I Wonder What Rick Perry's Been Up To ...

I'm disappointed that I used all my best one-liners on Texas governor and failed presidential candidate Rick Perry last night. This is because I just saw the most amazing piece of tape and just realized that he really deserves a post of his own, even though he has zero chance of being the nominee.

First, I want to make a point I wanted to include in last night's essay, but left out so it wouldn't take six months to read.  I have a real bug up my ass about sitting office-holders, especially executives, running for one office while holding another. I'm not as aggravated when legislators do it because they're a dime a dozen. The United States Senate, for example, didn't run any better or worse without Barack Obama and John McCain there.

But executives, like governors, are different. They are the seat of power in their states. If you look at recent presidential elections with incumbent governors running, you learn something shocking. Bill Clinton and George W. Bush spent twelve and eighteen months out their respective states to campaign for their parties nomination and the presidency. That means that they spent upwards of half of their final terms not doing their fucking jobs. Sure, Clinton would go home to suffocate a retard,* which would be illegal today, so that a sex or draft scandal might go away, but more often than not, he was out of Arkansas. And that goes double for Bush.

If the Tea Party gets their much-sought after Constitutional Convention, they gain at least a little respect from me by passing an amendment specifically prohibiting sitting governors from running for president. You could theoretically take the Tenth Amendment position that the states could pass such a law, but can you think of a single governor that would sign it?

As you all know, my dream candidate this year was Mitch Daniels, the incumbent governor of Indiana. But I would have hoped that he would resign his office at the moment that he announced his candidacy for the Republican nomination, and I would have forcefully criticized him if he didn't. It seems to me to be intellectually inconsistent to piss and moan and Obama golfing - which Republicans never did about the second President Bush setting a record for vacation days - while supporting a governor that is out his state for months at a time.

Let's assume that Perry's candidacy is anything other than a painkiller-induced hallucination and he actually won the nomination. By election day, Governor Perry would have spent a full fifteen months out of Texas during a truly ruinous economic period. Sure, I hold Perry in special contempt because I think that he's a moron and a fucking murderer, but I also support the general principle. You can't run as an executive if you're busy not being an executive because you're running for another office. Two recent presidents, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, seemed to do well as former governors. Mitt Romney will probably be nominated five years and a half years after leaving his only elected executive office with a 43% approval rating.

But that's not what I want to write about this morning, Rick Perry's stellar ignorance of almost everything is. Just looka this, teenagers.

 

How fucking great is that? It's abundantly clear that Perry has no idea that he knows what he's talking about, so he veers into talking points and accusations of "gotcha questions" toward a guy who sounds like he retired from the Albanian military in 1976 and is highly unlikely to be a mole from the hated New York Times.

For the unititaed Lawrence v. Texas, is an important test of just how "small government" you are. Most Republicans and busybody religious types fail the test in ways that only astronomers can properly measure. If, for example, you think that limited government should act as a butt-plug, you should probably see a psychiatrist.

Lawrence overturned the hilariously named 1986 ruling of Bowers v. Hardwick. In both Bowers and Lawrence, police entered a private domicile without a warrant and arrested homos for doing what homos do in their private domiciles, that being fucking (in Lawrence ) and sucking (in Bowers.) In the ironically nicknamed Whizzer White's majority ruling in Bowers, the right of sexual privacy extended only to procreative sex. That being the case, the state had the right to throw you in the can for ass or face fucking, be you gay or straight. I think it was wrong, but you can at least make a coherent argument in defense of Bowers.

By the time Lawrence came before the Court, the state laws had radically changed. 11 of the 13 states impacted by Bowers had changed their sodomy laws, specifically allowing for straight cocksucking and ass-fucking, but denying it to gays. That's a straight Fourteenth Amendment equal protection case that you can't argue against without being slack-jawed. The Lawrence minority specifically said that the states could pass a law allowing a given activity for one social group while criminalizing it for others, in direct defiance of both the spirit and the letter of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Do the facts in Lawrence fly in the face of the Fourteenth Amendment? It's almost legally and logically impossible to argue that they don't. The facts also make a pretty persuasive Fourth Amendment case, too. So what are you left with?

Look, I'd respect the opponents of the Lawrence decision if they just came out and said that they oppose it because God Hates Fags. But they won't. Perversely, they won't argue the legal or constitutional merits of their position either, mostly because they're silly. Instead, they argue on ridiculous grounds like "societal impact", "incest" and "bestiality" - what I like to call the "Santorum Default Position." They ignore the long-held conservative belief that the law and the Constitution mean what they say, or they don't.

