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.

Custard's Last Stand

sOne 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.