So Dick Cheney shot his friend in the face with a shotgun. Big fuckin deal. I know it sounds like some cold blooded badass shit for a guy to do but keep in mind it was AN ACCIDENT. So it doesn’t make him tough. Being clumsy is nothing to brag about.

I know this is last week’s scandal but I want to spend a couple paragraphs on it because you can’t help but draw parallels between Cheney’s flurry of buckshot and every other colossal mess these morons have created. Have you heard the details of the hunting setup at this place? They were hunting domesticated, flightless, penned in quail. And even still, they had to DRIVE UP to the place where the domesticated, flightless, penned in quail are. It’s like shooting fish in a barrel. Actually not even that. It’s like driving up to a barrel full of fish that can’t swim and shooting them. That’s not hunting, real hunters don’t do that kind of shit. It’s just animal cruelty. What I’m saying is this is classic Bush administration: set out to do something that is morally wrong, then do such a bad fuckin job of it that it turns out way worse than anyone could’ve imagined it would.

As you know I have personally flipped off Dick Cheney from less than ten feet away, so I’ve looked into the eyes of the abyss. I know the type of individual we are dealing with here. We are talking a HARD TARGET type of individual. I have no doubt in my mind that Dick Cheney would like to let loose some homeless vets or hurricane refugees on his private compound and go hunting for the Most Dangerous Game. Fortunately this is a rare case where the guy realizes the limits of his capabilities. He would not be able to hunt Ice-T or Jean-Claude Van Damme, because he can’t shoot for shit. I am positive – though I don’t want to test this out because it would be too dangerous – that any child, even a child without fingers, could be handed a gun and would get closer to hitting the quail than this bald bastard did. If it was ethical to do, this would be scientifically proven.

I mean think about it. He shot his millionaire lawyer buddy in the face. You know how hard it would be to do that? Imagine this. There is a domesticated, flightless quail in a pen on the ground. Then there is the millionaire lawyer in the neon orange hunting vest. By all accounts, the guy was standing on his feet, not on his head. That would mean his face would be five or six feet off the ground. No quail is gonna be anywhere near that area, quail are short, they are not at human height. All you can figure is that fucker was holding the shotgun backwards.

Either that or there’s more to this story than has been revealed. There must be a reason why Cheney and friends wouldn’t talk to the cops until the next day. And all the clues we need were in the State of the Union address. That’s right, I’m talking about animal-human hybrids. Cheney’s friend is a werequail. He looked like a quail. That’s much more plausible than the idea that somebody could actually miss one of the things. You’d have to be completely incompetent to do something like that. But if it just looked like a regular quail you would hit it. Then 18 hours later it wakes up naked in human form with buckshot in its face, shoulder and heart and they notify the police and the press immediately.

Okay so I still think it’s hilarious that my personal flip off buddy Dick Cheney shot a guy in the face. I mean, that’s fucked up. But just because it’s funny doesn’t mean we need to make a big issue out of it. There are many worse crimes for a vice president than being the very worst marksman in the entire history of projectiles, and in fact this guy has committed all of them at least three times. But there is one aspect of this thing that really disgusts me. They made the guy apologize! I don’t know if you saw this but the guy does a press conference, he’s still got buckshot in his face (they say it won’t ever come out), he just had a heart attack a couple days ago, and he says:

“My family and I are deeply sorry for all that Vice President Cheney and his family have had to go through this week.”

That’s the real cold blooded shit right there. I know this guy is friends with Cheney and Karl Rove and wants to keep the franchise going. But for god’s sake man, the fucker just SHOT YOU IN THE FACE. There is buckshot permanently embedded in your face, and we can all see it. Some of it got in your heart, you could’ve died. You could still die.

Mary Jo Buttafuoco, when her husband’s teenage lover shot her in the head, did not come out and apologize to Amy Fisher and her family. Ronald Reagan and James Brady didn’t apologize to whatsisdick after they got shot. I’ve never seen Tupac or Fifty Cents apologize to the people who shot them, and the guy with the chunk missing from his ear didn’t apologize to Mike Tyson. You know why? Because nobody, especially no millionaire republican, is that forgiving. You cannot convince me there wasn’t either a threat or an offer to this guy in order to get that out of him. I predict Secretary of Defense Mark Whittington. Whatever it was though, that shows you the kind of heartless reptile men we’re dealing with here. The type of people who would shoot a guy in the face and then force him to go apologize on TV.

During the week when Cheney Shoots a Guy in the Face was the top story, republican pundits kept saying it was time to start discussing the real issues. And I thought believe me motherfucker, you don’t want to start discussing the real issues. Because I agree, we need to get back to this illegal spying business. This is a big a fucking deal.