Lawrence, unlike Bowers, wasn't about cocksucking or buttfucking as a general proposition. It was very narrowly about gay cocksucking and buttfucking, since the state in question had legalized it for straights, as had most others where the law was applicable. And you just can't do that, which is, in large part, where my support for gay marriage comes from.

If you take the Santorum Default Position, you pretty much deserve to have your name publicly associated with ass-lube and feces, This is because you aren't arguing the Tenth or Fourteenth Amendments, you're just saying that God Hates Fags without actually having the balls to say so. Fuck you because you're stupid and dishonest.

I wouldn't interfere with your silly little superstitions by saying that you have to like gays. I certainly wouldn't use an instrument as fearsome as the law to do any such thing. As a conservative, all I want is the government to leave people the fuck alone when it comes to private behaviour that doesn't hurt anybody else.

By the way, the terms "Family values" and "the 99%" can be pretty much be used interchangeably when it comes to government action. And "upholding family values" is mentioned as a function of the federal government in the Constitution exactly as often as "providing universal health care" is. Look at the United States Postal Service and the war in Iraq. Do you really want the folks who produced those defending your family values? Because I can pretty much assure you that it won't end well.

But Perry very clumsily just ignores that very question because he has no idea what Lawrence even is. Amd it's even more impressive when you consider that he was governor at the time the state went all the way to Supreme Court to argue and lose. Moreover, this wasn't a case about some obscure administrative law that was thrown out. Homosex tends to generate a certain amount of  unavoidable attention in the U.S.

So Governor Perry did what Governor Perry always does, he gave an answer that was 100% fucking gibberish. But Christ, it's fun to watch. More candidates should run on an opiate rush and the pure, environmentally-friendly body wave of stupidity.


*Whenever I suppose that the 42nd president might be doing something good for mankind, I think of the last moments of Ricky Ray Rector to remember that Clinton is an irredeemable abomination of a human being. Rick Perry, who probably executed a factually innocent man and then knowingly covered it up, is even worse. Specifically because of the actions of craven motherfuckers like Clinton and Perry, I now oppose the death penalty, except in military cases in a volunteer army.

A Presidential Election Prediction

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

A Christmas Card From From Tom Waits

Tom Waits "Silent Night / Christmas Card From a Hooker in Minneapolis" from Austin City Limits on Vimeo.

It Hath Come!



And so hath I! Christ, I'm handsome!

Hitch 62: 1949-2011

Christopher Hitchens died Thursday night and we're all a little worse off for his loss. He was 62 years old.

When I started writing regularly nearly a decade ago, I knew that the exercise would be an exploration of my own outrage and contempt toward virtually everything. That being the case, I chose as models the two writers who best expressed those feelings, Hunter Thompson and Christopher Hitchens, both of whom were very much alive in the spring of 2003.

Of the two, Hitchens was a better writer for longer. Though legendary, Thompson was only truly incandescent between 1970 and 1979. Afterward, he became a truly erratic writer. The genius would pop up from time to time - the best example of which is his 1994 eulogy of Richard Nixon -  but, more often than not, he wrote like a Hunter Thompson impersonator. You could see him trying to top his own past and failing. It was almost tragic to watch, and most likely the reason he ultimately killed himself. Not only was football season over, as his suicide note said, it had been for a good long time.

Hitch was consistently brilliant for decades. If anything, he got better as he got older in ways that Hunter never could. While he never produced anything as immediately classic as "The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved", Christopher Hitchens was a better writer than almost anyone else for thirty years.

Where Thompson's written expressions of indignation were rhetorically violent, Hitchens' were outstandingly elegant without being foppish, a curse of most British writers. Thompson's outrage was energizing while Hitchens' was almost narcotic. His turn of phrase was so beautiful that you almost didn't notice the anger that drove it. And that, my friends, is art. Like Hunter Thompson, Christopher Hitchens turned something as terribly pedestrian and dreary as journalism into something literary and beautiful to read for it's own sake. The only other political journalist I can think of that turns cynicism into something akin to poetry the way Hitchens did is George Will.



I've made the proud ignorance of the Republican Party something of a religious text here for nearly four years. I've referenced it over and over again in this space, without knowing that Hitchens said it first on Hardball with Chris Matthews 11 years ago before yesterday. As Rick Perry would say, "Oops."

Here's the full quote;

“[George W. Bush] is lucky to be governor of Texas. He is unusually incurious, abnormally unintelligent, amazingly inarticulate, fantastically uncultured, extraordinarily uneducated, and apparently quite proud of all these things.”

As was true of Bobby Kennedy, when Christopher Hitchens hated you, you stayed hated. His best books, The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice, No One Left to Lie To: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton, and The Trial of Henry Kissinger were all moral condemnations of their subjects and all far more eloquent by several degrees than anything else written on the subjects of his scorn.

