You Are Dumb - Post-Millennial Judgment and Retribution for the Information Age

Shooting My Rockets All Over The Place

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 21:30:07 -0500

Spastic Topic Monkey Friday, 3 July 2009

Since we live in a time of extreme political craziness, sometimes I almost forget there are other types of craziness out there. Like the entertainment industry, providing mockable products since The Bible reached the top of the fiction best seller lists. So join me in a rapid-fire review of recent ridiculous entertainment news on SPASTIC TOPIC MONKEY FRIDAY!

Joss Whedon acolyte Tim Minear has announced his plans to create a modern, updated "Alien Nation" TV series for the Sci Fi Channel, aka "SyFy". The original Alien Nation series featured a cop named Sikes, played by conservative douchebag and Big Hollywood contributor Gary Graham, whose fellow Big Hollywood contributor, Dirk Benedict, got his wang bent out of shape when his character got turned into a woman in the recent Battlestar Galactica revamp. This leads to only one logical conclusion. Tim Minear MUST turn the Alien Nation cop into a woman.

But not just any woman. Let's really give Graham a fucking coronary. Let's make her a black woman. No, a black lesbian woman. No, a black, lesbian, liberal woman. In fact, fuck it, the cop's named Sikes, so Tim, do this for me. Just cast Wanda Sykes as the lead cop in your Alien Nation remake. I'm sure you can make the part work for her, and his subsequent meltdown will entertain the world until the show makes it to air.

Meanwhile, there are reports out of Hollywood that the, I shit you not, three-studio bidding war for the movie rights to Asteroids has been won by Universal. Yes, Asteroids. The video game. Little stick figure asteroids. Triangular ship. Hyperspace button. Produced by the guy who's at least partially responsible for this summer's GI Joe movie, and written by the guy who's at least partially responsible for this spring's Witch Mountain movie.

As a gamer who actually played Asteroids when it was new in arcades, the news stories and Internet snark surrounding this momentous event leave much to be desired. For example, did Universal buy the rights to just Asteroids, or did they buy the rights to the Asteroids franchise? Will the movie be permitted to use the shields from Deluxe Asteroids? The three ship forms and crystals of Blasteroids? Who am I kidding; this is Hollywood. They'll probably just ditch all of Asteroids' rich mythology and just make the lead actor have unresolved issues with his father, who will inevitably be played by Jon Voight.

And finally, since it's inescapable, you may have noticed that Michael Jackson is dead. And while this is not strictly pure entertainment news, I would like to share with you the single most ridiculous headline I've seen in regards to Jackson's demise and its related issues. ACTUAL HEADLINE TIME!

"OBAMA LETTER TO JACKSON FAMILY - Too Little Or Too Late?"

Um, excuse me? We've got two wars, an economic meltdown, a collapsing health care system, and a melting planet going on. The Jackson family is lucky Obama even NOTICED. Anyway, who are the experts who determined what the adequate response would be for a sitting United States President upon the death of a very popular musician who also happened to be a reclusive freakjob? Oh, right, the "experts" at the Post-Chronicle, which isn't even a newspaper, it's that right-wing news website made up to look like a newspaper that inexplicably gets included in my Huffington Post newsfeed.

Apparently, the Post Chronicle has an entire "appropriate response to tragedy by liberals" beat, because the last time these fucktards graced these pages was when they slammed Google for honoring Tetris over D-Day. And now Obama was both too "slow" and too "informal" in his reaction to Jackson's death. For evidence of this, they link to a Politico article (always a bad idea) which doesn't provide any evidence. Oh, Some Are Saying, is there any news story you can't be used to invent?

In other news, some are saying that the Asteroids movie is at least guaranteed to be better than Transformers: Rise Of The Fallen.

Kern Und Drang

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 22:31:01 -0500

Oklahoma, 2 July 2009

Memo to America's Homosexuals: IS THERE ANYTHING YOU CAN'T DO?

First, terrorists flew planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and we learned, through careful study and much forensics, that it was actually the fault of the homosexuals for achieving just enough tolerance that, as Pennsylvania state senator John Eichelberger, put it last week, "We're allowing them to exist". Which angered God, who phoned Allah, who whispered in the ears of some Saudi Arabians, who hijacked some planes.

Then, New Orleans went underwater. A few out-there kooks posited that perhaps severe hurricanes like Katrina were the result of mankind pumping millions of tons of carbon dioxide into the air, but those people were justly marginalized. And were probably secretly embarrassed after America's leading theological lights discovered the real cause. New Orleans occasionally celebrates homosexuals, which angered God, who phoned Poseidon, who swam around in a circle really really fast, causing Hurricane Katrina to appear above the Gulf of Mexico, aimed straight at Louisiana's Queer Central.

But we didn't learn. A number of states legalized gay marriage. Other states continued to allow them to exist. And so God decided to hit us where it REALLY hurt. Our wallets. He went back in time, because he can, because he's God. And he called up his buddies on Wall Street. Well, not exactly buddies, but I know they all move in the same circles, because I've watched the Republican National Convention. Anyway, he told them all to issue a bunch of iffy mortgages, then bundle and sell and resell the same mortgages, taking cuts off the top each time, and then God timed the whole thing so that the house of cards would collapse at the precise moment when wise men and women could divine, if you'll pardon the usage, its true purpose.

I know what you're thinking, gentle reader. You're thinking you've read these sarcastic flights of fancy before. And you're wondering which batshit-insane asshole actually went and blamed the economic collapse on the gays and the general American immorality? Because we all know one did.

Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce you to Sally Kern, whose last name is a synonym for how close two letters can get to each other before they start fucking, and who has won the classic Trifecta Of Stupid - she's a Republican, a state representative, and from Oklahoma. Sally Kern has introduced the I Shit You Not Act of 2009, whose more formal legislative name is the "Oklahoma Citizen's Proclamation for Morality". ACTUAL PROCLAMATION TIME!

WHEREAS, we believe our economic woes are consequences of our greater national moral crisis; and WHEREAS, this nation has become a world leader in promoting abortion, pornography, same sex marriage, sex trafficking, divorce, illegitimate births, child abuse, and many other forms of debauchery; and
WHEREAS, alarmed that the Government of the United States of America is forsaking the rich Christian heritage upon which this nation was built; and
WHEREAS, grieved that the Office of the president of these United States has refused to uphold the long held tradition of past presidents in giving recognition to our National Day of Prayer; and
WHEREAS, deeply disturbed that the Office of the president of these United States disregards the biblical admonitions to live clean and pure lives by proclaiming an entire month to an immoral behavior...

There's a lot more whereasing, but it's almost entirely a list of historical quotes about why America is a Christian nation, which I believe marks the first time something your Jesus-freak aunt sent in an e-mail chain has been placed before a state legislature. Frankly, I think that's space that could have been better spent detailing the "many other forms of debauchery" that are currently left to the imagination.

So after all the "whereasing" and listing how we've lost our moral wallet, abandoned our rich Christians... er, our rich Christian heritage, and that's why nobody has any money anymore, what does this proclamation call for? Surprisingly little, given its clearly psychotic tone. ACTUAL BE IT RESOLVED TIME!

"BE IT RESOLVED that we, the undersigned, believers in the One True God and His only Son, call upon all to join with us in recognizing that “Blessed is the Nation whose God is the Lord,” and humbly implore all who love Truth and Virtue to live above reproach in the sight of God and man with a firm reliance on the leadership and protection of Almighty God; and BE IT RESOLVED that we, the undersigned, humbly call upon Holy God, our Creator, Sustainer, and Redeemer, to have mercy on this nation, to stay His hand of judgment, and grant a national awakening of righteousness and Christian renewal as we repent of our great sin."

