It's Not Bad, It's Worse

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.

Topic Monkey Friday Is Adjusting Its Meds

Memo to Jay Leno: FIVE MORE WHAT?

It's like getting to the top of the rollercoaster, looking down that big first hill, and suddenly realizing there's a giant vat of rotting cheese at the bottom. I see the headline that Leno is stepping down at Tonight, to be replaced by Conan, and then I read that it won't be until 2009. And that's assuming we're not all dead of mercury poisoning, terrorist attacks, or space mutants by then.

Can someone please explain to me what Leno needs five more years to accomplish? Here, I'll help you with that. Please complete the following sentence.

"Man, I remember that one time, on the Tonight Show, when Jay Leno _________________________________"

You can't finish it, can you. Nobody can. The only reason he needs five more years before he can step down is that it's gonna take the archivists that long to compile a retrospective "greatest moments" reel longer than 45 seconds. Leno got the job in the first place because he was the safe, Nerf, middle-America guy who wouldn't traumatize the Carson-deprived with any of those fancy "ideas" or "concepts". And in the intervening dozen years, he's done that. Nothing more. Frequently less. All he's going to manage with five more years on the job is five more years on the job.

I hate Leno. From the standpoint of a connoisseur and occasional purveyor of Sweet Mother Comedy, he is everything that is wrong with everything ever. You just know that, if he hadn't gotten the Tonight Show gig, his career path would have included two failed sitcoms and a basic-cable talk show that would have siphoned away three of Dennis Miller's six viewers.

I feel bad for Conan. He'll get handed the reigns to what was once a vital cultural institution, at age 46, after seventeen years of being bleached and made flaccid by Captain Chin. It's like being a cast member on SNL the year after Anthony Michael Hall. Or being president after Dubya. It's like winning a classic car in a contest and finding that the delivery guy has stripped out the engine. Jay Leno, ruining things for the rest of us.

Speaking of ruining things for the rest of us, Jim Hertz, of Frankfort, Illinois, is nowhere near as famous as Jay Leno, yet he is just as deserving of our notice. Jim, whose first name was invariably spelled "Dick" throughout his school career, is a dumbass.

You see, Jim visited the local library over the summer with his wife, Jan. Based on subsequent events, I can only assume they stopped in because one of them needed to relieve their bladder, as people like Jim and Jan Hertz use books for table-propping and spider-killing, and you rack up hefty fines if you do that with library books.

While in the library, Hertz became incensed when he saw a poster of the Pledge of Allegiance on the wall. The poster lacked the words "under God", of which we have spoken at least twice before, and which have been the subject of much kerfluffle amongst the nations anticognoscenti. Furious that the gay liberal homosexual communist atheist agenda had infiltrated the heart of the Midwest, he called the library later to complain.

The incident should have stopped after the library informed Mr. Hertz that the poster was a historical item, one of several posters donated to the library by a railroad company. Before 1954. Back during the Dark Ages when "Under God" had never actually been IN the Pledge. Realizing that Michael Moore hadn't been in the library with a big eraser, Mr. Hertz accepted his mistake, went home, and nobody heard from him again.

As if. This is the problem with stupid people. When they're caught being wrong, it's never their fault for being wrong, it's YOUR fault for knowing something they don't. Hertz got all up in the Frankfort village library's grill about the lack of a note on the poster explaining to fucking imbeciles like him that the poster was old. He's fighting back, offering to replace the old, crappy, atheist, Satanic poster with a brand new spiffy Godariffic one from his Successories catalog, that has both "Under God" and a picture of a kitten on it.*

The library board, secretly laughing at Mr. Hertz behind his back, was willing to accept the donation, sell his new poster, and keep the proceeds, hopefully to buy some new history books, but that wasn't good enough. Lest you think I am making Hertz out to be a buffoon, I give you his own words in that wonderful tradition we have here, ACTUAL QUOTE TIME:

"I also pointed out to them that I found their copy of the pledge for sale for $5 on what I would call anti-Christian Web sites. We might put together a slate of candidates who will better reflect the wishes of the people of Frankfort. It seems to me they are not meeting the wishes of the people by not posting a corrected copy of the Pledge of Allegiance. In my opinion, the board is not taking this very seriously.

