You Are Dumb - Kentucky

Kentucky Fried Neurons

Tue, 21 Nov 2006 22:45:57 -0600

The News, 22 November 2006

Before we begin, you should know that today is World Hello Day, in which you are supposed to say hello to ten people for peace. This means you need to stop greeting people right now, and if at all possible, find the people you've greeted so far and rescind your greeting. Maybe slap them or something. Just to piss off the World Hello Day people. Bunch of fucking h... wait. Scratch that.

Memo to functioning Kentucky residents: GET OUT. GET OUT WHILE YOU CAN.

The stupidity is coming from INSIDE THE STATE.

I get a lot of material off of editorial pages, but nine times out of nine, it's from the letters to the editor, because let's face it, unless it's actably libelous or completely profane, newspapers will print anything. Those two restrictions, by the way, are why I don't bother writing letters to the editor.

The actual editorials I tend to leave alone, because, and this is from one who's written them, the newspaper editorial is an art form whose excitement and majesty can only be compared to Soviet-bloc concrete tenement architecture. Both of them are designed to occupy a certain amount of space in as nondescript a way as possible. Both are designed to house large numbers of stodgy, productive sentences / factory workers. Both are things I do not concern myself with. Normally.

Which brings us to Jenean Mcbrearty, contributing columnist for the Lexington Herald-Tribune. First of all, I don't even think that's a real name. It's a couple of desperation Scrabble words. It's the dregs of the phoneme grab bag. Anyway, I have to assume then when "Jenean Mcbrearty" isn't contributing columns to the Lexington Herald-Tribune, she's presiding over the world's largest straw production facility, because she managed to erect so many strawmen in her piece this week that you couldn't have enough smelly post-modern hipster festivals to set fire to all of them.

I mean, it's entitled "Hippies Still Trying To Ruin The Country", for fuck's sake. HIPPIES. Ruining the country! Or at least giving it the old dropped-out-of-college try! The only other person who thinks about hippies anymore is Eric Cartman, and he's fictional.

Of course, she's not talking about actual tie-dye-wearing, Dead-listening patchouli-heads undermining our democratic republic. No, the hippies, like the Power Rangers, have the power to morph. ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!

"Radicalized, the flower children morphed into lefty loonies who now masquerade as social progressives." The hippies have turned into radical morphing masters of disguise! There could be one next to you right now, and you'd never know they were guilty of horrible, horrible crimes, like this:

"For example, consider their continued belief that America's armed forces are neo-Nazi stormtroopers who delight in burning babies to further the aims of imperialistic corporations." Um, excuse me? I suppose, somewhere, you could find a handful of crazy people who believe something that this quote is a ridiculous exaggeration of, but for fuck's sake, progressives can't even get people to agree that torture is bad.

And it gets worse from there. "To renounce their military fictions would mean facing bigger, more important truths: Marxism doesn't work. Love is not all you need. Western culture is worth defending because it protects freedom, tolerance and the greatest material good for the greatest number."

Let's take those in order. First, thinking the government ought to pay for kids' vaccines isn't Marxism, and you could hold a convention of serious, intellectually honest Marxists in a small public bathroom. Second, that's a song lyric, not a philosophy. Third, freedom, tolerance, and the greatest good for the greatest numbers are what hippies get yelled at FOR BELIEVING IN. It's like yelling at fish for their constant Quixotic tirades against water. Mcbrearty must have foregone her state-mandated daily dose of bourbon and Lynyrd Skynyrd that day.

The "lefty loonies", a phrase, by the way, you can tell Mcbrearty thinks is beyond clever, then get accused of our other usual fake crimes - wanting to be nice to terrorists so they won't blow us up, wanting to surrender rather than fight, valuing the lives of Iraqi children, being mentally trapped in Vietnam, and loving BAWL more than God.

Yeah, that one threw me too. Thanks to a helpful parenthetical aside, though, I learned it stands for Buddha Allah Wicca Lenin, which I'm apparently supposed to believe are the four hippie gods. I could do an entire fucking column on why THAT doesn't work.

I hear tell there are sane people in Kentucky. If so, you need to realize that Jenean McBrearty is speaking for you, and that means you really need to move out of the state right away. Preferably leaving herds of newly-freed derby horses and a fiery trail of wreckage in your wake.