Ah, Oklahoma. Where "separation of church and state" is interpreted to mean that church and state can do whatever they want, as long as they do it through a hole in the sheet. You know what my favorite part about this proclamation is, though? Through sheer accident, they ALMOST got it right. Because the financial crisis was caused by violating God's law. Well, in much the same way that trichinosis is "caused" by not keeping kosher.

For example, there's God's law against usury, violated in increasingly creative ways by hedge fund managers and credit card companies. There's the admonition of the sin of greed. And there's that bit where I think Jesus kindly asks a bunch of rich people to stop building that giant needle with the huge eye, because that's not what he fucking meant. The Bible's a work of fiction, yes, but it's not completely devoid of cause and effect. But idiots like Kern never seem to get either the cause or the effect right.

Never Forget

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 22:45:20 -0500

Republicans, 1 July 2009

Memo to Mark Sanford: WE REMEMBER YOU.

Sure, I could talk about the long-awaited concession of Norm "Dental Dam" Coleman in the Minnesota Senate race, but I've been bidding Coleman farewell for so damn long that his actual leaving is an anticlimax. Instead, I'd like to celebrate the one-week anniversary of the greatest political story of 2009, Mark Sanford's Secret Argentinian Mistress, with a special all-infidelity edition of IDIOTS SAY AND ADMIT TO THE DAMNDEST THINGS!

""Because it's not feelings - it's not emotions. For most Christians, at some point in your marriage, if you're married long enough, you do it because that's what we're called to do _ out of obedience instead of out of passion. And I think that's where Mark and Jenny are right now." - Warren "Cubby" Culbertson, Mark Sanford's spiritual advisor and the leader of a "spiritual boot camp" hosted by the Sanfords while they were pretending he wasn't cheating on his wife.

I think this goes a long way toward explaining why certain breeds of Christians are so fucking miserable, and so fucking intent on making the rest of us miserable. Notice what he's not saying. He's not saying they're together for the sake of the kids. He's not saying they're together in the hopes of making it all work out. He's saying they're staying together because God will be mad at them if they don't. That's just sad. It's not noble, it's not righteous, it's just a tragic and ultimately dishonest form of self-martyrdom. This is just one of many reasons I've never spent any time at spiritual boot camp.

"Their belief was that if I walked in with a real spirit of humility then this last legislative term could well be our most productive one - and that outside this term, I would ultimately be a better person and of more service in whatever doors God opened next in life if I stuck around to learn lessons rather than running and hiding down at the farm." - Mark Sanford, who I hope is lying about why he's not resigning.

I say I hope he's lying, because the only thing sadder than a cynical plea for redemption that casts losing your position of power in disgrace over your ridiculous actions as "the easy way out", and keeping the job and the perks and the power as the real sacrifice, is if he actually believes it. And there's a chance he might. He's shown an alarming lack of political calculation in the past week, to go along with the equally alarming surfeit of self-delusion made evident over the past two weeks. But he's probably lying, because "whatever doors God opened next in life" is clearly faith-based code for "oh please oh please oh please don't let this be the end of my political career, Vitter's still in office and he fucked a hooker in a diaper".

"There were a handful of instances wherein I crossed the lines I shouldn't have crossed as a married man, but never crossed the ultimate line. - Sanford, in an AP interview.

By the way, fun fact - in that same AP interview, he admitted to seeing his Secret Argentinian Mistress a few more times than he actually copped to during his "brutally honest" and "admirably truthful" confession last week. Suckers.

Now, many people have speculated what, exactly, Sanford means by "not crossing the ultimate line", but I believe he is referring, metaphorically, to a famous French chastity belt from the late 1800's, the "Vaginot Line". That belt also served as the inspiration for French fortifications after World War I, if memory serves. In other words, this is a somewhat vaguely worded variant of the "I Only Fucked One Of Them, Honest!" defense, also known as the third worst defense in modern history, after "I am not a crook" and, of course, the Vaginot Line.

Let us pledge this day that no matter how many celebrities die, no matter how many comedians finally win their hard-fought Senate seats, and no matter how many Honduran governments get overthrown, that we will never forget the awkward, fumbling, and sordid tale of Mark Sanford and his Secret Argentinian Mistress. At least until someone gets pictures of Tim Pawlenty humping a capybara. And fair warning, if such pictures are found, I will be posting them at full resolution on this very page.

Censeless

Sun, 28 Jun 2009 18:22:59 -0500

Wingnut Revolution, 30 June 2009

Memo to Michelle Bachmann: OH, YOU'RE SERIOUS ABOUT THIS?

Covering the antics of Michelle Bachmann is trickier than you might think. I mean, yes, she is constantly saying things that are both stupid and crazy. That's a given. But the more she says stupid and crazy things, the higher the bar for covering her stupid and crazy things becomes. It's no longer enough for her to simply spout some black-helicopter anti-government fantasy du jour. My interest requires more to be piqued.

Which is why you didn't hear a peep from me when Bachmann went on the Washington Times radio show* and dropped this ACTUAL QUOTE:

"The mother lode of all data information will be from the Census. … Unfortunately, the Census data has become very intricate, very personal, a lot of the questions that are asked. I know for my family, the only question we will be answering is how many people are in our home. We won’t be answering any information beyond that, because the Constitution doesn’t require any information beyond that."

Now, I'm well aware that census-fear is so far out there on the wingnut crazy-idea matrix that it is usually only expressed by people who live on compounds. But this is our dear, sweet Michelle we're talking about here. She might just fear counting because she doesn't understand it. Maybe she's worried a felt vampire will show up at her house and tell the government how many people live there. My point is, with Bachmann, you can never tell which idiocies are just the passing fancy of a clearly malfunctioning brain, and which idiocies are part of a deliberate and new policy stance.

In the weeks since that fateful quote, however, Bachmann has made it clear that she views the 2010 Census as the devil's abacus, and warned that the Obama administration would use the 2010 results to throw another Malkin Party:

"If we look at American history, between 1942 and 1947, the data that was collected by the census bureau was handed over to the FBI and other organizations, at the request of President Roosevelt, and that’s how the Japanese were rounded up and put into the internment camps. I’m not saying that’s what the Administration is planning to do. But I am saying that private, personal information that was given to the census bureau in the 1940s was used against Americans to round them up." - Bachmann, on Fox News.

Note that whenever someone says "I'm not saying" in a situation like this, that statement should always be parsed as "Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying". For example, I'm not saying that Michelle Bachmann has a lead-lined room in her basement where she sleeps every night to keep the IRS from impregnating her with a gay communist fetus. I'm just saying that, historically, people with an irrational fear of the census have built such rooms.

Then she went on Glenn Beck, claimed that the Census should really be used to ferret out illegal immigrants, and shouldn't be asking "the date and time that we leave mental stability". No, really. And no, I don't have a decent explanation for why that moment didn't cause the entire universe to spontaneously implode, but I guess I'm glad it didn't.

The best part? People from the Census Bureau now get to try to explain to Michelle Bachmann that they are not in fact a shadowy government conspiracy to turn our precious personal information and bodily fluids over to ACORN, but in fact are part of a centuries-old tradition of collecting data about the United States because running a country is easier when you actually know stuff about it. This was, by the way, the single worst job in the entire world until Michael Jackson suddenly needed a probate attorney.

