your maker? And who decided that we have a maker in the first place…” It’s a fucking metaphor you over-analytical shit-brick! Ha ha! The English language is so fucking quirky. We get it.

Shit. The truth of the matter is that you got it. I can’t make this obituary entirely farcical, because you were too fucking important. When the FCC has a fucking law drawn up in response to a stand-up bit you’ve done, it goes beyond comedy and into the realm of truly important social critique. Your spot on the comedic Mt. Rushmore is already being carved right next to Richard Pryor’s combustible head. You weren’t Gallagher, smashing melons with a fucking mallet to make us laugh. Your comedy made us laugh, but it did so not by pandering to the lowest common denominator, but by flipping society on its head and shaking it like a bottle of orange juice until all the pulp had been evenly distributed throughout the audience, everyone the better for the experience.

Now that I’ve completed the sappy portion of this obituary, I would like to finish by telling you to fuck off and by hoping beyond hope that God is a devout Catholic who will give Beelzebub the charge of performing rectal probes on you in hell while making you watch your performance in Jersey Girl for all eternity.

How Does This Man Keep On Making Movies?

It is time for us, the citizens of this grand and glorious nation, to take a stand. To take a stand against the oppression, degradation, economic loss, and irreparable psychological damage caused by a single man. A man, whose reign of terror now stretches almost a decade in length and, despite all rational indications, appears to be growing stronger. He titillates us with the possibility of something that at worst will be interesting and at best will be nigh perfect in its power to entertain and enthrall us. This demon spawn of hell of whom I speak is M. Night Shamalan. And he will wrench our souls from our bodies and take about $9.50 from our wallets. Unless, you have a student ID, in which case you’ll only lose your soul and about six bucks.

You may or may not have noticed that I spelled M. Night’s name incorrectly. I know that there is a y between the h and the a in his last name, but I refuse to spell his name correctly out of principle and encourage you to do the same. Hopefully, if enough of us butcher the phonetics of his surname, we can deflate his ego enough to make him reconsider making whatever shit-storm of a movie he’s writing at this very moment.

Now, I saw The Sixth Sense when it came out in 1999 and I will readily admit that it was thoroughly enjoyable thriller, in spite of the fact that it caused a 3 to 4 year epidemic of people making half-assed jokes involving the phrase, “I see…(insert word here)…people.” However, while the movie was good, I think that people drastically underestimate Haley Joel Osment’s off-the-charts creepiness in the movie’s success. You take that kid out of picture and replace him with any other little tyke (with the exception of Dakota Fanning who is Osment’s female creeper equivalent) and the movie would have been just above mediocrity. I just thank God that the kid never made it into any TV or commercial spots. Can you imagine a Life cereal ad with Haley Joel Osment? Oh, Mikey would like it all right, and then he’d gouge out his brother’s eyes with his cereal spoon.

After The Sixth Sense is where M. Night Shammalamma’s reign of terror truly begins. Since that film came out, the man has written and directed five movies, none of which could be qualified as good. Granted, there are some people who will claim that Unbreakable and Signs were solid, enjoyable films, but I think these people miss what has become one of the key features of a M. Night production: a terrible, trite, and downright stupid ending that ruins everything that came before it. Signs is a perfect example of this as M. Night builds up the suspense of whether or not the world is going to be destroyed by evil extraterrestrials only to bust out the amazing plot twist that the aliens are deathly allergic to water. Water! That’s the best this dumb motherfucker could come up with? The substance covering 2/3 of the fucking earth? Why the fuck would aliens invade a planet that is predominantly made of liquid that burns their skin off? No, no, I’ve got to stop this now because attempting to apply reason and logic to any of this man’s films only leads to frustration and aneurisms.

I went to see Signs, and I ended up going to see The Village as well, which illustrates the second major flaw in all of M. Night’s films: his total inability to write even palatable dialogue. The Village had a cast that included Joaquin Phoenix (two Oscar nominations), Adrien Brody (one Best Actor Oscar), William Hurt (one Best Actor Oscar), Sigourney Weaver (three Oscar nominations), and a bevy of other talented actors. However, in spite of this collection of thespian excellence, the script that M. night wrote for them was so bloody horrendous that I felt like I was watching a high school production of The Crucible. This man managed to flummox the abilities of some of Hollywood’s finest actors with his complete and utter literary handicap. No actor, no matter how talented, could possibly say lines like, “I love you… like the day is long!” or, “We’ll be safe, we have the magic rocks,” with a straight face. It is somewhat needless to say that the shit-tastic “twist ending “ to The Village was really of no consequence because the film was pure drek from the opening credits and you can’t ruin something that was never any good to begin with.

This leads me to this past Friday when I went to see his latest offering, The Happening. I had no expectations for this movie whatsoever and knew beforehand that seeing it would be an exercise in masochism, but I went anyway. Part of the reason I went was that my friend wanted to see it and agreed to pay for gas and parking, but the other part was a morbid curiosity as to how M. Night Shamalan could possibly find new ways to fuck up a good premise for a movie. The idea behind The Happening, that some chemical or force reverses our survival instinct, causing us to become intensely suicidal, is a good one. However, true to form, M. Night managed to screw it up with his horrendous dialogue and a gut-wrenchingly sappy, pandering message of eco-consciousness. The idea that plants can adapt and “fight back” against our destruction of the planet by releasing spores is just idiotic and it completely ruins an otherwise intriguing premise. And, contrary to what you may think, what I just wrote doesn’t deserve to be prefaced with a spoiler alert because there is nothing to spoil. You will be just as unsatisfied with The Happening whether you know his signature “plot twist” or not.

I feel a great deal of guilt for paying money to see The Happening because I believe it is morally irresponsible, especially in these times of economic downturn, recession, and increased unemployment rates, to support the gainful employment of M. Night Shahmaylan. Just because a man made one good movie does not give him license to make bomb after bomb after bomb. The man is not talented, he is not original, he writes about as well as first-year theater major, and he has some sort of terrible power over us. He manages to get movies green-lighted that should never be in production and he gets the general public to come out in droves to watch films that even Pauly Shore could rightfully call crap. This man is one of the two major cinematic conundrums that I cannot for the life of me wrap my head around (Tyler Perry being the other). All I know is that M. Night Shaminahalalan must be stopped before he makes a movie so truly horrific that gives legions of moviegoers post-traumatic-stress-disorder. Don’t think it couldn’t happen. Thirty-three people had to be committed after they saw Battlefield Earth and a further fifty-two theatergoers were hospitalized with 2nd-degree burns on their corneas after watching Glitter from start to finish. The next film M. Night Shyamallan makes, and there will be a next one, could do even more damage than that.

Gkl