In case you missed this one, the government spies on you. AT&T and other companies said yeah guys, no problem, just plug in and check out any phone calls or emails you need to. According to Bush, in one of his familiar whiny-petulant-defensive speeches, “if Al Qaeda is calling your house, we want to know why.” Also, if other people are calling your house, they want to have a listen. According to the whistleblowers who revealed the existence of this problem, they were casting a “wide net” and thousands of people have been listened to. And separate reports have the FBI upset because they were buried in such an avalanche of eavesdropping that they didn’t know what to do with it all. In other words, the program is both abusive and ineffective, the two trademarks of the Bush administration.

Of course, the administration wants to shut down talk of this, they don’t want to have a legitimate debate about it. Even the many republicans who are upset about it want to just take care of it and sweep it under the rug before the mid-terms, so they’re actually proposing changing the law to make it legal. Pretty diabolical. Because yes, it’s a problem that the administration thinks they’re above the law. But if we made it legal to spy without a warrant, that would also be a problem. They don’t want to have a public debate about any of the issues this raises, they just want to come to a quickie compromise and get the news talking about missing white ladies or Jessica Simpson or somebody.

But honestly, I don’t think there’s much to debate. This is wrong, this is not what America is about, we don’t do that shit, case closed. The only thing you can really argue is IF we would be safer if we did that in some other country. But not here since this is fucking America, we don’t give up our liberty just because one or two morons in the audience on that live show they have on Fox mistakenly believe it will make us safer.

There are some motherfuckers out there, and they know who they are. They are guys who may possibly have giant flags flying off the backs of their trucks, or more likely little shiny flags pinned to their suit lapels. Some of these motherfuckers like to point alot of fingers and call alot of names that involve anti-american this and unpatriotic that and etc.

They can talk the talk and they can have the world’s largest selection of yellow ribbon magnets but if the fuckers don’t even know what America IS then they should probaly tone down the red white and blue shit a little. Okay so you have the three colors of the flag memorized but there are some other basics you gotta remember too. First of all, the constitution. Second of all, the constitution. Extra credit: Ben Franklin.

I mean when Milli Vanilli were up there talking about how great they were and it turned out they were lip synching and didn’t even sing on their own album, they got their grammy taken away from them and one of them jumped out a window. And I’m afraid there are some individuals out there who are in the same situation. These are people who use ‘FREEDOM’ and ‘DEMOCRACY’ in sentences more than they use ‘the’ and ‘is,’ and now all the sudden it turns out THEY DON’T EVEN FUCKING BELIEVE IN FREEDOM AND DEMOCRACY.

If you believe that it’s okay for the government to tap your phone line without a warrant, you don’t believe in America. It’s that simple. I mean what do you think is the BASIC PREMISE of this fuckin place anyway? If you don’t give a shit about the most basic American values then 1) please give all your flags to somebody who deserves them and 2) stop trying to change what America is about. It’s not like you didn’t know what you were getting into when you lived here. Ben Franklin has not been kept secret from you. The constitution is widely available, you could’ve checked what it said. I’m not gonna tell you to move to Russia, because that would be unamerican. But you don’t go into a vegan sandwich shop and ask for ribs, and you don’t go to America and ask to be spied on by the government.

Can you believe there are people willing to stand up and say, “I don’t care if they’re listening in on my phone calls and reading my emails, because I’m not doing anything wrong”? You might as well wear a t-shirt that says, “I’m with stupid” and has the “with” part and the arrow crossed out. You’re missing the point. You’d make a good citizen in a dystopian sci-fi story.

The only way they can justify that kind of pathetic Big Brother suckling is to turn it into a simplistic this-or-that choice, like it’s either a. police state or b. get blown up. But you know what, that’s not what America is. You can’t choose to abandon everything America is about because you’re scared. I’m not saying that’s for pussies, although it is. But I’m saying that it just doesn’t make any god damn sense. If freedom puts us in danger, that sucks. Because we’re keepin the freedom. That’s just the way we do it around her.

So now that we’ve settled that issue, let’s agree that it doesn’t even have a thing to do with what’s going on here with this domestic spying. Okay, so they’ve made a plausible alibi here by establishing that this administration could fuck up anything from nation building to disaster relief to shooting flightless domesticated penned-in quail to– well, I was gonna say putting on pants but how about the less hypothetical swallowing a fucking pretzel. Despite the long track record of fucking up every imaginable detail I still find it hard to believe that they just FORGOT to ask for warrants hundreds of times.