I wish the Census Bureau the best in its attempts, but I hope they realize that mere words flowing into Bachmann's ear-holes are not actually going to place information into her brain. They should instead consider an elaborate ruse where actors, portraying Dick Cheney and Sarah Palin, give Bachmann a "secret classified briefing" that reveals how the Census is actually a tool of the CIA used to root out socialists, and that the Shadow Census, as it's called, is actually being run by George W. Bush out of a secret control room in the basement of his new Dallas home. Because when you're dealing with Michelle Bachmann, all the facts in the world are powerless against any lie she's insanely predisposed to believe.

*"Bachmann went on the Washington Times radio show" may be the wingnuttiest eight-word phrase in the English language, come to think of it.

Above The Fold, Below The Belt

Sun, 28 Jun 2009 17:38:07 -0500

Headlines, 29 June 2009

Memo to OneNewsNow: THANKS FOR THE WORDS.

One of the effects of my meddling with the time-stream on Friday is the inexplicable return of You Are Dumb features abandoned years ago. For example, from time to time, back in the early years of the column, I'd ignore stories and details and just focus on the headlines, the idea being that how the stories were sold was as important as the stories themselves. Either that, or I just had a backlog of funny-sounding headlines a couple of times. I can't remember which it was now.

Anyway, I get a lot of e-mail from wingnut Internet "news" source OneNewsNow, and these e-mails consist almost entirely of headlines, including one headline that becomes the e-mail subject. Presumably, OneNewsNow figures I will be enticed by the headline, click through to the e-mail, and discover the truth the liberal mainstream media doesn't want me to know. But that's too much work. And why should they be the only ones who get to ignore context to suit their agenda?

31,173 nationwide help make handwritten Bible

Assuming this isn't the punchline to "How many Christians does it take to screw up Genesis", this headline raises two important questions. First, were any of these people familiar with Barnes & Noble, and second, did anyone check it for errors? Or did they just assume that the divine hand of God would make sure all thirty-one thousand of them spelled everything correctly, just like He did back when ALL the Bibles were hand-written?

Lawsuit targets televangelist Creflo Dollar

I'm sorry, there's a televangelist named CREFLO DOLLAR? I know that televangelism by definition preys on the weak-minded and gullible, but much like the Shmuckler mortgage refinancing, if you believe that a man who fate has cruelly named Creflo Dollar has an insight into the one true word of God, then you deserve to lose all your money in fees to, say, a service that sends godly text messages to your cellphone.

Chicago children march in gay pride parade...or not This headline shows the true journalistic integrity of OneNewsNow, as they cover all the bases. Imagine what it would do for the news world if other organizations adopted the "...or not" terminology to their headlines? Corrections would become a thing of the past, and all the journalists and pundits who now lose their credibility and their jobs after making obvious factual errors would have a "get out of trouble free" card they could play to stay on the air after fucking up.

Senate confirms trans-nationalist to State Dept."

I have to assume that "trans-nationalist" is one of those tinfoil-hat code words for someone wingnuts don't like for some fucked-up crazy reason. At this rate, soon the State Department will be chock-full of trans-nationalists, trans-genderists, trans-fattists, and trans-siberianorchestrists. Each with access to their own trans-black helicopter and trans-government mind control ray.

Holder fails to explains [sic] why 'hate crimes' legislation is necessary

Real-world version of this headline: Conservative sticks fingers in ears, yells "la la la la I can't hear you" while the Attorney General tries to explain to him why he can't beat up gay people in his spare time.

Tobacco regulations patrol personal decisions, behavior

Laws that seek to regulate personal decisions and behavior are BAD. Unless those decisions and behavior are really, really gay. I mean, gayer than taking a flaming hot stick, shoving it in your mouth, and sucking on it until you feel light-headed.

ACORN changes name in hopes to change image

See? We told you ACORN was evil! Just like any organization that changes its name is evil, like, um, Blackwater and AEI. But ACORN's especially evil, because it's not ACORN that's changing its name, it's a former subsidiary of ACORN whom ACORN asked to stop calling itself ACORN International. I mean, how evil is that? EVIL!

Obama's creeping submission to homosexual activists

I can only imagine the conversation that must have gone on in OneNewsNow's offices over this headline. "Yeah, it's good, but is there any way we could make it sound like Obama is even more gay? Can we work "bend over" into it somewhere? Maybe say the gays are "sticking it to" him? No? Well, write those down, we'll use 'em next time."

Offering living water to homosexuals

OK, what the fuck? This one I had to look at. Ah, awesome. Turns out some "well-meaning" churchy douchebag headed down to the Boise gay pride parade to hand out bottled water to the marchers. Which sounds nice, except he got a church to put its logo and the "living water" scripture from John 4:13 on the bottles. I don't know what that scripture says, because I've already done more digging for this than I want to, but it doesn't really matter, does it?

The douchebag, Tom Munds, says he wants to debunk the media myth that Christians hate homosexuals and vice versa. But if he really didn't hate homosexuals, he'd take the water to the parade and leave the logos and the proselytizing at home. Helping your fellow man with no strings attached is Christian. Helping your fellow man in the hopes that he'll read your religious message, come to the church you've advertised, and deny the attractions he was born with? That's pure asshole.

Putting The Worm In Wormhole

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 10:57:12 -0500

Star Trek, 26 June 2009

Memo to Heather Smith: I AM RISKING THE TIME-SPACE CONTINUUM TO TELL YOU THAT YOU ARE DUMB.

Time travel is a dangerous thing. It can create an entire alternate universe where things unfold differently from the way we remember them. But "dangerous thing" is my middle name. I'll risk it all - the possibility that my site will be covered in lens flare, the chance that I'll suddenly start looking like a dude from Coldplay, even the risk that my cat will turn into Simon Pegg.

So let's slingshot around the sun, back to a simpler time. A time before I wished there was a way for Google Reader to filter out feeds containing the word "Jackson". A time when Mark Sanford was considered a 2012 frontrunner. A time when we were all innocent and the world itself seemed new. Mid-May, 2009.

The new Star Trek movie was imminent. Smart nerds everywhere approached it warily, as if it were a cornered skunk, knowing full well that at any moment JJ Abrams' rebooted franchise could spray us all with its horrible stench. But other nerds had other concerns, and brought those concerns to the pages of Big Hollywood. You Are Dumb Dot Net, a website noted for its extensive knowledge of both Star Trek and the horrible writing on Big Hollywood, inexplicably failed to comment on Heather Smith's article, "Where Have All The Kirks Gone?", and that is the mistake we are traveling back in time to rectify.

One common trope of conservatism that I find particularly insipid is the idea that, thanks to changing mores, pesky feminists, and rampant acceptance of homosexuality, American society has lost its vital manliness. That men are no longer real men like they were a few decades ago, and that those vital elements of condescension, macho bullshit, and dick-waving patriarchy should somehow be dragged upstream against the cultural current and restored to its former glory. And I find it even MORE insipid when it's expressed by a woman, given that the age of manliness she pines for would wonder why she's pining and not making dinner and a martini for her husband.

But such is the pining of Heather Smith, who clumsily injects the American Pussification mindset into one of the least appropriate venues it has ever been applied to - comparing William Shatner's James Tiberius Kirk to Chris Pine's James Tiberius Kirk. ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!

"Consider four attributes of the ideal man: self-control, bravery, confidence and sex appeal. In the original series, Kirk has supreme self-control. He sacrifices himself for the safety of his crew and, in more than one episode, even chooses duty over true love. In the latest “Star Trek,” Kirk is Peter Pan, an irresponsible, reckless man-boy. The new Kirk tears down an empty Iowa highway in a stolen hot rod and drives off a cliff, jumping out to save himself, not the car. He gets into bar fights to serve his vanity, not some higher cause like rescuing the crew from aliens."

