All the News that's Fit to Bloviate

If you need a good laugh try going to the Drudge Report website and just read the headlines and advertisements. Run by an insipid bag of protoplasm appropriately named Matt Drudge, the Report is a faux news site. I say faux because most of the story links lead to right wing blogs, not legitimate news sites.

Yesterday an ad appeared at the top with a picture of President Obama that said, “BP Oil Spill, Obama’s Fault? Vote Here” Let’s do a checklist:

Does Obama work for BP? NO
Does he work in the oil industry? NO
Was he on the oil rig when the explosion occurred? NO
Did he cause the methane buildup? NO
Was he in charge of safety checks on the rig? NO
Did he cause the hole in the pipeline? NO

Hmmm. Call me Skeptical Pete if you want to, but I’m not seeing how this is Obama’s fault. The ad might as well say, “BP oil spill, The Cookie Monsters Fault? Vote here”.

(A small aside: James Carville, shut the hell up. Skeletor has been on TV all week crying like a baby whose lost his pacifier for Obama to come down to the gulf. Why? What’s he supposed to down there he can’t do in D.C.? Is he supposed to don a wet suit, dive down and seal the hole with his presidential spit? Go to your room James and let the grown ups talk.)

One of the headlines last week led me to an article posted on WorldNet Daily, a right wing burlap sack filled with conspiracy theories, half-truths and outright lies. It was about private investigators supposedly discovering that Obama was using a social security number that would have been issued to a resident of Connecticut. Since Obama never lived in the Nutmeg State, how could this be? There’s only one answer: Obama isn’t a citizen and to stay ahead of Johnny Law he co-opts other people’s SS numbers. I googled this story and oddly enough the only mentions it’s getting are on right wing blogs. Not one legitimate “news” site gave it any ink.

Another story that the Drudge Report had itself in high dudgeon over was the one about the White House offering Joe Sestak a job to drop out of the Pennsylvania senate race. It was again a story on the festering pustule that is WorldNet Daily with the puffy, prevaricating Dick Morris bellowing like a water buffalo that if true this was an impeachable offense for Obama. Man, the republiclods get a chubby at the invoking of the word “impeach” in any of its forms.

Again, I researched the story. Legitimate news sites talked to historians, ethics professors, lawyers and political experts. Their reaction? “So what? Backroom deals happen all the time.” The most interesting nugget I read was that Reagan and Bush did the same thing. Swing and a miss, no impeachment republichowderheads.

So remember, for the best in online comedy, try The Drudge Report. As my 11^th grade English teacher liked to say: It’s funnier than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.

Rand Paul: Man of the People (If You're White)

Rand Paul, the Tea Party candidate who won the Kentucky republican primary, went on Rachel Maddow’s show last week and said he did not support the 1964 Civil Rights Act in its entirety. He believes it should be ok for business owners to discriminate against serving people they don’t want to serve for whatever reason. He backed up this belief by having his victory celebration at a private, restricted country club. Taking heat for his views, Rand did what any good politician does and blamed someone else by saying, “I never should have gone on with Rachel Maddow.” This brings me to my advice for Rand Paul:

1. Never go on TV with a host who is smarter than you. This will limit you to Access Hollywood and some local morning talk shows but keeping you out of the public eye and your mouth shut is essential.

2. You already have 2 strikes against you. One, you’re a member of the Tea Party whose goals seem to be carrying loaded firearms everywhere they go to make up for their lack of manhood and not having Barack Obama as president. Two, you ran as a republican, a party whose mission statement is “as long as things are good for wealthy, old white guys, the rest of the country can suck it. Oh, and we don’t want Barack Obama as president.”

Now some people would consider your muffin-top hair cut as strike 3 but I’m willing to overlook it. I think you have to be more cautious. Keep your more controversial thoughts to yourself instead of blabbing them to a liberal talk show host 24 hours after winning a primary. Wait until you’re actually in office before you implode.

3. You told President Obama to stop blaming BP for the oil spill. This is an unpopular sentiment so you need to blunt its effects. Go with the old stand-by that your quote was taken out of context and follow with “what I was saying was don’t blame BP for this oil spill, blame them for all oil spills worldwide. Retroactively I feel they are to blame for the Exxon Valdez and any spills that may occur in the future.”

You’ll notice that all of my advice is predicated on the fact that you are a very stupid man and the less you speak the better. When you decide you need to talk try not to sound like a dope and for Pete’s sake, don’t go on with Rachel Maddow anymore. Try the morning chimpanzees on Fox News. I don’t think even you could screw that interview up.

