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Political Fucktardery a la Carte - What Really Matters
Yep, this is gonna be another one of those columns. What? Like YOU can concentrate on just one of these stupid stories. Come on, you know you wanna graze. Consider my column your pasture.
Where to begin? Oh, yeah – with the dirty dirty sex, of course. Continuing the proud Anglo-American tradition of linking lawmaking and buggery, Florida Congressman Mark Foley found his gay ass at the center of this election season’s biggest non-story after sending some randy IMs and e-mails to his teenage coffee-fetchers, and getting caught – THREE YEARS AFTER THE FACT. Let’s forget for a moment that no laws were broken and no sex was had – this story just had too much leg for the political press, always frantic to draw attention and ratings away from hard-hitting entertainment stories like Nicole Ritchie’s anorexia, to pass up. The tagline, as per usual, was “WHO’S TO BLAME?”
CNN and its compatriots, completely flummoxed by an opportunity to take a REPUBLICAN sex scandal and run with it, scrambled to take a position that didn’t make them look like they were gloating TOO badly, while FOXNews provided us with more laughs than Jon Stewart as it contorted its way through its own hilarious version of the stages of grief and denial. First Bill O’Reilly’s graphics department tried to spin the ultimate damage control for the Republicans by erroneously identifying Foley as a Democrat. When blatant denial didn’t work, they went into overdrive with the tried-and-true conservative tactic of aggressive-offense-as-defense, giving massive face time to a few pugnacious second-string Republican House members who busily feigned moral outrage at the OPPOSING party. In the most Rube-Goldberg-ish spin in political history, these House members expressed absolute RAGE that the Democrats had had the nerve to know about this scandal and sit on it until it was most politically advantageous to make it public. This is more or less the tactic they’ve chosen to roll with in the intervening week and a half, ignoring the fact that there’s no evidence the Dems could possibly have known about this, while the House GOP contingent itself has left a downright iridescent paper trail on Foley’s appetite for pages that stretches all the way back to 2000.
In the most dazzling display of partisan switchback, one intrepid conservative columnist, the largely unheard-of Jeffrey Lord, delivered an online diatribe that used the “six degrees of separation” paradigm to link House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi to NAMBLA.
It couldn’t have been easy going for Lord to draw this conclusion. For one thing, Nancy Pelosi, being a woman, lacks the standard equipment required to be a NAMBLA member, being neither an “M” nor a “B”. But because Nancy Pelosi once marched in the San Francisco Gay Pride Parade next to Harry Hay, a now-dead gay activist who once kinda sorta said something that wasn’t completely critical of NAMBLA, Lord stretched a slender thread of credulity from NAMBLA to Hay to Pelosi and wove a column blasting Pelosi around it, slapped an unflattering Pelosi file photo (admittedly not difficult to find) on top and called it a column. The column has been circulating on the Internet to a raucously enthusiastic reception and citings aplenty among conservatives.
The punchline to all this? The tactic will probably work, because Americans have proven that they have a fatal blind spot when it comes to the general cuntery of the Republican party, and it would appear that we are only getting dumber. At least our kids are, if results of the scholastic aptitude tests that have been the mandatory centerpiece of the Bush Administration’s No Child Left Behind public school program are any indication. Under the ostensible guidelines of the program, nearly half of the schools in the country should expect to have their Federal funding cut for nonperformance among special ed students and those living below the poverty line. Surprise, surprise.
But enough about our stupid kids. So depressing, and besides, if they didn’t want to be stupid, they shouldn’t have been born retarded or poor. Onward…
We all know that the North Korean president – or, as he likes to refer to himself in the apparently salvia-fueled parallel universe in which he dwells; Omnipotent Master and King – Kim Jung-Il is clinically fucking insane. Well, now he appears to be a clinically fucking insane dude with a successfully tested nuclear warhead. At least that’s what he says, and we know he blew up SOMETHING that registered as a small disturbance on the Richter scale. The problem, as always when dealing with a known lying headcase, is that he could be, well, lying. And this is a plausible possibility, considering North Korea is broke as shit. Kim Jun-Il himself wears those government-surplus glasses sported by poorer residents of Indian reservations, so it would’ve had to have taken some heavy-duty McGyvering to make nuclear capability a reality for him. China is considering dispatching inspectors to look for trace elements of uranium, paperclips and duct tape.
The UN Security Council, true to form, took immediate dynamic action upon hearing of the possible test; they issued a stern statement that a wrist-slapping might possibly be in the offing if Kim’s hijinks didn’t cease immediately, or very close to immediately. Meanwhile, Bush, when cornered by the American press on the matter, fumfered his way through a tough condemnation, followed by a reiteration of his longtime position that we should really get China to do something about this.
Finally, onto the single piece of news that most Americans care about: the acquisition of YouTube by Google. This is a developing story with possible long-term ramifications for Internet-wired citizens the world over – will Google change the YouTube format? Will the usage terms become tougher? What will that shirtless old hippie dude who posts his own monologues have to say about all this? Will we lose any of the several dozen versions of the Tamil movie clip of that breakdancing “Little Superstar” midget?
At the end of the day it’s this, not the midterms, not the page-mashing congressman, not our failing educational system and certainly not the tin-pot dictator in the eighties glasses, that we’ll want to know about. Stay tuned.