Let's just completely ignore Smith's "ideal male" definition, and take it as a given. A warped, deeply psychotic given, but a given nonetheless. You're going to sit there and tell us that Captain Kirk, as portrayed by William Shatner, exhibited SUPREME SELF-CONTROL? That Shatkirk only got into bar fights in a calculated attempt to save his fellow crewmembers? First, this view is completely unsupported by the text. And second, the Kirk character was deliberately set up to contrast with a character who actually does exhibit "supreme self-control". By those standards, Smith should be exhibiting Chapelesque fits of embarrassing lust for Mr. Spock.

The only way to make Shatkirk look like a real man and Pinekirk look like a modern feminized wimp is to invent a completely fake Shatkirk and contrast him with a completely fake Pinekirk, which she manages first by acting like the Kirk in the car-cliff scene isn't twelve years old, and second by portraying the same bar fight setup used in thousands of movies over the years as an act of vanity. But it doesn't stop there.

"The 1960s Kirk destroyed evil computers with logic problems to save the ship. The new Kirk almost gets thrown out of Starfleet Academy for manipulating the computer program to his advantage." - Yes, dumbass, in a scene that was only IN the new movie because cheating on the Kobayashi Maru was established by...the 80's Kirk. You're gonna write an article about James T. Kirk and act like you've never seen Wrath of Khan? Only on Big Hollywood, folks.

You want to know how flimsy her premise is? So flimsy she abandons it two points into the meat of the thing:

"The original Kirk bluffed aliens, threatened planets, started wars and keenly understood the necessity of maintaining peace through strength. The new “Star Trek” punishes Kirk on an icy planet because of his aggressive desire to take the fight to the enemy rather than consulting with the bureaucracy of the Federation. But then again, what do we expect with the headquarters of Starfleet being based in San Francisco?"

See? New Kirk is, um, just like Old Kirk, only his actions are portrayed as dangerous and rebellious by those liberal elitists at Starfleet, even though he's vindicated in the end. Which is something that happened all the time in, well, the original Star Trek, which was thought up by a fucking hippie.

I will spare you the section on Kirk's relationship with women, because Big Hollywood should really keep it in a box and only let it communicate through a blind empath, lest the sight of its ugliness drive men mad. Suffice it to say that New Kirk struck out with Uhura because feminists have abandoned women's traditional role as a check on male behavior. No, really. That's her point, or at least as much of her point as I can parse without clawing my fucking eyes out.

Here's a startling revelation for you, Heather. Men are, overall, better people than they were 40 years ago. Even if a man COULD manage to be like Shatkirk, which he couldn't, because Shatkirk is a fictional construct in a consequence-free universe, we don't want him to be. Because even if those qualities you admire so much are as desirable as you say, they're the product of a regressive context. For all our flaws, we're better than we were then. More free, more equal, and happier because of it. Unless my meddling in the timestream turns us all evil and makes us wear gold vests*. That'd suck, and I'd feel just awful about it.

*Or become bisexuals in leather catsuits, for you Deep Space Nine fans.

Malos Aires

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 21:37:29 -0500

Republicans, 25 June 2009

Memo to Mark Sanford: BUSTED.

Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to fuck our Argentinian mistress. God, I love that phrase. "Argentinian mistress". I happened to be able to watch the press conference, and in the world of political theater, this was Andrew Lloyd Webber's all-singing, all-dancing production of "Hamlet".

It started with five minutes of apologizing without telling us what he was apologizing for. All the subtext pointed to the second "family values" Republican affair revelation in the past few weeks, but with all his talk about "God's law", and protecting people from themselves, I honestly thought he might have been fucking a llama. Usually, with an affair, the wife is there behind him, so the lack of a wife made me briefly consider other forms of south-of-the-border action.

But when the Secret Argentinian Mistress peso finally dropped, oh lord, it was the schadenfreude jackpot. Lights were flashing, bells were ringing, and hundreds and hundreds of golden schadenfreude coins rained down from the sky. In less than a week, the Mark Sanford story went from "where is he", to "he's here", to "then why's his car at the Atlanta airport", to "why is he flying back from Argentina", to "you can't drive along the coastline in Buenos Aires", to "Argentinian mistress". It's almost impossible, in this day and age, for someone to flame out that spectacularly in politics.

Now, as I write this, it's mere minutes after the shocking (Argentinian mistress! Woo!) revelation, but there's already a few pieces of spin making the rounds that need to be shot the fuck down.

The first is that what Sanford did was brave or courageous. BULLSHIT. Yes, he was direct and honest with the public. Why? Because he got caught. He got caught lying about where he was going, he got caught lying about why he was where he was, and he's been covering up this affair for a year, including apparently the last five months since his wife found out. That isn't fucking bravery. That's not fucking honesty. That was the last desperate act of someone who knew that he'd run out of lies. Fuck that noise.

And while we're fucking noise, fuck the noise that you can't make "political hay" out of this. With Republican affairs, there's always a hypocrisy factor. It was true of John Ensign, moral crusader and marriage enthusiast, and if a Mark Sanford 2012 blog is to be believed (shortly before it closes its doors forever, one would presume), Sanford was against gay marriage and gay adoption. Of course, the Mark Sanford 2012 blog also said this, which I want to preserve for the ages because of how mind-bogglingly wrong it turned out to be. ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!

"Well, thanks to the invasive media, starting today he is back at work in Columbia. So where has he been hiding? I’ll let the government-run media fight over which trails he was at. But don’t believe for a second that his wife and other VIP’s didn’t know where he was. Quite simply, he left for a few days to clear his head. He did this without taking his private security detail, which you and I pay for. Because of this no one really wanted to tell the media where he actually was. They knew - but they were smart enough to not give it away."

Unfortunately, Mark Sanford wasn't smart enough to not give it away, and so my black, black soul is filled with glee. Because there's another reason to make political hay about this - yes, the affair makes him a big stinking hypocrite, but more importantly, the affair made him do a stupid, irresponsible thing - vanishing for a week without making arrangements with anyone to be in charge in case of an emergency. That's fucked up, and I'd hate for the waves of sympathy for his family and calls for privacy to make us lose sight of that fact.

Is this all rationalization? Is this all what I tell myself to justify my tribalistic glee at One Of Theirs essentially taking himself off the national chess board? Mmmmmmmaybe. Does that bother me in the slightest? Like fuck it does. Anyway, I like to think that if a Democrat had been busted sneaking away to visit his, and I'll say it again because I love the way it rolls off my keyboard, SECRET ARGENTINIAN MISTRESS, I would be 85 to 90 percent as schadengasmic as I am right now.

Just Thinking About The Weather

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 08:04:35 -0500

Idiots Say The Damndest Things, 24 June 2009

Memo to Joe Barton, Todd Akin, S. T. Karnick, and Shia LeBouf: YOU ARE DUMB.

What is it with stupid people? Don't they realize it's hot and humid in Minneapolis? Don't they know there are things I'd rather be doing than sitting in the corner of my home where all the heat-generating equipment lives, making fun of them? You'd think they could be a little considerate and spend some time not being IDIOTS, but they can't, and since they've SAID THE DAMNDEST THINGS and it's Wednesday, it is my obligation, nay, my duty, to respond. And since it's so fucking hot, let's make it a global warming special.

"And something that the Democrat sponsors do not point out, a lot of the CO2 that is created in the United States is naturally created. You can’t regulate God. Not even the Democratic majority in the US Congress can regulate God." - Texas congressman Joe Barton, who is fast becoming a regular honoree of this site. Inhofe better watch his back.

