Sometimes I think I oughta just change the name of this column to WHAT THE SHIT IS GOING ON IN THIS COUNTRY?! I mean seriously.
Take this Howard Dean business for example. I know the republicans are scowering the shit out of his past. The media wants him dead, and they’ll do whatever they can to nail his balls to a wall and then pee all over him. You know, practically every politician is getting a bribe or a blowjob or some stupid shit and all everybody can find on this guy is, “he went ‘Yeeeahhh!!!'”
That’s a fucking scandal? How did this even make it on TV? It’s been the top story all week. Shit, even Michael Jackson is real news compared to this! This is a waterskiing squirrel. They’re writing epic poems about a 2 second video clip of the guy being goofy to rile up a crowd. I mean, they had more intelligent discussions on the red carpet coverage at the golden globes. They didn’t do that for Bush’s “fool me once, shame, shame on me, shame shame shame, you can’t fool me again” or whatever he said. They didn’t do it for dropping his dog or falling of a segway (previously believed impossible) and it took them months to notice him standing on the aircraft carrier or saying “bring ’em on” or lying about uranium or etc.
But Howard Dean goes “yyyeaaaah!!!” in a funny voice and they’re outraged.
I’ve been beating up on Fox, uh, News for a long time so let me take some swipes at CNN. I can’t turn the fucking channel on without seeing Robert Novak (now known as “Bob”, he’s on so much) criticizing Howard Dean. Novak was on one CNN show the other day talking about “the now infamous speech” and he said “that was what Howard Dean wanted to show America, and America didn’t like it.”
Oh yeah, Novak? Well America didn’t like you outing a fucking CIA agent in your column, but somehow you are still working and being taken seriously. America didn’t like you leaking democratic memos stolen from their computers! (Don’t tell me you didn’t think there was something suspicious about getting secret democrat strategy memos from republicans. You’re a grown adult now, you can figure this shit out on your own.)
Two tips for the cable news assholes if they want to have at least some sort of vague appearance of being real news:
- don’t act like a guy going “yeeeeaaahh!” is a serious issue worth discussing
- if you’re going to have a political analyst talking about what the democrats should do, don’t have it be the white house plant at the center of two huge political scandals. I mean actual scandals involving compromising national security for political retribution and big time partisan dirty tricks ethics violation related program activities. Those type of people don’t have the most credibility, in my opinion.
Of course, the way they justify playing the “yyeaahhh!!!” clip over and over again is by saying that it means Howard Dean is “angry.” What the fuck? First of all, we’re ALL fucking angry. This isn’t an unusual thing if Howard Dean is angry. If Bush doesn’t make you want to put your fist through a wall, you must be the fucking buddha. Second of all, going “yyeeaahhh!!!” doesn’t mean you’re angry. The dude was smiling. He was hyping up the crowd. When the “hype man” for a rapper goes out and says “put your hands up! put your hands up! yeah! yeah!” does it mean he’s angry? No. He’s happy. Angry is when you start tossing chairs around or throwing garbage cans through store windows or rolling cars or punching people in the balls or smashing heads through glass or “hulking out.” If he had been angry he would’ve worked “motherfucker” in there three or four times and stomped on something.
I can predict what’s next. As the shocking “yeeeaaahhhH!!!” scandal begins to die down, and Dean builds a little more Momentum® in other primaries, he’ll be out in the cold somewhere and they’ll get a shot of him talking with a little bit of a booger on his nose.
The clip will be shown on the cable news channels, the late night talk shows, the sunday morning talk shows and the prime time interview shows. It will be joked about in monologues and discussed on talk radio and in newspaper editorials. CNN’s Talk Back Live will have a call in poll about how the booger will affect Dean’s campaign. The experts will agree that after “yeeahhh!!!” and now the booger, Dean is finished. Mainstream voters do not want a booger on the president’s nose. Novak will say that Howard Dean may think America wants boogers but America does not like boogers. Dean and his wife will have to do a big sit down interview and Diane Sawyer will ask his wife how many times in a day Howard has a booger on his nose. Does he ever wipe it on anything. Does she ever have to do sort of a rub her nose gesture to give him the suggestion that he should check for a booger. Even the people who thought the booger wasn’t a big deal at first will start trying to defend the booger. He doesn’t usually have a booger. Did you see that new speech, he was doing a lot better, there were no boogers at all. It’s back to the old booger-free Dean.
Meanwhile we’ll still have a $447 billion defecit, I won’t have fuckin’ insurance, nobody will have jobs, Halliburton will continue getting away with murder, Osama bin Laden will be lounging on a beach somewhere, an unidentified 13 year old kid locked up in Guantanamo Bay for more than a year without charges will start wondering about changes in his body, there’ll still be soldiers dying every day, Afghanistan and Iraq will remain in total chaos without the democracy they were promised for christmas, our nuclear power plants will still be unprotected, John Ashcroft will be sitting hard on top of our civil rights, homophobic zealots will be checking for margins to scribble on in the constitution, STEROID ABUSE WILL BE RUNNING RAMPANT!, I guess…
…and we’ll be talking about “yyyeaaaaah!!!” and a fuckin’ booger instead of what the fuck we’re gonna do about this mess these assholes pushed us into.
Now, I can’t vote obviously, and if I would I would vote for ANYBODY that would run against Bush. I swear to god, I almost would even vote for fucking Lieberman over Bush, that’s how hardcore I am about this. I would vote for R. Kelly over Bush, even if he had a little girl for a running mate. I would trust him more.
So I’m not going to endorse somebody or say not to vote for somebody. But I don’t think we should fall for this media blitz that’s trying to trick us into hedging our bets and voting for the establishment democrat. I don’t hear people saying “I voted for him because I believe in him!” I hear, “I voted for him because I heard he was the one who has Electability®.” I’m voting for him in case other people will vote for him also.
