You Done Fucked Us Up Good, Man

Flush with Clintonian surplus, a wide-eyed George W. Bush wanted desperately to re-make America in his own brush-clearing, compassionate conservative image. So the president fed us some lines straight from the hook-line-sinker playbook, preying on our post-90s naiveté by touting his [ready-to-profit friends’] vision of The Ownership Society.

He's failed miserably. Here's the closest the Bush White House has come to achieving their Ownership Society: With its bailout largesse, private dealmaking and specially financed loans, the federal government does now own much of our society. Ironic how seven years ago we’re told to boycott the French; and here we stand now, adopting their very ideals.

Instead, Bush's brazen ideological architects will leave office having produced, more astonishingly, The Schizophrenic Society. After eight brutally deflating years of embarrassing misadventures and horrible policy-making, nobody out there quite knows whom to believe and whom to trust, where to turn and where to hide. We don’t know who among us is ultimately right and who is unfathomably, unconscionably wrong, who has our best economic and social interests at heart and who wants to make a special rapey kind of love to our faceholes. We're in a constant state of ever-deepening paranoia.

The Bush administration over the last eight years has resurrected the concept of the schizogenic mother, the idea that parental behavior causes mental illness in the child. Says my good friend Dr. Hoobs, a foremost scholar of all things psychology, by presenting two (or more) conflicting messages, the child's put in a double bind -- a damned if you do and damned if you don't unanswerable conflict that can cause intense psychological damage.

These schmucks in the White House are so expert at inflicting this mental illness that it, more than anything else, has fundamentally changed the outlook of the nation. More than 9/11 and the war, more than the Wall Street meltdown and the subsequent bailouts, more than the whole using the Constitution as toilet paper thing, the Bush administration's constant stream of conflicting messages on every issue has left the American populace in a delusional state of reality.

They tell us we have to go to war because of an imminent threat, that there are weapons of mass destruction. But we also have to depose tyranny and keep liberty on the march (offer not valid in North Korea, Cuba, and most of Africa). They tell us free-market economics is the only way to keep democratic capitalism alive. But we also have to intervene in the financial mess with nearly a trillion bucks worth of your money. They tell us we have to protect the founding father-inspired rights of our citizens. But our fingers were totally crossed, brah. Sorry for the sour body language.

Often times, Dr. Hoobs tells me, the schizophenic child reacts to this illness by creating an internal world of fantasy, contributing to an utter confusion as to what's actual reality. And you can see this manifesting itself in the ever-present escapism we see on a daily basis: reality television, interactive gamer culture, Internet communion. Our brains are constantly inundated with images outside our genuine experiences, furthering our rampant delusions. We're fucked, and it ain't just the economy and the war. We're well and truly fucked...in the head.

So when someone asks, "Do you think we need a bailout?," the right answer should be, "Why ask me? I'm fucking lost. I'm fucking sick. I'm pleading insanity, and so should you." How do we know who's right on Georgia, or a financial rescue, or what constitutes torture? How do we know whom to follow? You're asking complex issues of people that at this point in the country's history could all plead insanity on everything from the election to the economy to the world at large. And a president in search of a legacy just found an incredibly unflattering one: the Schizophrenic Society. Congratulations, folks, you've inflicted illness on the American public.

Liberals playing its not-so-friendly game of I’m Gonna Git You, Moosesucka with Us Versus Them Specialist Sarah Palin thought they had their checkmate when Charlie Gibson threw down the now-famous Bush Doctrine Gauntlet to the world’s most politically dangerous Lenscrafters model. Gibson failed miserably because his non-smoking gun backfired: It’s fairly easy to prove beyond all doubt that the Bush Doctrine actually has as few as four and as many as six wonky definitions.

So perhaps we should put aside the idea of the Bush Doctrine from public consciousness. We should be talking about the dreaded Bush Syndrome. It's a doozy.

Be Back Shortly

There's a whole lotta shit goin' down right now. As such, I'm suspending my blog. I can't do multiple things at once, even though I really want you to read it. I trust this is the right decision. I'll pick it up when it's politically convenient for me to do so again.