Assuming for the moment that Joe Barton's God exists, and behaves the way Joe Barton says he does, then we, as a nation, regulate God all the time. Grass is naturally created, but the city can still tell you to mow your lawn. Snow is naturally created, but I don't see Joe Barton pushing for us to take our fucking chances and abandon plowing. And to hear most people tell it, our current version of marriage was created by God Himself, and we seem to be willing to regulate that more than we even need to.

Of course, even if we couldn't regulate God, we could still regulate the human-invented industrial burning of epic shitloads of coal and oil. But that's so fucking obvious to everyone except fossil fuel whores like Barton that it's barely worth saying anymore.

"This whole thing strikes me if it weren’t so serious as being a comedy you know. I mean, we just went from winter to spring. In Missouri when we go from winter to spring, that’s a good climate change. I don’t want to stop that climate change you know. Who in the world want to put politicians in charge of the weather anyways? What a dumb idea." - Missouri congressman Todd Akin, doing his state's educational system proud.

It's not that we want to put politicians in charge of the weather, dipshit. Politicians are already in charge of the weather. You're in charge of the weather right now, which should terrify all of us. Luckily, you're an outnumbered asshole in a heavily Democratic House of Representatives, so the amount of influence your moronic inaction and inexplicably irrelevant paeans to Missouri seasons has on our future survival is minimal for now.

Also, I know I'm getting to this quote a couple of weeks late, but on June 2nd, Missouri "just" went from winter to spring? Maybe Missouri should send representatives to Congress who know what goddamned month it is, and then maybe we'll let them weigh in on climate change, OK?

"Moreover, there is actually a very good, important, and timely thought in Land of the Lost. In a very amusing way, the film satirizes the current-day perversion of science in which claims of consensus are used as a blunt instrument to shout down opposing ideas." - S. T. Karnick, one of Big Hollywood's many bloggers who are neither big nor Hollywood.

No real joke here, I just wanted to idly mention that S. T. Karnick turned to "Land Of The Lost" to find vindication for global warming denial, creationism, and for some reason, whether or not the speed of light is a constant. No, I don't understand that last one either, unless he thinks "the speed of light" is how long it takes between hearing a concept and the light bulb above your head turning off. In which case it ain't the Doppler effect that makes everyone else's seem that much faster, dude.

"I don't mess with the Wii, to be honest with you. It's kind of an amateur console. I'm not into the Wii thing. This is how in a simple way you can find out if it's a gamer you want to play with. Ask them if they have a Wii. If they say yes, get the fuck out of there." - Shia LaBeouf, not talking about global warming, but I don't care, because this is a special bonus quote.

Holy shit. What possible Wii game could LeBeouf have experienced that traumatized him so deeply that he's decided to write off the machine the media runs on? It must have been really, really bad, because I saw Transformers, and afterwords, when I went near a movie theater, I didn't ask them if they had PROJECTORS, and if they said yes, gotten the fuck out of there. I just avoided shitty giant robot movies with Shia LeBeouf in them.

About the only way to make LeBeouf's advice make any sense at all is to replace the word "gamer" you mean "man", replace "play with" with "have sex with", and replace "Wii" with "Transformers on Blu-Ray". At least that advice helps the species evolve, and possibly stop creating douchebag mother-fetishists like LeBeouf.

The Responsibilities Of The Man

Sun, 21 Jun 2009 08:57:17 -0500

Main Column, 22 June 2009

Memo to Barack Obama: TAKE A DIVE.

One of the biggest problems with the conservative world going completely feces-flinging apenuts over the election of Barack Obama is that it makes it really difficult to focus on the shit Obama is doing wrong. And he is! He's doing all KINDS of things wrong. They're just not funny things. Some horrible racist aide sending out a horrible racist e-mail and then flubbing the apology? That's funny.

But if the crazy people weren't tearing out what little hair they have left over Obama bowing to Muslims, bringing about the end of capitalism by bailing out a car company, and not immediately carpet-bombing Iran, it's all too easy to forget about Barack Obama's biggest flaw. It's a flaw that was apparent during the campaign, that we all knew or should have known would come back to bite us on the ass during the administration. Barack Obama is part of the system, is beholden to the system, and is interested in the continuation of the system.

It was probably unavoidable. No real outsider, nobody really and truly hostile to the elements of American society that desperately need changing, would actually win the election. Sure we could all harbor our secret hopes that Obama actually was the "dangerous liberal" his opponents made him out to be, but it's never gonna happen. Obama believes in the system, and his instinct is, and continues to be, to save the system first and change it later.

It's true of the financial system. He continued the Bush bank bailouts, repairing the symptoms of a deeply flawed system. Only now is he starting to turn his eye toward financial regulation. And given the way his health care initiative, which started out center-right, has been watered down by Republican and Blue Dog obstructionism? Don't get your hopes up that Wall Street will get reigned in anytime soon.

And it's true of his detainee policy, where he has actively fought to defend and protect some of the worst abuses in American history, hoping we'll be satisfied with his promise that he won't continue them. The institutions must be protected at all costs, and only then can we work on minor, subtle tweaks to their behavior, like a kinder, gentler, indefinite detention.

And nowhere was this more true than with last week's DOMA controversy. The Defense of Marriage act is one of the purest examples of how fucked up the system is in recent memory. It was passed September, 2006, right before midterm elections, in an attempt to take the "gay marriage" wedge issue away from conservatives through traditional Clintonian triangulation. It's a shitty, shitty law, and it's one of the Democrats' biggest mistakes - throwing a loyal constituency under the bus in order to placate and shut up their opponents, who never, ever, feel placated and shut up.*

DOMA's being challenged in court, and Obama's Department of Justice** is defending the law. Now, I understand the argument that the government, as an institution, is obligated to defend its actions when challenged. But I don't agree with it. The government fucks up all the time. Obama has, in fact, publicly stated that DOMA was a fuckup, and that he wants it repealed. If we all agree it was a mistake, what's the point of doing your damndest to keep a court from declaring it a mistake? Plus, a court ruling against DOMA might actually have some weight down the road the next time Congress wants to pass a stupid law, unlike repealing one stupid law.

And then, not only does the Obama DOJ defend the gay marriage act, they do it by citing precedent. Specifically, laws against incestuous and underage marriage. And again, maybe it's a constitutional argument - that if the government can regulate marriage in those areas, it can legally regulate marriage in this one. But correct doesn't mean right, and it doesn't mean necessary.

After decades and decades of the Santorums of the world calling gay people dog-fuckers and child-fuckers, you know what's not going to earn you any sympathy? Essentially saying that "we don't think you're child-fuckers and dog-fuckers. We're just saying we can treat you the same way as child-fuckers and dog-fuckers if we want to." Just take a dive, already. Take a few dives. Not everything the government did under Bill Clinton and Dubya is worth saving. Let it crumble, and either build something new in the rubble, or just let it lie there as an abject lesson. But that won't happen, because being The Man brings with it certain responsibilities. Responsibilities that go "beyond" right and wrong.

*To this day, by the way, the media calls this a "Sister Souljah" moment, and acts like every liberal needs a bunch of them to keep their supporters in line. This ignores the fact that Bill Clinton's actual "Sister Souljah" moment was one of the most shameful and embarassing acts of political theater in his entire presidency.

**Which, in another case of protecting the system, never got the post-Bush purge it so desperately deserved.

The Hand That Feeds You

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 17:48:20 -0500

Meta, 19 June 2009

Memo to the audience: THERE'S MORE OF ME TO GO AROUND.