Yes, the board is surprisingy unresponsive to the only two fucking nutjobs who've ever complained about the poster. Those bastards! And as the proprietor of what I'm sure you would call an anti-Christian website, I take grave offense that we would offer "copies" of items as merchandise. We use only the finest CafePress sweatshop workers to provide our readers with the opportunity to never order any of our T-shirts. So there.

*Certain portions of this sentence deviate strictly from purest fact, but the essential spirit is there.

Racists and Psychos and Bears, Oh My!

Memo to Desperate Republicans: YOU ARE DUMB.

Seriously. When it comes to finding a candidate, Republicans are like overconfident high school seniors who don't bother applying to a "safety college". And then when a meteor strikes the one university they DID get admitted to, they're forced to head off to Devry, or order correspondence courses from Sally Struthers, or go to one of those "accredited medical universities" in the Caribbean.

Let's move to Tennessee, where tongues are drawn to windowsills like magnets to steel. Every two years, in the 8th District, a racist douchebag named James L. Hart runs for Congress. He believes in "eugenics", a.k.a. the breeding of Aryan super-men like Khan. That thing ol' Adolf was a big fan of. Anyway, things were going along as usual in Tennessee. The sun rose every day, the cows got milked, the pigs got fucked, and all of a sudden, the Republicans realized, to their dismay, that they hadn't managed to run any other Republicans for the 8th District! Oh, no!

A failed scramble later, and all of a sudden, the Republican Party is being represented by a man who claims that non-whites should be sterilized, and that their "poverty genes" will turn America into Detroit. Of course, the Republicans are adamant that they don't share Hart's values, and I'm sure most of them don't. Yet despite that, Hart's runs every year as a Republican, not a member of the Eugenics Party or some other fringe group he made up himself. It's almost as if, especially in the barely-Reconstructed South, the GOP has spent the last 40 years courting the racist vote through thinly-veiled campaigning on issues like "states' rights". But that's just crazy talk.

And speaking of crazy talk, let's turn our gaze to Illinois. Illinois Republicans face the dubious task of challenging Barack Obama for a U.S. Senate seat. Obama is that rarest of Democrats. He sounds like he believes what he's saying. After his DNC speech, I spent 42.6 seconds in complete cynicism remission, which is a personal record. To oppose Obama, the GOP has considered:

• A horny, sex-club-frequenting Borgfucker
• A short-tempered celebrity football coach
• A couple of former governors
• A crazy right-wing failed presidential candidate from another state with financial liabilities and embarrasing hypocritical past statements who also happens to be black like Obama.

Guess who they went for? Alan Keyes, who vowed he would never "imitate" Hillary Clinton by running for senator in a state he didn't live in! Hooray for the process! Lest people be overly concerned with the embarrassing thing he said a coupla years ago, Keyes got right to work saying even more embarrassing things. I believe it's a Special Carpetbagging Edition of ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!

"I would still be picking cotton if the country's moral principles had not been shaped by the Declaration of Independence." I mean, sure, I remember learning in school about how the Declaration of Independence ended slavery, but I also remember my teacher going to a locker every five minutes to take a swing out of a bottle. At the time, I just thought he was very, very thirsty.

Keyes is also rabidly anti-gay, rejecting the idea that sexual preference is not a choice. "We as human beings cannot assert that our sexual desires cannot be controlled. [That would] consign us to the real of instinctual animal nature-- and we are not there." I love the conservatives who think gay people are A-OK in their book... as long as they stay celibate and alone. Hooray for compassionate conservatism!

Which is ironic, because when it comes to candidates, Republicans are less discriminate than even the sluttiest gay man. As we've seen, the GOP'll grab any ol' asshole that passes by for a shot at finishing the race on top.