Trapped in the Highlands

I need help. There’s a great old Celtic song called Wild Mountain Thyme. Last Friday at work I listened to Enter the Haggis’s live version which is awesome. The problem is that now I can’t get the tune out of my head. I’ve been singing it for 4 days: morning, noon and night:

Will you go, lassie, go
And we’ll all go together
To pick wild mountain thyme
All around the blooming heather,
Will you go, lassie, go

I tried listening to Slayer’s War Ensemble thinking it would pummel the song out of my head:

Propaganda death ensemble
Burial to be
Corpses rotting through the night
In blood laced misery

But it didn’t work. I was shredding on my air guitar, banging my head and still felt like I was among the blooming heather.

To get music out of my mind altogether I tried to write a poem but this came out:

I knew a man who was a Scot
Who wanted to smoke some pot
He only had 3 dimes
So had to buy wild mountain thyme
Now he thinks he’s a knight in Camelot

Music wasn’t working, writing didn’t work, so I turned to TV. Up and down the dial I searched for help. I stopped on the History channel but they had a 2 hour history of Scotland. I went to the Food Network and Paula Dean was cooking thyme roasted chicken. Home and Garden had the winner of the Best Field of Heather contest and TV Land was showing a marathon of Lassie!

I went to my DVDs to grab Terminator 2. I figured Arnold Schwarzenegger and James Cameron could drive the song from my head. I put the disc in, pushed play and suddenly there was a swell of bagpipes. I had picked out Braveheart instead!

As I write this I am preparing my last ditch effort. I have a new blade in my jigsaw and I plan to cut off the top of my skull to remove my brain unless you have another idea. Help me.

Things You Don't Hear Every Day

“You can never have too many pickles.” That’s a phrase you don’t hear too often. Sure, you may encounter a mountain of a man at the local market one Saturday buying a 55-gallon drum of industrial dills swimming in an ocean of brine and hear him opine, “You can never have too many pickles, that’s my philosophy.” But unless this man is your uncle Skeeter who lives in your grandparent’s root cellar with his collection of dungball matrushka dolls, you’re not likely to hear the phrase again in your lifetime.

Another sentence you’re not going to hear uttered too many times is, “After the nitro-burning diarrhea it gave me, I won’t be eating at Tia Juanita’s Explosive Bowel Movement Café again.” There are several reasons you won’t be privy to this comment. First, I don’t know if a restaurant by this name actually exists. If it does, I’d guess it to be in Tucson or San Antonio or possibly Hell. Second, you would think the name of the establishment would be a tip off for any unsuspecting patrons. The speaker of this line would have to be incredibly stupid. My conclusion is that unless you know someone who is, or are yourself, as dumb as a VH1 reality-show contestant, you will never hear this phrase.

Watching TV the other day I would have been stunned to hear the news reader say, “Republican party leaders John Boehner and Mitch McConnell made cogent remarks today about something President Obama said.” Again there are multiple reasons why you will never hear this said. John Boehner, representative from Ohio, is orange. Seriously, check out a picture. The man’s skin is orange. It’s impossible to listen to a six foot carrot speak about domestic policy and take it seriously. Mitch McConnell, senator from Kentucky, is a gainsayer. He has never had a thought roam through his decaying brain beyond, “listen to what the democrat says, then say the opposite.” This idea has been squatting in Mitch’s brain so long it has taken root like an unrestrained dandelion, its tendrils reaching down into his brain stem.

Finally, one last phrase you will never hear: “this blog made perfect sense and really made me think”. Never gonna happen.

Where Have You Gone, Michelle Bachmann?

Sometimes it’s hard to come up with a subject to write a blog entry about, but there was always one person I could count on to be there for me, and that was Michelle Bachmann. I’ve called Michelle different epithets in my blog: whackjob, wingnut, bat-shit crazy; and they all fit like a warm mitten on a cold winter’s day. But there is another term that fits also: muse. When I needed inspiration she would pop up in a news story making an outlandish statement that I could satirize for a few hundred words and mine for a handful of laughs.

Some of my best blogs were written about Michelle’s ridiculous proclamations, but recently she’s been quiet. Sure, she’s made appearances at Tea Party rallies but she’s just regurgitating the same garbage she’s been talking about for months. She’s not breaking out any new material. It’s like watching Jay Leno every night to hear the same Sarah Palin joke.

Where have you gone Michelle? If you’re not going to unleash the crazy, how can I release the satire from its dark, lonely cave? What happened to my Michelle, the woman who called for a Joseph McCarthyesque investigation into which members of congress were un-American? Where is the Michelle who refused to fill out her census form because she was convinced Obama was going to use the data to put people in internment camps? Where’s my Michelle that blamed the swine flu breakout on Obama because he is a democrat and the last swine flu epidemic also came during a democratic administration? That one combined her lunacy with her complete distaste for fact-checking as it turned out the last swine flu outbreak was actually under a republican president. Where has that ignorant, feeble-minded Michelle gone?