I know, I know. YOu were hoping for some insightful commentary on modern idiocy. Or, barring that, at least a Spastic Topic Monkey Friday. But you won't get that, because today is about blatant self-promotion. Apparently, running a one-man war on stupidity doesn't eat up enough of my free time, so I'm expanding my Internet micro-empire with a new site, Forkbastard.

http://www.forkbastard.com

Forkbastard is a food blog. What, you say? Has Bryan gone insane? Did he just use the dreadeed b-word? Yes, he did. The reason I'm so emphatic that You Are Dumb is not a blog because it isn't one. I know what a blog looks like, and what it does, and this ain't it. Forkbastard is most definitely it. I'm basically breaking every single rule I espouse here for a pleasant, old-school Internet experience. Why? To see what happens. Here are some key ways that Forkbastard is NOT You Are Dumb.

POSTING SCHEDULE: Like a blog. Whenever I feel like it, whenever I can. As short or as long as is necessary to get the point across. Because it's a food blog, by necessity you will learn more about my life than you do in these pages. Don't let that discourage you too much.

COMMENTS: As of Launch Day, Forkbastard has open comments on every post. It even allows anonymous comments. This will lead to one of two things - either the blog will not be terribly popular, and I won't have to do anything, or the blog will attract the kind of people who surf the Internet and force bloggers to do moderation queues, then turn off anonymous comments, then heavily moderate their registered user comments. But that's pessimism for the future. Today is about optimism for the now.

TWITTER: I KNOW. But right now, if I'm in a restaurant, and I have a Wi-Fi signal, jotting off a quick note via Twitter is the quickest way to both jot a note for myself and give anyone following it an idea as to what's going on between posts. And since I'm not trying to communicate much, the 140 character limit doesn't come into play the way it would if I used Twitter for any other purpose. Also: breaking ALL my rules.

ADS: - Forkbastard has Google Ads. It's an experiment. I don't know how much they bring in or how big my audience there will eventually be, but if I can even partially defray the cost of hosting two sites (even given my host's eminently reasonable rates), that's a good thing. If more money than that manages to come in, then certain hardware upgrades to improve the overall foodblogging experience might be in order.

How will Forkbastard be like You Are Dumb? Well, I'll be writing it. Which means if you like the way I think, and the way I turn a phrase, you'll like Forkbastard. Unless you're completely uninterested in food, of course. It will cut a wide swath through the food world, from my own cooking, Minneapolis restaurants, junk food, and, in what I'm sure will be an important recurring theme, why Guy Fiere is such a fucking whore. Oh, and since I'm writing it, Forkbastard will likely have the most f-bombs of any food blog not ghost-written for Gordon Ramsay.

I know what some of you are thinking. No, I am not bored with You Are Dumb. This isn't gonna be one of those web things where a creator gets an itch to grow artistically and abandons the old gray project in favor of the new shiny reddish-orange one. I'll be doing YAD as long as I have something to say and I can still get to the keyboard, and I'll always have something to say. As hard as this may be to believe, I have even more to say than I can fit here.

So visit Forkbastard. Throw it on your RSS reader. Tell your politics-hating, food-loving friends about this exciting new entry into the culinary Web 2.0. Go back and read yesterday's column and see how many in-jokes about Forkbastard you can find. And, what the fuck. Sign up and leave some comments over there if you feel like it. We'll see what happens.

Bad, Da Bing

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 18:04:28 -0500

Main Column, 18 June 2009

Memo to Microsoft: I HAVE DECIDED THAT YOU ARE DUMB.

I understand why a company might want to beat Google in the search engine business. Google's on top of the search world, making piles of money. Which means if you beat Google, you end up on top of the search world, and you're the one making the piles of money. To be the man, as the saying goes, you have to beat the man.

What I don't understand is why Microsoft keeps trying. They just released their third, or fourth, depending on how you count, attempt to make a search engine people want to use. And because we all know you can't start a new web page these days without a god-awful name, they're calling it Bing. And they're calling it a "decision engine".

Nobody needs a decision engine, of course. But they can't call it a search engine, because nobody needs a search engine that isn't Google, either. I'm not saying this to kiss Google's ass. All I know is that either Google works pretty damn well, or the Internet has settled on Google and has collectively decided that if it's not on Google, it doesn't count. Which amounts to the same thing. To challenge that, you have to provide a feature none of us knew we wanted, and then pull it off really well.

As far as I can tell, Bing doesn't do that. I say "as far as I can tell" because whenever a new search engine comes out, I test it. It's an empirical test based on an incontrovertible fact: that I am the single most important Bryan Lambert on the entire goddamned Internet. It was true yesterday, it's true today, and it'll be even more true tomorrow. Google recognizes this. Put in my name, and boom, I'm on top. As it should be.

Bing fails this test miserably. Bing's "decision engine" has decided that the most important Bryan Lambert on the Internet is some goon with a Facebook page. I am not some goon with a Facebook page. Hell, if I were to decide to wake up one morning and embrace Web 2.0, I still wouldn't have a Facebook page. After the Facebook guy, the next most important Bryan Lambert is STILL not me. It's some minor-league baseball player. Sorry, Bing. You're going to have to put YAD higher than #35 before I stop mocking you.

And you'll also have to pull your ridiculous commercials, which are nothing more than a high-tech version of a Ron Popeil infomercial. Like Microsoft, Ron Popeil is selling you shit you don't need to fix a problem you don't have. So the infomercials have to play up the problem you don't have and make it look horrifying enough to get you to want to solve it by buying their product.

This is how you end up with scenes of middle aged housewives being strangled to death by tangled, sentient garden hoses. All they wanted to do was water the lawn, but they didn't have a Garden Hose Detangling Wheel, and now they're DEAD. Do you want to die? Do you? Your garden hose is out to get you. Don't trust that green bastard. Lock his ass down in the WHEEL OF PAIN. Show that hose who's boss.

The Bing commercials are exactly the same. People go on the Internet, search for something obvious, and CHAOS ENSUES! People are jabbering unrelated nonsense at them! And breaking into song! And they won't listen when all you wanted to do was look up the prices of hotel rooms! How can people live like that, with no decision engine to help them enforce rigid structure on the tangled Interhose? Well, nobody actually does live like that, because that's not what happens when you do a Google search, assholes.

Microsoft needs to give up on search engines. Take all the Bing people and reassign them to products that actually need to be improved. You know, like video game consoles that explode after six months of use. Why can't someone make a console that doesn't need to be constantly replaced under extended warranty? I'm sure someone at Microsoft could figure that out. Or PC operating systems that don't suck. There's a market with some room for growth. But no. Microsoft's gotta spend all its energy trying to make better search engines and portable touchscreen music players. Fucking geniuses.

If We Get Any More Post-Racial, We'll Be Pre-Racial

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 21:36:09 -0500

Racism, 17 June 2009

Memo to Goforth, DePass, de Nugent, and Buchanan: I AM CRUSHING YOU.

In a turn of events that startles nobody, except maybe Pat Buchanan, the election of America's first black president has opened up a lot of old, festering racial wounds in this country. And for the most part, that's a good thing. Yes, sometimes, when festering wounds open up, an octogenarian white supremacist snaps and kills a security guard, but from a broader societal standpoint, it's good to root these fuckers out and crush them when they expose themselves. Usually by SAYING THE DAMNDEST THINGS.

"I went on the wrong email and I inadvertently hit the wrong button. I’m very sick about it, and it’s one of those things I can’t change or take back." - Sherri Goforth, the legislative aid for a Tennessee state senator, as reported by Nashville Is Talking.