Stupidity + Anatomy = Comedy

Fri, 29 Jul 2005 14:21:04 -0500

Sports, 2 June 2005

Here's something you may not know about stupid people. Turns out, stupid people have organs called "mouths". Colloquially referred to as the piehole, the gob, the shitspout, or, in the case of Norm Coleman, "Where The Teeth Hold Dominion", this mouth is capable of exuding the most astonishing feats of illogic the world has ever seen. So today, I'd like to spotlight a few of these feats, in a segment I'd like to call "Idiots Say The Damndest Things".

"I don?t think Deep Throat is a hero. I think Deep Throat is a snake." - Pat Buchanan

Luckily, I trust Buchanan's opinion on herpetology about as much as I trust his opinion on immigration. And the color of my shoes, for that matter.

I love, by the way, that all the experts they're turning to to analyze whether W. Mark Felt did the right thing or not are all the aides, speechwriters (like Patty Patty Buke Buke), and convicted felons of the Nixon administration. Just because Liddy and Colton have served their time and moved on to lucrative careers in talk radio and Christian evangelism doesn't mean they weren't nose-deep in Nixon's shit. They got caught. Sent to prison. Their boss forced to resign in shame because he was dirty as hell and sloppy about it to boot. They helped him.

So maybe, just maybe, these aren't the people we should be turning to for a moral judgment on the matter? Or am I talking the crazy-talk again? Ignoring the realities of the 24-hour news cycle? Some kind of pundophobe? Fuck it. Doesn't really matter anyway, because as Deep Throats go, Felt isn't the guy anyone wanted it to be. You know you all wanted it to be Ben Stein. I know my demographic. Post-buellerites, the lot of you.

"I don't think there's a church-state issue, because it's not mandatory, and I say 'worship services' instead of 'church." - Kentucky Judge Michael Caperton

Caperton is being delusional in defense of his idea of innovative sentencing - giving people the option of going to jail, or getting out of their jail time by attending the aforementioned "worship services". Just a bunch of misdemeanor drug and alcohol offenders, but still. Even in Kentucky, you don't get out of separation of church and state just by changing the name of something. You have to change the name of it so that it pretends to remove the religious connotations. If they'e renamed Creationism "The Godmadeit Theory" instead of "Intelligent Design", you think they'd have gotten anywhere? OK, do you think they'd have gotten as far. As fast? No.

Here's some more from Caperton: "I saw that our drug problems were getting worse and worse and decided we needed to try something new. All the feedback I've gotten on it has been very positive." - First of all, you don't get to call religion "something new". Even Scientology's been around for decades by now. Hell, all the guys who put on purple sneakers and cut their balls off are making travel plans for their ten year reunion.

And second, of course all the feedback you've received on it has been positive. You live in KENTUCKY. Where thinking dinosaurs waved to Adam and Eve on the way to the tar pit for a bath qualifies you for a seat on the school board. You'll keep getting the positive feedback until the first guy you let out goes and hangs out with the Wiccans on the equinox. Or cuts off his balls and buys purple sneakers. Or as soon as anyone asks the ACLU, which they did, and no, they're not thrilled.

"Some people may think I'm a crazy nonsensical parent and I'm overzealous, but I feel okay with what I'm doing." - Michael Croteau, New Brunswick, Canada.

What he's doing, in case you were wondering, is waging a crazy, nonsensical overzealous war against that oppressor of human rights, Hockey Canada. You see, three years ago, Hockey Canada did not give Mr. Croteau's son an MVP award. Now I know hockey is more important in Canada than it is here, and I know it's more important here than it is to me, but when your son loses out on award, should you really sue the award-givers? That's what Dad decided to do.

And then, when he lost that case, and the hockey league suspended his kid because of the ongoing lawsuit, he filed a HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATION complaint with Canadian authorities. Which he also lost. So now he's set up a web site, and is thinking of appealing his case to Canada's Supreme Court. Which doesn't handle nearly as many hockey-related cases as you might think. But, you know. He's okay with what he does. And so, he says, is his son, who coincidentally refuses to talk to reporters about it. Probably because, well, he's 19, he's in law school, and he wants a chance in Canada's frozen hell of getting laid at some point in his life.