Someone Please Code Red This Fucker...

Someone should cram that sweat-stained bloody sock right down Curt Schilling's gullet and pray to the God of Attention-Seeking Douchefaces that it has the same effect it had on Private Willie Santiago down in Gitmo. It seems to me that death by lactic acidosis may be the only way to shut this blustery blowhard up for good.

The future 300-pound, disabled right-hander has issued yet another one of his classic Unnecessary Punditry barbs. Schilling, apparently with his oversized finger on the pulse of everything New York, claims the entire New York region is cheering Tom Brady's season-ending injury, a claim I have yet to see in person or read in print. Nonetheless, that didn't stop the man whose nose is everywhere but his own sad, sorry business of being a fat fuck with too much time on his hands from sounding off anyway:

"The euphoria in New York is palpable," Schilling said. "The Yankees suck this year and they are bitter and mad and making excuses over that. Now they got Tom going down so New York's excited. It's unfortunate, but when you crawl to the top of the pile you will have people trying to knock you down."

To be fair, the Yankees do suck. That's no secret. To be unfair (or, real), Schilling is a loudmouth know-it-all who, in reality, knows next to nothing. They say it's better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt, an adage for which the Big Schill has absolutely no use or no regard. Only full-fledged idiots cheer for other people's major injuries, and while many Jets fans perked up when they heard one of the league's best players and Jets' chief rivals was lost for the year, that's not to be confused with palpable euphoria (we'll save that for when someone publicly punches Schilling in his chubby face).

Perhaps more importantly, does Schilling understand how New York sports fans operate? He does know that not everybody roots together, right? For instance, there are these people known as Giants fans, which Schilling should recognize as the people who are euphoric about their team's winning the Super Bowl against Brady's, placing them firmly on the Don't Care Whether Brady Gets Horribly Injured Or Facefucks a Moose list. Then there are these other people called Mets fans, who generally hate the Yankees just as much as Red Sawx supporters, and these New Yorkers aren't "bitter" and "mad" because their team is actually in first place, unlike the second-place Sawx.

Schilling's opinions are often as bloated as his waistline and, unusually for a pitcher with so few walks, way off target. This one's especially stupid, however, because it shows his willingness to admit his warped perspective holds no roots in reality. The only way New York will truly be unified in euphoria is when someone permanently sews up this fat fuck's cakehole and breaks his stumpy blogging fingers.

One Last Note on the Palin Nomination

After two straight political posts, let's get back to what we do best: Being jerks.

Slack LaLane co-founder Don Fiedler and I had some brunch with our main squeezes and some associates yesterday when we started talking about The Politics. We discussed Palin's well-delivered though monumentally dumb zinger about how community organizers are like mayors without the responsibilities (the line that set me off on Thursday), and that's when we figured out who the perfect running mate for Obama would have been.

Obama should have picked that poor Austrian woman whose father locked her in their windowless basement for 24 years and fathered seven children with her. I'd love to see her step up to the DNC podium and take this cheap shot at Johnny Mac:

"I guess a prisoner of war is sort of like being locked in your basement for 24 years, except that you aren't raped by your dad."

Full applause. Tons of laughs. Check mate, fuckers.

Us & Them...and People Like You

Took me a few days, but I've finally got it. Sarah Palin isn't just the wild card, the catalyst, the spark. Her nomination delivers exactly what this election cycle's been missing: the wedge. Leave it to an Alaskan to heat things up.

Palin brings "people like you" back to the table. Always to Republican advantage, she revives the Culture Wars, which had been at best a series of small skirmishes fought mainly on the world wide web. You couldn't play the People Like You card with Obama, because then you'd be a racist. You couldn't play the People Like You card with McCain, because then you'd be an ageist, and worse, an ageist that's against the troops. But with Palin, a small-town hockey mom governor with charisma and poise and a shitload of familial shenanigans and right-wing social ideologies, we're about to hear "What people like you don't understand" a whole lot more than if Romney, Pawlenty or Lieberman snagged the VP slot.