This is the kind of apology that demands a certain amount of context. By "went on the wrong e-mail", Goforth apparently means "typed a list of her co-workers into the To: field". And by "inadvertently hit the wrong button", she meant the button that went out on the Internet, found a picture of all 44 Presidents, replaced Barack Obama's portrait with a pair of white bug-eyes on a solid black background, and attached that picture to the e-mail. I can't do that with my e-mail at work, but to be fair, we don't have Lotus Notes 8.

And hey, look, it's Tennessee again. What were the odds? Significantly better than one in fifty, that's for damn sure. It never ceases to amaze me how America's pigfuckers immediately go to decades-old stereotypes when it comes time for them to hate on Obama, but I guess that's why they're FUCKING RACISTS.

"I am as sorry as I can be if I offended anyone. The comment was clearly in jest. The comment was hers, not mine." - Rusty DePass, Republican activist from South Carolina.

Another apology, and more context... in a moment. What's with these names? Sherri Goforth? Rusty DePass? If the third quote ends up being from Lynchy Joe Crossburn, you're all going to think I'm making this shit up. And I'm not. This guy is really named Rusty DePass, and he really did make this half-assed apology for calling an escaped zoo gorilla "one of Michelle's ancestors", the Michelle in question being the Michelle you think it is.

What puzzles the living shit out of me about this apology is not the boilerplate "if I offended anyone", nor the bog-standard "it was a joke", but that last bit. Does he think Michelle Obama is going around telling people she's a gorilla? Or, being from South Carolina, is he a creationist pigfucker in addition to being a racist pigfucker, and assumes that anyone who believes in evolution doesn't get to complain when you call them a monkey?

Either way, that's some serious bullshit, Bullshit compounded by the fact that I don't recall Michelle Obama ever even taking a stand on evolution. Sure, we can make certain assumptions, based on her political leanings and her demonstrated lack of idiocy, that she's not a creationist, but she's not Richard Dawkins. Hell, she's not even Richard Dawson. Plus, that ain't how man and apes are related anyway, but I'm guessing scientific rigor isn't Rusty's strong suit. Or even his second strongest suit, you know, after hating black people.

"The responsible white separatist community condemns this. It makes us look bad." - John de Nugent*, on the murder at the Holocaust Museum.

I would love to know who the hell is in charge of drawing the line between the responsible white separatist community and the irresponsible white separatist community. I bet that guy needs a T-square, a mechanical pencil, and really, really good eyesight.

"Thus, Sotomayor got into Princeton, got her No. 1 ranking, was whisked into Yale Law School and made editor of the Yale Law Review — all because she was a Hispanic woman... One prefers the old bigotry. At least it was honest, and not, as Abraham Lincoln observed, adulterated “with the base alloy of hypocrisy." - Pat Buchanan, on MSNBC, citing Abraham Lincoln in his defense of bigotry. I shit you not.

I really don't give Pat Buchanan enough attention on You Are Dumb Dot Net. He really is a horrible human being. A waste of space, using up precious oxygen so that he can say stupid shit like this to a national audience. He's a dinosaur, a relic of a bygone era where "the old bigotry" got you invited to the best parties, and what Buchanan laughably sees as the "new bigotry" wasn't even an option for minorities. Fuck Pat Buchanan, and get him and his Lincoln-quoting old bigoted ass off of my television.

*OK, maybe racism stems from a deep-seated resentment of one's own ridiculous name. Which means today's celebrities might be breeding tomorrow's Klan.

With Your Bailiff, Paul Shaffer

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 08:39:48 -0500

Comedy Court, 15 June 2009

Memo to David Letterman: CONSIDER YOURSELF SUBPOENAED.

Been a while since one of these was necessary, but as you know, whenever a comedy bit blows up into a large controversy, You Are Dumb Dot Net has an established method for arbitrating said controversy. And so I find myself reluctantly and dejectedly opening up the summer session of Comedy Court.

THE DEFENDANT: David "Skullhead" Letterman, host of The Late Show, storied gap-toothed interviewer, stalkee, and flinger of pencils.

THE CRIME: Being a sexist pig; joking about the rape of a 14-year-old girl.

EXHIBIT A:

"Bought makeup from Bloomingdale's to update her "slutty flight attendant" look." - Item number two on the Top Ten list about what Sarah Palin did during her New York trip.

EXHIBIT B:

"One awkward moment though during the game, maybe you heard about it, maybe you saw it on one of the highlight reels. One awkward moment for Sarah Palin at the Yankee game, during the seventh inning, her daughter was knocked-up by Alex Rodriguez."

THE VERDICT: - Not guilty.

Prosecution argued that Exhibit B was a reference to Willow Palin, the fourteen-year-old daughter of the Palin clan, who was the only daughter at the baseball game in New York. And since knocking up a 14-year-old requires having sex with her, and since having sex with her is statutory rape, David Letterman was making a rape joke. The Court rejects this argument due to the fact that Bristol Palin exists, Bristol Palin became famous for getting pregnant while an unmarried teen, and Bristol Palin has since gone on to prominently promote the same kind of abstinence that got her preggers.

Therefore, the Court rules that the joke was in fact about Bristol Palin, and not only that, but that this joke sets precedent. Any joke about a pregnant Palin daughter shall be understood to be about Bristol Palin until such time as other Palin daughters, having received the same stellar education and moral values of their sister, also end up pregnant. Furthermore, the Court rules that the Palin clan needs to henceforth stop going onto cable news and bitching and moaning about David Letterman, Rape Enabler. I know you're happy that people are saying your name again, but enough is enough.

Prosecution has also argued that, by calling her a "slutty flight attendant", David Letterman is judging Sarah Palin, an accomplished and erudite politician, based solely on her appearance, which was never played up on during her campaign or amplified with tens of thousands of dollars in campaign-supplied wardrobe. Prosecution's case ignores an important key fact - Sarah Palin does, in the view of this Court, rock a look that could be described as "Slutty Flight Attendant". A slutty flight attendant look starts with a slutty librarian look, but adds vaguely uniformy elements like gold buttons and subtracts the slutty librarian's interest in books and research.

In ruling for the defendant, Comedy Court would like to stress that it is not ruling on the appropriateness or niceness of the joke, as appropriateness and niceness have no place in the judging of comedy. The jokes made logical sense, and were also fair, both on their own merits and under the Fuck Sarah Palin And The Very Stupid Horse She Rode In On Act of 2008. Court adjourned.

Loose Ends And Looser N's.

Tue, 09 Jun 2009 23:16:44 -0500

Spastic Topic Monkey Friday, 12 June 2009

Memo to Bill O'Reilly, Allergan, and Chuck Grassley: YOU ARE DUMB.

Lots of loose ends to tie up this week - flotsam, jetsam, lorem and ipsum. So once again, it's time for the traditional compendium of smaller idiocies known as SPASTIC TOPIC MONKEY FRIDAY!

Bill O'Reilly desperately wants to know why the pro-life asshole who shot an abortion doctor to death is getting more attention than the Muslim asshole who shot an Army recruiter to death. Well, he doesn't really want to know. Bill O'Reilly has never desperately wanted to know anything, unless you mean in the Biblical sense. Which does not count as intellectual curiosity, in case you were wondering. No, he's just setting up the usual bullshit false equivalency, which I will now puncture, because that's what I do.

The Army is still recruiting. The Army still has plenty of recruiters in plenty of locations in all 50 states doing their vitally important job of encouraging service-minded youths of above-average intelligence and a drive for leadership that the Army is a good choice for them, and doing so without lying to them or misleading them at all*. So while Private Long's murder was tragic, and pretty much an act of terrorism, it wasn't the game-changer that Dr. Tiller's murder was, because there are a lot fewer OB-GYNs performing late-term abortions than there are Army recruiters.