While science has yet to find a way to actually stop dumb people from using their flatulent tongueholders, research is continuing into this pesky conundrum. And until that glorious day when You Are Dumb Brand Telepathic Self-Applying Duct Tape is loosed upon a grateful world, we'll just have to endure as best we can. For the sake of the children.

Save Money, Make The Dinosaurs Gay

Thu, 11 Aug 2005 13:31:56 -0500

Main Column, 19 January 2005

Memo to Creationists: YOU ARE DUMB, AGAIN, STILL, ALWAYS.

Thought you were gonna get away with just a theme week? Think again. Think for the first time ever, actually. That would be helpful. Maybe it'd keep the fight against the New Dark Ages from being more than one step forward, two steps back. We got the stickers off the textbooks in Georgia, in a win for Team Not Completely Retarded, but this Spring, in Kentucky, a museum will open that's gonna make Dinosaur Adventure Land* look like the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The Answers in Genesis Museum of Creation, in a bid to become the most oxymoronically-named institution in the nation, will be a $25 million natural history museum made up entirely of fake nature and fake history. Well, not ENTIRELY. There has to be room for three other vital elements of any rabid Christian institution. Gay-hate, heathen-blame, and a gift shop.

But first, the creationist nitty-gritty. Like Dinosaur Adventure Land before it, two big areas of this House of Bullshit will feature information on are why the Grand Canyon isn't really that old, and how dinosaurs co-existed with man. This will apparently involve making giant dinosaur models and putting statues of Jesus next to it, and making a big model of the Grand Canyon and putting a bunch of signs next to it saying "NOT THAT OLD" and "WASN'T THERE SOMETHING ABOUT A FLOOD?"

According to their website, there's a proposal for an exhibit that explains how "facts don't speak for themselves", which I think we'll all agree is a vital principle if you want to convince people that the Earth is six thousand years old. Or, more accurately, reinforce the belief of idiots who've been told since birth that if they don't think the Earth is 6,000 years old, they're going to burn in eternal hellfire. Which is not part of the museum's mission statement, but it might as well be. ACTUAL MISSION STATEMENT QUOTE TIME!

"Exalt Jesus Christ as Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer through a safe, wholesome, family-friendly center for learning and discovery that clearly presents major biblical themes from Genesis to Revelation. This center will equip Christians to better evangelize the lost with a sense of urgency, through a combination of exhibits, research and educational presentations that uphold the inerrancy of the Bible. This center will also challenge visitors to receive Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord and to accept the authority of the Bible by providing culturally relevant biblical and scientific answers from a biblical worldview.

It's an ABATTOIR FOR THOUGHT. Brains go in one end, and tiny chunks of cholesterol spray out the other, flying through the air, trying to land on a heathen and give him Christfeldt-Jakob Disease. And the mental Mrs. Lovett making neuron pies is Ken Ham, a man whose very name makes pigfucking jokes entirely superflous. He may have won that round, but how will Ham deal with the pickle that is ACTUAL QUOTE TIME?

"We want people to be confronted by the dinosaurs. It's going to be a first class experience. Visitors are going to be hit by the professionalism of this place. It is not going to be done in an amateurish way. We are making a statement." That statement? If you polish a turd shiny enough, you can get someone to buy it. I'd have said "polish a coprolite" there, but you can't make a coprolite in six thousand years. Not unless God spends his time going around pointing at turds and saying "YE BE STONE NOW". And if God did that, Kentucky would become an art installation.

So we've covered the stupidity, but I can hear you asking. What about the hate? Well, step right up, because this Ham comes with a heapin' helpin' of the ol' homoheathenhate. You see, the Creation Museum is FAMILY-FRIENDLY. Says so right there on the label. That's why they're including family-friendly exhibits like a recreation of Noah's Ark complete with the screams of drowning sinners, an exhibit demonstrating how AIDS is God's punishment for homosexuals, and one, I shit you not, on how the teaching of evolution led to the Columbine shootings..

You see, it is the position of Ham that Harris and Klebold killed 12 classmates, then themselves, because they believed in survival of the fittest. Two kids who COMMITTED SUICIDE did so because they believed in survival of the fittest. There's only one way to even remotely reason that so that it works, and that way carries with it the interesting correlation that Ken Ham does NOT believe in survival of the fittest, and ergo has NOT killed himself.