Even God His own Self wasn't spared the wrath of Hitchen's typewriter. His 2007 book, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything posited that most of mankind's evil is sanctioned in our holy books, in one way or another. And the truth of that is almost inescapable. You can argue whether the good religion produces outweighs the evil it condones, but you cannot reasonably argue that said evil isn't textually sanctioned and, in some cases, actually demanded.

I was raised Catholic, so there are few things that I love more than precious (mostly, but not always, liberal) Catholics who feel that feel that the One True Church is "misguided" in believing that things like divorce, homosexuality and abortion are abominations and mortal sins, while maintaining that they are "good Catholics."

If you're one of those folks, you're a hypocritical asshole and should probably suffer any number of biblical fates for several deadly sins, not the least of which being pride.

The Church isn't a grassroots organization like ACORN, for Christsakes. Moreover, it never pretended to be a "bottom-up" democracy. Foundational beliefs like papal infallibility tend to undercut silly notions like that quite nicely.

The Church is their club, not yours, and their rules are law. To suggest that you can "reform" what even you believe is the Word of God - and is actually written in the text of the book - is more than a little presumptuous and definitive proof that you're simply bad at your religion. It is the height of arrogance to suggest that your religion disagrees with you, rather than you with it.

When I was twelve years old, I determined that the beliefs of the Church were dangerous and silly, so I refused confirmation and stopped considering myself a Catholic. As a matter of theological fact, liberal Catholics aren't Catholics, either, I'm just honest enough to say so. The Church was there long before I was born and will continue long after I'm dead. I merely choose not to prticipate in it's extraordinary silliness.

Under no circumstances would I associate myself with anyone running around Africa and telling the locals that AIDS was bad, but condoms were worse, so I quit. But I would never presume to say that Church's position wasn't biblically sanctioned because it is. I just happen to believe that the sanction is moronic and demonstrably lethal to the most vulnerable people on earth. If you believe that "God hates fags", you sure as shit better not have a tattoo while doing so because that just happens to be the next verse in Leviticus.

Essentially, that's what God is Not Great is about. If you wrap yourself in some supernatural, superstitious ceremony, you should also be called to account for the true - and sometimes breathtakingly so  - evil that's done in it's name. If the world was populated with rational adults, rather than overly tall children, that book would not have been as controversial as it was.

The facts are the facts. And the facts are that the Catholic Church didn't renounce the biblical interpretation that the Jews were responsible for the murder of Christ - the basis of 1,000 years of Christian-propagated pogroms - until Vatican II, seventeen years after the Holocaust ended. And, to my way of thinking, that's more than enough reason to renounce Christianity.

Of course, Hitchens wasn't without his own messianic impulses. He was fervent supporter of the idea of regime change, particularly in Iraq. While I was - mistakenly - at the time, as well, Hitchens and I differed on the entire  point of the war. He strongly advocated Bush's disastrously wrong "democracy agenda", which argued that you can maintain Iraq as a cohesive country while enhancing regional stability under the will of the people. It should be pretty clear by now that you can't.

His position was eminently justifiable as an ethical matter. He morally identified with the plight of the Kurds., who are the world's largest minority without their own country. For Hitchens, it was a matter of loyalty to leftist comrades against what he rightly called "a pornographic regime." But he never, to my knowledge, shared their aspirations for a national homeland.

And that's where his case falls apart. There is no reason to believe that the Kurds will ever abandon their desire for a state, but any declaration of independence will result in a catastrophic war with Arab Iraq, Syria, Iran and Turkey, some of whose territory would be a part of such a state. And unlike Kosovo, there is no international guarantor that can protect such a fledgling nation from immediate destruction.

Having said that, you can't help but admire the passion that Hitchens brought to the issue, particularly when you consider the personal and professional friendships his stance cost him on the political left. He was unwavering in what he believed was right, and that couldn't have been easy.

On the other hand, he did popularize the term "Islamofascism", which I've had a number of things to say about. It is the one instance I can think of where Hitchens carelessly throws words together, contrary to their diametrically opposing meanings. Like "progressive conservative" or "revolutionary conservative", "Islamofascism" is an oxymoron and well beneath the linguistic standards of a titan of the language that Christopher Hitchens was.  Being an Islamofascist is not unlike being a "pro-abortion Catholic", a ridiculous contruct on it's face and not something to be taken seriously.

One can't truly appreciate Christopher Hitchens without exploring the way he conducted the last 18 months of his life. Instead of engaging on a maudlin celebration of his own mortality, Hitchens instead used his esophageal cancer as a point of intellectual exploration, especially in his Vanity Fair column. If you read anything today, it should be "Topic of Cancer" and  his most recent essay "Trial of the Will."