Tiller's family has closed his Kansas clinic as a result of the shooting. This leaves two clinics providing late-term abortions in America. So Bill, for your false equivalency to become a true equivalency, terrorists would have to blow up one third of the Army recruiting stations in America. Until then, eat shit.

Women! Are you jealous of Viagra, Cialis, and Rogaine? Do you long for a needless pharmaceutical you could take for purely cosmetic reasons, without the pesky birth-control side effects of Yaz? Well envy no longer, because Allergan, the makers of Juviderm brand gunk you inject into your face and Natrelle brand breast implants to give you the honkers God neglected to provide, is now marketing Latisse.

What is Latisse, you ask? It's a glaucoma drug whose side effect happened to be the treatment of hypotrichosis. And what, you ask, is hypotrichosis? Funny you should ask. It's the name they gave to the fake disease where you think your eyelashes need to be longer and fuller. Latisse grows eyelashes. So move over, Bob Dole's limp penis! Now Brooke Shields is promoting pharmaceutical mascara! Maybe she's born with it, maybe it's Maybelline, and maybe it'll darken your eyelids and mess with your eye pressure on account of it being FUCKING GLAUCOMA MEDICINE.

I have mentioned in the past that Twitter is bullshit. And in the never-ending series of followups I call "I Was Right", I present to you the tweets of Chuck Grassley. ACTUAL TWEET TIME!

"Pres Obama while u sightseeing u said 'time to delivr on healthcare' When u are a "hammer" you think evrything is NAIL I'm no NAIL"

"Pres Obama you got nerve while u sightseeing in Paris to tell us"time to deliver" on healthcare. We still on skedul/even workinWKEND."

First, this didn't need to be said at all. Second, it didn't need to be said twice. Third, it didn't need to be said twice with 140 characters per attempt. And fourth, motherfucker, you are a SITTING UNITED STATES SENATOR. The fact that you abbreviated like this is embarrassing, and the fact that you didn't even abbreviate consistently, and got under your 140 characters in such strange and bizarre ways is even more embarrassing. In a just world, these two tweets would murder political Twittering in its sleep. We do not, as I perhaps have said, live in a just world.

*I said they had plenty that do this. They also have plenty that do... other things.

The Great Matching Effort

Thu, 11 Jun 2009 08:52:31 -0500

Wingnuts, 11 June 2009

Memo to Frank Gaffney: YES, YOU ARE DUMB TOO.

Call me a collectivist if you will, but sometimes there is an effort so great that only by working together can we achieve it. And so it is with mocking Frank Gaffney for his recent Washington Times column. Lots of blogs have covered it. The guys at Sadly, No - the closest thing on the Internet to what I do here - took a few swings at it. But Frank Gaffney went to an extraordinary effort to say some of the stupidest, most inflammatory things that have been seen in print about President Obama since the election. It's only right that a similar effort go into mocking him and calling him funny names for it.

First, the establishing shot, if you will. Frank Gaffney is a nutcase. He's the president of the "Center For Security Policy", which, if you're familiar with classical think-tank nomenclature, translates to "The Center For Nuking Everything Around Israel Until It Turns To Radioactive Glass, And Put Some Big Fans On The Border So That All The Jews Don't Become Mutants". Gaffney has starred in a You Are Dumb column once before, back in 2007, when he criticized Condoleeza Rice for engaging in peace talks with both the Israelis and Palestinians. Two years ago, he accused Condi of planning to rape Israel the way Neville Chamberlain raped Czechoslovakia.

Needless to say, that incredibly offensive charge laid at the feet of an African-American diplomat did not prove even remotely true or realistic. And that is why, two years later, Frank Gaffney is STILL writing things for the Washington Times like this. ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!

"The man now happy to have his Islamic-rooted middle name featured prominently has engaged in the most consequential bait-and-switch since Adolf Hitler duped Neville Chamberlain over Czechoslovakia at Munich."

You stupid, stupid fuck. Two years ago, I told you to get a new goddamned analogy, because I was sick to death, then sick to reincarnation, then sick to death AGAIN of people comparing any peaceful overture to appeasing Hitler. Did he listen? Of course he didn't listen. Frank Gaffney would never listen to little old me, because my name's not Benjamin Netanyahu. The latest attempt to unleash Hitler's reanimated corpse upon the world through diplomacy is, of course, Obama's Cairo speech, which has inspired a mountain of crazy in the past week. A mountain that Gaffney singlehandedly dwarfed with some kind of large, moon-sized construct. Call it the Dumb Star:

"With Mr. Obama's unbelievably ballyhooed address in Cairo Thursday to what he calls "the Muslim world" (hereafter known as 'the Speech'), there is mounting evidence that the president not only identifies with Muslims, but actually may still be one himself. Here, in one simple sentence, Gaffney not only digs up the debunked Secret Muslim stuff from the campaign, but actually attempts to resuscitate it with bullshit "evidence" from the speech. Which I will summarize and laugh at thusly:

Obama called it "The Holy Koran" - Gaffney claims this is rare for non-Muslims. I don't think that's actually true, but that may just be because I reject any claim Frank Gaffney makes automatically. Still, non-Christians use the phrase "Holy Bible" all the time. Christians print it on the cover like it's the title, after all. And Obama's not just any non-Muslim. He's a non-Muslim going out of his way to appeal to the general, non-radicalized Islamic population of the world. Frank Gaffney doesn't take this into account because Frank Gaffney doesn't recognize the existence of a non-radicalized Islamic population, because he's a pants-pissing, jingoistic bigoted asswipe.

Obama said Islam was "revealed". - Again, in Frank Gaffney's world, one can not adopt the turns of phrase of one's audience without somehow outing yourself as a secret member of that audience. I mean, there are only centuries of political oratory tradition that have honed this very technique. There's no way an established master of political oratory like Obama would know about those techniques and use them. No, it's much more likely that Obama, having successfully hidden his Muslimitude from the American public during a grueling 18 month campaign, would accidentally slip a few "revealing" tells into his Cairo speech. And that Frank Gaffney would be the only one clever enough to catch them.

Obama lumped Jesus in with Moses and Mohammed! Any proper Christian would, when speaking to the entire Muslim world not equate the three, but instead place Jesus in his rightful divine place, much much much better than the other two. Plus, Obama said "peace be unto them", which is something only Muslims ever say. And yes, technically, this point is exactly the same as Gaffney's other two points - that Obama, in a speech designed to mend fences with an Islamic audience, used phrasings and constructions that they would appreciate and understand, instead of lording it over them or, even better, just dropping bombs on them the way Dubya did because that worked out so fucking great.

Lest you think that Secret Muslim is the only election-era conspiracy theory to which Frank Gaffney subscribes, allow me to correct that impression with a parenthetical aside so completely bugfuck wingnut tinfoil-hat that it could spawn its own column or two if I thought any of us could take that. ANOTHER ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!

"(Who knows? By the time Mr. Obama's friends in the radical Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now (ACORN) perpetrate their trademark books-cooking as deputy 2010 census takers, the official count may well claim considerably more than 7 million Muslims are living here.)"

Someone should cast that sentence in bronze so that when the aliens come, and they wonder what happened to the dominant species here, they can find that bronzed sentence, translate it into their alien tongue, and realize that we all died off because nobody was smart enough or bold enough to drag Frank Gaffney off to an institution and forcibly treat his psychosis. I can only hope some shred of the Internet also survives, and the aliens will know that some of us really thought that was a good idea.