Those creationists. They've got their own tour guides, their own theme parks, their own "institutes", and now their own museum. At this rate, they should have their first solid, proven fact sometime around the year FOUR THOUSAND AND NEVER. Which is at least fifteen hundred and never years after they expect the Rapture, so I guess it doesn't matter.

*See Thanksgiving week, 2004 if you don't know.

It's Not Bad, It's Worse

Thu, 18 Aug 2005 13:54:48 -0500

Main Column, 28 October 2004

National politics got you down? Then whatever you do, for fuck's sake, do NOT look at the local races. Becuase THEY ARE DUMB.

I have never in my life wished for another man to fuck a pig and get caught more than I do right now. Except that if he did, if there was some Austin Gullette protege out there, he wouldn't make the news unless he was running for Congress. And even then, they'd get confused over the term "pork-barrel". The news is 80% politics, 20% Iraq, with a 15 percent overlap of Iraq/Politics. If Ashlee Simpson had appeared on SNL three weeks from now, her story wouldn't have petered out in less than a week. Thank goodness for small favors.

Anyway, they say that all politics are local. And I say that all politics are fucking stupid. By applying the Fucking Stupid Commutative Principle, then, we find that all local politics are fucking stupid. But now we need evidence to back up our theory. Can we discover any? Let's find out together.

ILLINOIS: You've heard of Illinois. That's where Barack Obama is giving Alan Keyes the kind of man-spanking Keyes professes to hate, but secretly loves. Only it's in the polls. But you may be surprised to know that there are other politicians in Illinois, some of them potentially almost as dumb as Keyes.

Jerry Weller, a Republican congressman from Illinois, is being challenged by Tari Renner, head of the poli-sci department at Illinois Wesleyan U. Weller, like some high school jock filled with roid rage, apparently feels the need to refer to his opponent as "the professor" at every opportunity, although there is no evidence as yet that Weller's campaign literature features crudely-drawn caricatures of Renner in a cap, gown, and big glasses. Weller, who is engaged to marry the daughter of a genocidal Guatemalan ex-dictator after the election, also is telling people that because some fringe anti-drug-war website "endorsed" Renner, that Renner is PRO-HEROIN. That entire preceding sentence is 100% true, especially the part about the dictator's daughter. I know. Even as I typed it, I thought to myself, "Damn, I'm making up some funny shit... wait, this is the TRUE part!"

KENTUCKY: Still, that's nothing compared to Kentucky, where Senator Jim Bunning is suddenly fighting for his career after going what many independent observers are calling COMPLETELY FUCKING NUTSO. He accused Democrats of beating his wife. He repeatedly changed the rules of his one debate with his opponent Daniel Mongiardo, performing his half of the debate on video from Washington, D.C., in an RNC studio, with no independent observers present. And he STILL got caught breaking the rules by using a teleprompter.

Faced with trouble, Bunning's camp did what any self-respecting Kentucky Republican would do. Called his opponent a queer little faggot who likes to fuck other men in the ass. Not in so many words, of course. This is Kentucky 2004, not Kentucky 1992! They've moved out of the Dark Ages, people. No, instead, David Williams, president of the state senate, made the point with subtlety and class. It's ACTUAL HOMOPHOBE-BAITING QUOTE TIME!

"What a shame it would be if we traded the strong left hand of Jim Bunning -- the punch that he has -- for the limp wrist of Mongiardo. [Bunning is] fully capable of still throwing that hard pitch from the mound. And his opponent is a switch-hitter who doesn't know if he's on the left or the right."

See? It's a baseball metaphor! 'Cause Bunning used to play major-league baseball, which is 100% straight and American. Williams, of course, denied that his statement was meant in a sexual way, and to give him the benefit of the doubt, allow me to list all the various connotations and meanings the term "limp wrist" has that do not apply to homosexual slurs.

There, I'm done.

MINNESOTA: And how much more local can you get than my own back yard? In our own Sixth District, just a ways north of me, Republican Mark Kennedy is staving off a challenge from Patty Wetterling, who rose to prominence after her son was abducted in 1989. Kennedy, who is apparently a bit of a complete asshole, started running ads that accused Wetterling of having "latched on to radical extremist groups".