It was on the topic of his own mortal illness that he truly broke through a journalist, and produced some of his most beautiful writing.  There was no sentimentality or self-pity in those columns, particularly "Trial of the Will", published just a week before his death. It was an intellectual and philosophical exploration on what it is to die, written by someone who was in the process of doing just that. "Tuesdays With Morrie" it wasn't.

Christopher Hitchens explored his own death with the same courage and valour that he lived his life. It didn't matter if you agreed with him or not because he was smarter than you are and would argue circles around you. Even when he was wrong, he could make a persuasive case that he right. That isn't normally the job of a journalist, but it is the raison d'etre of a writer.

Hitchens on Bill Clinton



Hitchens on Mother Teresa



Hitchens on the Tea Party



Hitchens on Jesus and the Exodus



Hitchens on 60 Minutes

"Reminds Me of Childhood Memories"

I don't tend to talk about my childhood much, mostly because I've spent decades repressing it. This is because I hate children even more than I hate myself.

Children are short, smelly and can't hold their fucking liquor. Christ, I'm not fully convinced that males under six feet tall are even human, which should tell you all you need to know about my feelings towards kids. I'd be completely comfortable if the voting age was raised to thirty-five and everyone under twenty was subject to being fired out cannons during wartime.

Whenever I'm forced to remember that I was once like that I feel like going Hemingway. I therefore tend to stuff my childhood into the same tiny ball of rage deep inside of me that makes me the world-famous blogger that I've become.

However, from time to time, external forces bring memories from my shorter days surface, sometimes even refreshing ones. This occurred most recently on Tuesday.

It started out innocently enough. I was checking my e-mail at work and I received a notification that startled me. I was being followed on Twitter by something called LesbianAssWorship.Net (or @LesAssWorship to you uncouth swine.) That's when it all came rushing back.

I think I was five years old. Maybe six. And it was a holiday when it was cold outside, so it was either Thanksgiving or Christmas. Whatever it was, we were having turkey. Anyhow, we were sitting around the holiday dinner table and I guess I looked a little sad. Life, you see, was out to get me even then and I was even worse at hiding my disdain than I am today.

Suddenly, my elderly grandmother pounded her fist on the dinner table, causing a turkey leg to fly off the serving plate and into my lap, and holler "Nothing soothes a crisis of the spirit like Lesbian Ass Worship! Nothing!"

It didn't stop there, either. She went on and on for almost an hour. According to her, straight men could worship lesbian ass, too.  It was almost like hearing Stephen Hawking expound upon theoretical physics. There was just no arguing with the fucking woman. She was crazed in ways that I had only previously seen in National Geographic. And there was no shortage of crazy in my grandmother on a normal day.

Finally, my father fired a tranquilizer dart directly into her neck and the peace of my home was restored. Even today everybody in my family referes to it as "That strange and horrible night that grandma went nuts about ass-eating."

As deeply and darkly strange as that evening was. I still can't say that she was actually wrong. As an adult, one of my sexual heroes was the grand dame of lesbian porn, Janine Lindemulder, from whom a learned a great deal about tonguing a lady from both the front and the back. And every women I've ever been with considers me something of a sexual MacArthur. and that night, over thirty-five years ago, was an enormous gateway in my becoming the man I am today.

Who knew that Twitter could be so rewarding?

It Hath Arrived! Thoughts on Lindsay Lohan and Playboy

I'm of the considered opinion that everybody should have a friend like Elisson. The man is an outstanding blogger, single-handedly popularized the 100 word story and is a world renowned expert on all things cheese-related. In a world almost entirely without heroes, Elisson stands alone .. except when he's holding up my own personal Jesus, Velociman. I'm honoured and pleased that Elisson has ever bothered to read my nonsense, let alone say the extraordinarily nice things about it in public that he has.

Having said that, there are things that can tear even the closest friendships asunder. Like when Elisson commented that  Lindsay Lohan's titties looked "awfully saggy." I was enraged for months, almost to the point of violence. But I came to understand that the whole point of friendship is overlooking the things that divide you, like how metaphysically wrong your friends may be about certain things.

Look, the rap on LiLo for years has been that she has big fake udders. Not that I give a shit. I think that implants age better than the real thing, and the science is with me on that.. But if a lady chooses to get implants, she should endeavour to get them with just the right amount of sag, lest she wind up looking like a fucking cartoon.That's just common sense, people.