In case you haven’t heard, all they had to was go to a secret FISA court AFTER they’ve already done the spying, and ask a very lenient judge to approve it. This has been going on since the ’70s and apparently something like 6 have been turned downed in that time. The fact that that’s all they have to do to spy on you is actually kind of scary if you ask me, but they couldn’t even be bothered to do that. They did like those odds.

So it doesn’t take a genius to notice there’s something they’re not telling us here. Obviously, if they’re not asking for Absolute Guaranteed and Legally Required Court Approval, that means they’re spying on someone that no way in hell they’re gonna get a warrant for. Which, it sounds like, would be pretty fucking tough. There has been some pretty convincing speculation on who they’re actually spying on:

1. JOURNALISTS. This one kind of makes sense because there are some journalists that have interviewed actual terrorists. If they were spying on them to try to find out their sources, that would probaly be the closest thing to a legitimate reason. And still illegal. This theory picked up steam when whatsername on CNN asked the writer who broke this story if he had any information that Christiane Amanpour had been spied on. There hasn’t ever been an explanation for why she asked that and CNN even removed it from the transcript. Hmmmm.
2. POLITICIANS. Shit man wouldn’t it be beautiful to watch Scott McLellan answer questions about tapping John Kerry’s phone during the campaign? Maybe this is wishful thinking, but it just seems like what these people would do. After all, they did bug UN Council members and try to blackmail other countries into approving the Iraq invasion. It seems kind of crazy that modern republicans would do the exact thing that brought Nixon down, but remember, ignoring the lessons of history is one of their favorite hobbies.
3. THE ANTHRAX KILLER. Just kidding. I don’t think they’re looking for that guy anymore. Kind of interesting that he also went after journalists and democrat politicians. Hmmm. Oh well, I guess we will never know or think about it again so really who cares other than the people who lost family members and friends, etc.
4. PRETTY MUCH EVERYBODY. Actually, I don’t know if I’ve seen anybody speculate this, but it’s my theory. They couldn’t go to FISA and say “give us a warrant for everybody.” To understand this idea you gotta go back to that quaint year of 2002, when I and others were shitting our pants over Iran-Contra felon John Pointdexter and his Total Information Awareness program, the creepy program with the all-seeing-eye logo that was gonna compile a huge database on all american citizens and use algorhithms to figure out which ones of us to send to Gitmo. Well Congress got upset, forced Pointdexter to resign and cut off the funding for the program. The End. Or was it? Earlier this month at a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing, Iran-Contra scumbag/current intelligence czar John Negroponte was asked whether Total Information Awarness was continuing in a different form, and instead of saying “No” he answered with a less comforting “I don’t know.” Later, the former head of the NSA was asked the same question and said, “I’d like to answer in closed session.” Uh oh.The National Journal has an article on this now. Apparently when the funding got cut off they didn’t take that to mean “stop doing this creepy shit you fuckin sickos” but instead to mean “please find funding elsewhere and change the code name.” Now instead of the terrifying “TOTAL INFORMATION AWARENESS” it has the more enigmatic name “BASKETBALL.” Seriously. According to the article, none of their sources would comment on whether Bush’s eavesdropping program was related to Basketball, but both are always described as “an early-warning system.” If you read what some of the whistleblowers were talking about, they talk about scanning through everyone’s phone calls with software that recognizes certain threatening words. That kind of thing seems like it would go hand-in-hand with this all seeing basketball business.

But how can you defend our liberty when every time you turn around there’s something else to be pissed off about? One day they’re spying, the next day they’re shooting a guy in the face and then the day after that they let the UAE buy the company that runs our ports and don’t even tell congress. Or Bush. So there’s already a new scandal of the week. I won’t pretend to have a deep understanding of this port security issue but it seems to me like it’s the same old shit with FEMA and everything else. They only care about hooking up their rich buddies and corporations and the safety and well being of Americans is an afterthought, if it’s a thought at all. Which it isn’t.

I personally am not comfortable with a state run corporation from the United Arab Emerates running our ports, and it’s not comforting to know that many of our ports are already run by other countries. But the issue is bigger than that. These fuckin things have been sitting there wide open regardless of who’s running them. It is flat out ridiculous that this administration hasn’t done much of anything to increase safety there. As somebody who lives on a coast, this seems pretty important to me. We can spend billions upon billions to start a horrible civil war in Iraq but we can’t throw a couple bucks at protecting ourselves at our own front door.

By “protecting us” by the way, I should probaly reiterate that I do not mean listening in on our phone calls and reading our emails. You know who you are. Stop spying and mind your own business, assholes.

–VERN