I’ll say this about John Kerry. I like that he’s a vietnam vet who came back and protested the war. His catch phrases are pretty good. He has three words for Bush: “bring it on.” (I think it should be “bitch, it’s curtains,” but oh well.) He has a message for the special interests and all those fuckers: “We’re coming, you’re going, and don’t let the door hit you [where the good lord split you] on the way out.” (I would add, “I just cleaned it.”)
But there’s one thing I can’t get over: he voted for the Iraq war resolution. He fucking fell for it.
Sure, it was cool when he told Rolling Stone that he didn’t know Bush would “fuck it up so bad.” And yes, he was lied to. But you remember my columns. I knew it was all lies. You knew it was all lies. Dennis Kucinich and many other democrats knew it. Millions of people all around the world knew it and took to the streets to say it. We got pictures, man. We all knew it, so you’d think the vietnam vet who came home and protested the war and now he might be president – you’d think that guy would be able to figure it out too. He’s not Robert Novak. He’s not Radio.
So Kerry voted for the war, Howard Dean said “yyeeeaahhhH!!!!” in a funny voice. I guess they decided which one was the bigger scandal, but I disagree with their choice.
One more thing about CNN. I watched the state of the union on there. I don’t know if you noticed this, but at one point Bush said he wanted to make a constitutional amendment to define marriage as “between a man and a woman.” In other words, “I hate gays so much, I’m willing to ruin the constitution to prove it.”
If you think about it, the whole idea makes no sense. First of all, from the government’s perspective, marriage has NOTHING to do with religion. As far as Bush is concerned, marriage is a legal status. It’s going into a court room and getting a judge to sign a paper. It’s signing up on the internet to be a reverend. It’s eloping at the church of Elvis. It’s going on Fox and having america vote for who you should marry using a touch tone phone. It’s a joke gone too far about britney going to las vegas and getting married for the weekend. Religion has nothing to do with it on your end, Bush. That’s not up to you.
And second of all, if you have to specify it as between a man and a woman, doesn’t that mean that it really isn’t? Like, if we don’t SPECIFY that gays aren’t allowed to get married, then one would naturally assume they were, right?
Just to really hammer the point home that these guys are heartless, amoral scumbags with the nectar of human souls dripping from their lips and staining their thousand dollar ties, Dick Cheney stood up and applauded the constitutional amendmant comment, and his own daughter is a lesbian!
This no doubt will be a notorious moment in history, like those pictures of George Wallace trying to prevent black kids from going to white schools. This asshole is actually asking to amend the constitution to prevent civil rights.
And after the speech I watched a good hour and a half of CNN, supposedly the most liberal of the cable news channels. They never even mentioned it! It wasn’t even on their radar as a major part of the speech. In fact, it’s a week later and I still haven’t seen it mentioned on tv. No criticism, no praise, no footage of log cabin republicans acting out that scene from SCANNERS. Nobody cares.
Meanwhile, did you notice this David Kay thing? In one of the state of the union’s funniest gags, Bush cracked, “already David Kay’s report has found dozens of weapons related program activities.” This of course was a pretty big change from last year’s speech, where there were hundreds of tons of specific weapons that could kill such and such amount of people.
And then to build on the joke, David Kay resigns a couple days later and says he doesn’t think there were ever any weapons during the ’90s! That was hilarious. I wondered how they could screw up so bad that even their stooges are starting to turn on them. But now I’m starting to suspect something more diabolical. As David Kay does more interviews, he keeps putting the idea out there that the CIA gave bad intelligence, and that Bush is a victim!
We remember, of course, before the war, when the intelligence community was saying there wasn’t proof of weapons, and when they were saying their intelligence was being cherrypicked, and that they were being pressured (including by Cheney, in unprecedented personal visits) to come up with intelligence that would support going to war. And now we’re supposed to believe this.
Look, I’m no fan of the CIA. I don’t enjoy their work. But it is pretty clear to anyone who’s been paying attention that it wasn’t their bright idea to go in there. George Tenet even testified to congress that an invasion would be the only thing that could cause Saddam to give weapons to terrorists.
But if this is the strategy, it might turn out to be pretty funny. I personally wouldn’t want to piss off the CIA. Isn’t that like pissing off the mafia? Imagine all the things the CIA knows about Bush and Cheney that we don’t know. If they piss off the CIA, they could go down pretty spectacularly. Hopefully, they’ll cover it on CNN.
ABOUT THE OSCARS
The one thing that prevents me from changing the column title is that these academy folks seem to be getting a little hipper. There were alot of long shots I was pushing for this year that actually made it.
*John Depp. A comedy role as a drunken pirate in a silly summer blockbuster based on a Disneyland ride. Completely deserving of an oscar nomination, but you’d never think he’d actually get one. Hooray for justice.
*the little girl from WHALE RIDER. (put another r. kelly joke here) This girl was flat out great. But they were pushing her for supporting actress. Somehow she still got lead actress. good job little girl.
*Triplets of Belleville song. Perfect opening to the film that gets you absorbed into the world of the movie. did you notice the cartoon Django Rheinhardt had fucked up trailer fire fingers under his Mickey Mouse gloves? Later the song shows up again in an amazing way. Plus it’s catchy as hell which seems to be all these nincompoops want. I was hoping it would get nominated but I was surprised it did. Can’t wait to see who sings it on the show.
*LOST IN TRANSLATION. Yeah we all loved this movie but when we saw it we never thought it would get nominated for best picture. That kid sure knows how to direct a picture. Best movie from a Copolla since CAPTAIN EO.
Well I gotta go now but thanks everybody and drop me a line some time thanks
–Vern