I thought you wanted to be known as the most paranoid, narrow-minded Michelle in America and you’re letting Michelle Malkin win the title without a fight. Maybe you have been saying crazy things the last few months and I’m just not hearing them. Maybe you’re saying them on Fox News which I don’t watch. I tried viewing the morning show once but I was laughing hysterically one minute and throwing up in my mouth the next. I couldn’t take the dichotomy. I tried making a game out of it and counting all the lies they told, but a Cray supercomputer couldn’t keep up with them.

My lament is over now. I’ll continue trolling the news sites and blogs, hoping to hear that Michelle has come to her senses and said something inexplicable like the oil spill in the gulf is Obama’s fault because he has always gotten regular oil changes for his car or that she was abducted by aliens and they tried to brainwash her to vote for healthcare reform.

If Mrs. Bachmann decides to stay silent I will have to find a new muse to help me fill my blog space. But it won’t be the same without my Michelle.

People Who Need to Shut Up, Part 2

Politicians

All of them: Democrat, Republican, Independent, Libertarian, Communist, Teabagger, all of you shut up.

On Monday Republicans voted to block a finance reform bill from making it to the senate floor because they oppose it as it is written. I understand having differing viewpoints so on the surface this isn’t unreasonable. However, the bill wasn’t being voted on. It was just coming to the floor to be debated. So the Republicans were against talking about the bill. They didn’t want to debate whether to debate the bill. By all means, let’s not talk about these things. What good would open dialogue do when writing laws to govern the country? Let’s just scribble something down on a cocktail napkin over a triptych of highballs, add a few doodles or caricatures and vote that baby into law. Or is that what we’ve been doing all along?

The Democrats are no better. The next day I saw some senator on Andrea Mitchell Reports (can’t remember who he was or even what legislation he was speaking about—I know, I have a great ear for detail) saying he believes they have enough votes to push the bill through. Not, “we have a bill we really believe in” or “we have legislation that will change things for the betterment of America”, just we have the votes to cram it through. We could cram all the politicians into a meat grinder, feed the results to farm animals, and they could shit out better representatives than we have now.

Teabaggers, until you start denouncing the members of your movement who openly call for the assassination of the President or bring vile signs to rallies I won’t even listen to your platform.

The Lohan Family

For the love of a merciful God, will you just go away?

Lindsey is a drug addict. Her father is a drug addict. Since her mother is partying at the clubs with Lindsey until 5 in the morning, I’m assuming she’s a drug addict. The 16 year old sister has been living with Lindsey so I’m sure she’s partaking but still has that new drug addict smell.

They’re all attention whores, seeking out cameras to shove their pasty white faces at and microphones to speak the gibberish of a coke-addled mind into. If they combined their IQs into a composite family number it would reach back the evolutionary chain to Australopithecus africanus who liked to hang out in exclusive caves grinding animal bones into powder and snorting it through a reed.

Do us all a favor: buy a little farm out in the middle of nowhere where you can smoke meth and snort coke while basking in each other’s narcissism. The important thing is that you shut up and go away.

My Cat Phantom

Not technically a person, but I'm including him anyway. I love the little ball of fur but he’s like a gray crack addict when it comes to his treats, Temptations.

I get home from my second job at 5:30 a.m. so its 6 a.m. when I get into bed and I have to be up again no later than 12:30 p.m. Six hours of sleep is all I get time for. When I first introduced him to the Temptations I was happy I had finally found a treat he likes. Then he started waking me up at 11, an hour before my alarm goes off, begging for his treats. Soon it was 10:30, then 10. At first he just sat on my nightstand “meow, meow, meow, meow, meow”. Now he jumps onto the bed and stands right over my face “meowmeowmeowmeowmeow” until I wake up. This morning it was 9 a.m. when he woke me. I got up, nudged him out of the bedroom, yelled “Its 9 a.m.!” and slammed the door on his plangent, heart-shaped face.

Of course he sits outside the bedroom door “Meeoow! Meeoow!” Translation: “You’re killing me! I need my fix!” The only way I can drown him out is to turn up the white noise on my alarm clock. This morning I had the rain function on. The problem was I could still hear him “Meeeowwww! Why don’t you love me anymore?” So I turned the rain up louder and it became a competition. Pretty soon I had a thunder storm erupting in the middle of my bedroom and Phantom was on the phone with the SPCA hotline reporting me as an abusive owner.

Puss, for the love of God, let me sleep.