So now this election's not about the polarizing war. Now it's not about the sputtering economy. Now it's not about rising gas prices, stagnant wages or the declining standard of living for many middle and working-class families.

Now it's about wholesome small-town folks versus those assholes in the big bad city.

Now it's about our social wedge issues: An unmarried pregnant teenage daughter plays midwife to a rekindled abortion debate; support for the 1998 Alaskan constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage riles the gays; B-roll footage of her firing semi-automatic weapons triggers the gun control shootout; a strapping 19-year-old Army son questions everyone's Do You Support Our Troops Enough? nationalism; Palin's questionable church sermon video brings God into the fold; and new revelations about her attending five colleges in six years matriculates the furor over educated elitist snobbery.

Oh, it's on like Donkey Kong.

Focus on the Family fuckfaceian founder James Dobson declared last year that he wouldn't help elect McCain: "Speaking as a private individual, I would not vote for John McCain under any circumstances," he said. Enter Alaskan Tina Fey and you've got yourself a whole lotta flip-flopping before God. Just this week Dobson praised Palin, giving McCain renewed support from the evangelicals that helped re-elect Bush in the name of Baby Jesus. McCain doesn't have to court the wedge issue voters when Dobson's saying things like: "...Now especially with this selection, with just an outstanding V.P. candidate as a running mate, I tell you what I am relieved and very excited."

I fell for it. Mostly everyone fell for it. This is what McCain's people wanted. They may not have vetted her accurately, but I doubt they even care now. If we thought 2004 was bad, the Culture War is about to get more heated than ever. When Palin last night delivered the line, "I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a community organizer, except that you have actual responsibilities," I didn't even realize how deep that cut. If I were the Obama camp, I'd respond with something like this:

"How dare this two-bit hack knock community organizers when they're the people who get stuff done when their mayors and governors don't, or can't, or won't? How dare she put down the responsibilities of people who are out on the frontlines to help fight AIDS and homelessness, hunger and child abuse? How dare she belittle the efforts of REAL people taking REAL stands against the problems they face in their own communities, while she sits in a comfortable desk chair and contributes nothing but a signature or a veto?"

Only, as I've come to realize in the past 24 hours, that answer means nothing. No matter how well rebutted, their ultimate point is that "community organizers" represent big-city liberal ideology, and the concept itself will always be a joke to Them. Just as a mayor of 6,000 people thinking it's a real job that counts as experience towards the presidency of these United States will always be a joke to Us. There just will always be a divide between the town and the city, the hustle and the flow, the conservatives and the liberals. But when social conservatism gets in the way of a perfectly good election, all hell breaks loose. And Us and Them fever pisses all over the rulebook.

It was always there, but now it's everywhere. And now it gets ugly.

(Oh, and on a side note, is John McCain a POW? Because if he is, they might want to play that up a little more. I am just finding out about this.)

Labor Day Pains for the Maverick

Last night I returned from literal heaps of fresh mussels and three picturesque rounds of golf on Prince Edward Island and found the world not quite the same as when I left.

Mostly out of touch with the outside world, I came home to discover that Hurricane Gustav forced the evacuation of the entire city of New Orleans (blacks too, this time!), photogenic striker Fernando Torres limped off the pitch and joined talismanic midfielder Steven Gerrard on the Liverpool injured list, the Dutch believe an American attack on Iran's nuclear program is imminent, our pets' heads even may or may not be falling off. and the Republicans delivered the all-time greatest post-convention gift to their Democratic counterparts: In picking Alaska Governor Sarah Palin to fill the ticket, the McCain campaign effectively took the "experience to be president" meme off the table.

Republicans everywhere rejoiced when Obama selected Joey The Hairplug -- after all, how can you claim with a straight, half-black face to be the Campaign of Change when the guy just below you on the ticket has three decades of stereotypical Washington insider experience, a man with political solids owed and ties to corporate lobbyists? And then a week later, having learned nothing at all, the McCain campaign fumbled the ball right back (or the Obama campaign broke serve right back, depending on whether you're more excited for the start of the NFL season or the last week of the US Open). You can't be about the Ready To Leadness of the opposition candidate when you're a 72-year-old stressed-out cancer survivor who just selected to be your running mate the two-year governor of the 48th most populous state.