My heavens! Did she visit a Hezbollah training camp? Join PETA? Was she, in fact, an Al Qaeda deep-cover mole, and her so-called "abducted son" was actually a DIRTY BOMB? No. "Latched on to radical extremist groups", translated from Asshole Politician into English, comes out as "Received support and money from MOVEON.ORG". Folks, if MoveOn is a radical extremist group, then Habitat for Humanity is the Symbionese Liberation Army.

So, over the next five days, as you look at the presidential election and despair at the state of politics, take heart in the knowledge that it gets much, much worse the farther you move down the ticket.

Custard's Last Stand

Fri, 19 Aug 2005 11:23:37 -0500

Main Column, 29 July 2004

One of these days, I'm going to go through the archives, and make some kind of Map of the Fifty Hates, just to see how many of the great states of the Union have felt the mighty wrath-hammer that is my prose.

You'd think I'd have done Kentucky by now, right? Google doesn't seem to think so. Kentucky has always struck me as more "hick" than "redneck", anyway. Slightly lower chance of having a cross burning on your yard, but still damn difficult to find decent Thai food in. But Kentucky is not without its deep red-state (Sorry, Mr. Obama) idiocy, as evidenced by Midway, Kentucky's unique form of pro-American protest.

Burning ice cream.

Now, setting stuff on fire IS a time-honored traditional protest, whether it's Tom Sawyer novels, Twisted Sister records, the American Flag, or your own gasoline-soaked body. But just because something is traditional does not make it a good idea across the board. When planning to set something on fire in protest, one should research the product in question as to it's overall, say, FUCKING FLAMMABILITY, YOU HILLBILLY RETARDS...

Ahem. Of course, anything is flammable eventually. You won't go up like flash paper if you drop a match on your skin, but that fact hasn't put our nation's fine crematoriums out of business. Still, without some kind of professional-grade kiln or furnace, it's probably a bad idea to try an burn a FROZEN LIQUID DAIRY PRODUCT. This is what happens when you let the Intelligent Design fuckers write your TEXTBOOKS. You end up with generations of Scopes rejects who think milk will ignite.

Having now explored, if not necessarily answered, the question of why they tried to burn ice cream, we now turn to the greater conundrum of why they tried to burn ice cream. What did pure, innocent, ice cream ever do to anyone? Well, it seems that the founder of Ben & Jerry's recently created the "PantsonFire-Mobile"*, which is a car with a large statue of Dubya on it, and the Dubya statue's pants are on fire for obvious reasons.

Seems Chuck Bradley, whose family owns a corner market in Kentucky that sells the glorious B&J pintage, didn't take kindly to that mean ol' Vermont liberal, who no longer owns the company that makes the ice cream that Bradley attempted to burn, badmouthing his President. So, you know. Make a pile and get some matches. Which is, when you think about it, reactionary-bordering-on-caveman. Don't like something? Make a pile and get some matches. If he'd only thought to hit the ice cream with a rock, he could have made a fortune off the National Geographic circuit.

I scream, you scream, we all scream for ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!

"We've got a great country -- thousands of men have died so we can stand here today and speak our minds but not bad-mouth the leader of the free world." - Bradley, in the kind of pontificating on the nature of "freedom of speech" that can only result from a lifetime of brain-freeze.

So now that we've learned what kind of hayhumper tries to set ice-cream on fire in anger, we turn to another burning** question: What kind of elementary-school dropout comes out to support and watch the attempt? Let's hear from Charlene Harris, who brought her TWO AND FOUR YEAR OLD CHILDREN to watch the protest, thereby ensuring that both kids will grow up to join Gay Drag Queens For Kucinich if there's a shred of fucking justice on this planet.

"It was kind of hard to explain to them why the ice cream was bad. We do support the president, but they like ice cream." Charlene, it was hard to explain to them because, first, as we've shown, it makes no fucking sense at all. Second, YOU were trying to explain it. Third, you were trying to explain it to a two-year-old and a four-year-old. And lastly, you were trying to explain it to a two- and four-year-old that share your genetic code. I just got a message for you from Sisyphus. He says you should give up.

* Fun idea, but that's the kind of proper-noun construction that gives style-guide editors conniptions.

** Really, it's more of a sputtering, melting question that runs into the gutter and attracts flies for a week.