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.

And To The Retardos, For Which It Stands

Memo to 247 members of the House of Representatives: YOU ARE DUMB.

The Capitol Building is not your fucking elementary school playground, and the law of the land is not "TAG! NO TAGBACKS!". Every last one of you who voted for the law that says the courts can't rule on the Pledge of Allegience ought to be impeached and thrown out of office for either ignorance or deliberate ignoring of how the government you are a part of works.

Yes, tired of those pesky courts, full of "activist judges" getting in the way of the legislative branch doing whatever the hell it wants to, the House passed a bill, 247 to 173, that would prohibit any federal court, including the Supreme Court, from ruling that the words "Under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance are unconstitutional.

That means that two hundred and forty seven of our elected representatives are whining babies who are either malicious, stupid, or both. Hell, calling them whining babies is an insult to whining babies, who at least have an excuse for their squalling. You cannot overturn a fundamental power granted to a branch of gorvenment by our Constitution, a system that has served us for 228 years, by passing a LAW. The system doesn't work that way. And if you don't understand that, you shouldn't be in office, and if you do understand that and don't care, then you REALLY shouldn't be in office.

And if you're going to vote to overthrow the government, which is essentially what you're doing, could you find a better reason to do it than over the goddamn, doghumping, irrelevant, meaningless, insipid, annoying, thrice-forsaken PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE?! What is wrong with you people? Missouri representative Todd Akin, the short-bus General Patton of the 247th Fuckwit Division, said that if "under God" were to vanish from the pledge, it would have "emasculated the very heart of what America has always been about".

Get this man a copy of Gray's Anatomy and a history book, STAT. First of all, Captain Akin of the S.S. Mixed Metaphor, hearts do not have cocks. Hearts cannot be "emasculated", and by assuming that either the biological organ "heart" or the metaphorical "heart of America" is a well-hung man, swinging free in the land of the brave, you reveal much more about your own inner, repressed, Republican psyche than any of us wanted to know. You can't emasculate a heart. You can't emasculate a skull either, which is a shame, 'cause I'd pay for the surgery myself if it meant we had 247 fewer dickheads in the House of Representatives.

And if "under God" is the very heart of what America has always been about, then why, if you'll pardon me covering the same ground I had to cover the last time this issue came up, has it only been in the pledge for FIFTY YEARS? Boy, it's a good thing all those enlightened, jingoistic, 1950's fucks realized what all those stupid Founding Fathers hadn't noticed, and put that "under God" into the pledge. If they hadn't, the heart of what America has always been about would still be wandering around, dickless and embarassed.

And on top of all that, last time I checked, the Supreme Court was busy dodging the issue and letting "under God" STAY IN THE PLEDGE. Yeah, it stayed in on a technicality, but do you really think that if those activist Supremes wanted to rule against it, the technicality would have stopped them? They certainly didn't let technicalities stop them in 2000, that's for damn sure.

Really, there's only one positive thing I can say about this bill passing in the House. It was not, inexplicably, the single most retarded thing to come out of Washington yesterday. Thanks to Dubya, that bar has been set even lower. Our President actually tried to scare us by saying that if we pull out of Iraq, all of the insurgents who are trying to get us out of Iraq will follow us to America and fight us here. After a brief sabbatical to recharge its batteries and soak up some sun, it's ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!

"If we stop fighting the terrorists in Iraq, they would be free to plot and plan attacks elsewhere, in America and other free nations." - The Mental Midget Ostensibly Running Things

That's such a boneheaded sentiment it almost deserves its own column. The "terrorists", who are mostly insurgents and mostly targeting the military are not attacking soldiers because they hate our uniforms.

That Other Four-Letter F-Word

Memo to Disingenuous Amenders: YOU ARE DUMB.

Let's see. The death rate and casualty rate in Iraq are at their highest points, well, ever, actually. The insurgency is spreading so wildly, the administration wants to take billions of dollars we were supposed to be spending on rebuilding the country, and put it into desperately trying to keep it from getting even more broken. Economy's still in the shitter. Poverty rate's skyrocketing. Obviously, it's time for the Republicans in Congress to perform their most sacred of duties.

That, of course, would be to schedule a potentially politically embarassing vote on motherfucking FLAG-BURNING. Yes, the right's classic is back again, the constitutional amendment to outlaw desecration of the American flag. Also known as "the amendment that makes the gay marriage one seem almost rational by comparison".

Of course, it's all a ploy to get Kerry and/or Edwards to eithe rmiss the vote, or vote against it, because flag-burning is a huge issue amongst the largest group of voters in the country - the shit-for-brains.

You know what happens when an American flag is burned? NOTHING. Neither jack, nor shit. A small amount of fabric is combined with oxygen to release chemical energy, leaving behind smoke and ash. That is IT. You are not injured. You are not hurt. You shouldn't even be offended, but apparently you are. Offending people is not a crime. If it were, I'd be typing this from prison. OK, technically, there's one less American flag in the world, bringing the total number down to about three billion.

And it's not as if flags are even burned all that often. I could maybe sort of kind of not really understand this when it came up after a couple of high-profile flag burnings, but I went and looked. Flags ain't burned all that often if Google News is to be believed.

Here's an interesting exercise. Search Google on "'American flag' burned". You know what makes up the entirety of the first eleven pages? Stories about three rogue Americans who went to Afghanistan, wearing khakis emblazoned with American flags, and tortured people. By, amongst other things, BURNING THEM. Yet there seems to be no push for new laws, or even stepped-up prosecution, for people who set fire to foreigners.

The most recent actual, protesty, burning of an American flag I can find was this past weekend, in which an anti-war dude sort of set fire to a really tiny flag on a stick at a 9/11 memorial. Which is admittedly tacky, but perhaps isn't the kind of thing we should be FUCKING WITH THE CONSTITUTION to try and stop. The memorial went on, the horrible blah blah of that tragic blah blah were blah blahed, and everyone went on with their lives.

That was it, for the past month, and I had to look for it. Oh, there was one other flag burned, but that was in Greece, where all we could do about it is bomb them for being vaguely swarthy. Since it was during the Olympics, we didn't. This time.

Anyone remember the last time you heard about a flag being burned? How about an epidemic of flag desecration? Unless I can't get to work in the morning because all the burning flags are blocking traffic, I think maybe Congress should leave well enough alone. Of course, it's not really about stopping the rampant flag-burning that's taking place roughly ten times an hour in every city on the planet. No, it's about forcing people with some fucking SENSE in their heads to use that sense, vote down the appointment, and then be portrayed in ads as "supporting flag-burning".

You know why they do this? Because it WORKS. And you know why it works? Because we're a nation of fucking retarded rednecks who believe whatever we're told and react in the most cave-man, fratboy way possible.

"Well, shit, I've got no job, my son's legs got left in Tikrit, my daughter's pregnant because her pharmacist insists The Pill kills babies, and my life sucks. Maybe I oughta do something about it this November... What's that, mister gravely-voiced man on my teevee? John Kerry burns flags in his backyard? I can't vote for him! He's a flag-flamer! A flip-flopping flag-flamer! And he supports civil unions? He's a flip-flopping, fag-favoring flag-flamer! I'm voting for Bush!"

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why I'm proud to live in a democracy.