If you're one Girl Jumping Out of a Cake Surprise away from certain death, and the whole theme of your campaign surrounds your opponent's inexperience, but you still want to make the maverick choice, you might want to choose an outsider governor whose state's population density is more than 1.1 people per square mile (hint: there are 49 other states from which to select).

Clearly McCain was pandering to the frowning, frumpy pantsuits in Hillary Clinton's camp. McCain can win this election, and the best place for him to look for votes is in the same place that put 18 million cracks in the glass ceiling. At least 30 percent of Clinton's primary voters say they won't vote for Obama, so McCain's going for the Adams Apple-less jugular and pandering to women. Or is he? He (well, at least his campaign) has to be smart enough to know women will not flock to a woman who has run and will as pro-life in all cases, pro-Creationism in schools and pro-Pat Buchanan.

So maybe she was just a last-minute curveball substitute for someone's turning them down or their backing out of a more-qualified candidate. Joe Lieberman? McCain loves him, especially after Joe let him cheat off him on the Shia/Sunni test. But he already lost once, and he's way too Jewy and boring. Charlie Crist? I said glass celing, not "glass closet." Chuck Todd knows what's up. Mitt Romney? America fucking hates Mormons. The right answer would probably have been Tim Pawlenty -- yes, that Tim Pawlenty.

Elections are not won or lost on the bottom of the ticket, but Palin poses some serious problems for McCain. Conservatives love her, and they're donating like mad again, but this one should unravel pretty quickly. For one, she's under fucking investigation for abuse of power (if true, she'd fit right in with the current administration of fuckfaces). Similarly, she was nearly recalled as Mayor of Wasilla for firing the police chief and library director for not supporting in her 1996 race. And I bet you'll be hearing all day and night about the allegations that her son is really her daughter's son, and even more about how her 17-year-old daughter actually is pregnant this time for real. Sick vetting, Jonny Mac, sick vetting. Admit that the only thing your campaign learned about her is that she didn't use "boom goes the dynamite" in her sportscast:



Families should be off-limits, but they never are. Ask Chelsea Clinton how much she loved 1991-2000. So allow me to pose another question altogether. Political gain aside, does it not make Palin either a horrible mother or incredibly naive to put her daughter in this position? Kids and families should be out of bounds, be we all know they're not. She had to know this issue (the real pregnancy) was going to come up and be a major national news story had she decided to prioritize personal and political ambition above her family's privacy. And she went ahead and did it anyway.

The media shouldn't be focused on this shit, but they are, and now we have blogs that care about it a whole lot more. So personal privacy among our politicians (shit, even among our citizens) is a thing of the past. She knew that. By accepting his nomination, she basically said "Fuck it, my daughter will deal with it somehow whether she likes it or not." Sick parenting, Sarah, sick parenting.

And while families should be off limits, this whole thing speaks to hypocrisy and judgment. And, to me, that's an issue now. After GWB's administration, I think it's of the highest importance to know the character and integrity content of my candidates and their veeps -- this whole scenario (both the real and possibly fake pregnancies) speaks volumes to those facets of her as a person. This could (and should) also be a big problem for McCain (but probably won't). Even though I don't want to see the story focus on the poor girl here, the media should focus on how McCain had to know about this in the vetting process, and yet he still chose her. Huge risk for such little reward. Maybe he also thinks she looks like Tina Fey's aunt.

I love this for one simple reason: It has to put the religious right and Family Values Republicans in a bind, a real tough pickle. They now have to vote for an admitted adulterer who has not denied calling his wife a "trollop" and "cunt" and the mother who let her kid go out and get pregnant [at least] once. Abstinence-only in the statehouse, but no abstinence-only in the Palin house? Poor form, Palin. I'm gonna love it when these assholes vote for that wholesome family-values pairing, while Obama and Biden have two of the seemingly best family stories in American politics today. Fucking hypocrites.