But what if her ginormous jugs are, as I suspect, real? The fact that a 25 year old starlet looks like a 42 year old MILF (albeit the hottest one this side of Julia Ann) says something important to me, specifically that she knows how to live! I learned while still in the crib that old women who look young are never to be trusted, but that young women who look old before their time should always be treasured for the ability to please a man. Verily, they know it all, teenagers. They've lived in ways that most of you never will.

Most of you by now understand that I feel a special kinship with La Lohan. With our shared love of vodka, cocaine and vehicular mishaps that can easily be blamed on a black kid, how can I not? That's just the way love works, as any well-adjusted adult will tell you. I know that Paula Abdul used to sing about opposites attracting, but how well did her marriage to Emilio Fucking Estevez work out, huh? And because Lindsay and I are medically incapable of being each other's liver donor, that's enough to make us perfect together! I really have thought this through, folks. She's the Nancy Reagan to my Ronnie, the Nancy Spungen to my ... Oh, I guess I should re-think that one, huh? If memory serves, that love story didn't end particularly well.

That being said, I wasn't as excited as you probably thought I would be about Lindsay appearing in next month's issue of Playboy. Don't get me wrong, the prospect of seeing her naked always makes my testicles rattle like Jerome Green's maracas on those great Bo Diddley records, but Playboy is just the wrong forum for it.

After all, who in the fuck does Playboy, anymore? I actually do read Playboy for the articles, which is a terrible thing to say about pornography! A titty mag should never be a literary journal, and that's exactly what Playboy has always aspired to be.

To remain relevant, I posit that Lindsay needs to be edgy in something other than a criminal justice-related way. And Playboy just hasn't been edgy since the early 1970s. That's why I always thought that she would be far better off appearing in her altogethers in a magazine like Black Tail. Fans of irony everywhere would love her for it.

As absolutely everyone on earth expected it would, Lindsay's spread (so to speak) has leaked online. I'd post the pictures myself but two things get in the way of my doing so. First, I can't post nudity because far too many of you crazy bastards read this dopey blog at work. I'm just not funny enough for anyone to lose their job over it. Second, I understand that Playboy is highly litigious and I've had quite enough of twisted old cunts threatening to sue me over utter fucking nonsense for the time being. It's rather exhausting.

But I'd be remiss if I didn't offer my thoughts on the pictorial, wouldn't I?

A number of blogs have insulted LiLo over her apparent lack of areola of any kind. I on the other hand find it novel and really quite endearing. There's a lot to said for tiny nipples on huge knockers, and if you need a giant bullseye on a titty to know where your teeth are supposed to go, you probably need to mature as a lover. And most of the bloggers who make that criticism are probably too far advanced in their faggotry to convince otherwise, anyhow.

As is true with areolas, pasty-skinned, redheads shouldn't have public hair. I'm pretty sure that's in the Bible. Probably in Leviticus. But you won't know if Lohan does from the Playboy pictures, which is a goddamned shame. When you know more about a given girl's twat from paparazzi pictures of her getting out of a car than you do from Playboy, that tells you everything you need to know about the sorry state of modern mainstream pornography. No friggin' wonder the Hefner family wants to take the company private again. The stock must be fucking worthless. And if it isn't, it should be!

Forget about Miss Lindsay's intimate grooming habits for a second. La Lohan is said to have been paid a million dollars for these pictures. And it's not like her career trajectory is going up these days. She's about where Robert Downey, Jr. was a decade ago, uninsurable and under the constant threat of immediate incarceration. For a million dollars, we should all be able to visually inspect her for cervical cancer! This is a dire economy and modesty is just not acceptable marketing. Who doesn't know that?

I'm always amazed that what a gorgeous ass Lindsay has. So fixated are we on her majestic mammaries that we too often overlook what the other side of her has to offer. It's tragic that's it just sitting there, ignored, when it should be desired, bitten, licked and fucked endlessly. And a dynamic little dumper it is. If nothing else, the Playboy shoot does give it some attention, albeit far from enough.

I also know from some experience that pasty-skinned natural redheaded girls have the prettiest assholes that you're ever going to see in your entire life. They're just the pinkest little things in all of creation. But don't go to Playboy to learn this. No, those useless pricks just had to go waste a perfectly good teachable moment that could have brought humanity a little closer together. Take it from me, if you've never seen a redhead's rectum, I implore you to so at the earliest opportunity. You'll thank me for it. They're tasty, too!

The Lohan pictures are about as good as you would expect them to be. She's a remarkably well-built girl, especially when you consider her now legendary extracurricular activities. My only problem is that Playboy didn't fully exploit her current financial woes to give us the full-airport-cavity-search that we truly deserve. As celebrity exploitation, they're wonderful. But as pornography, they're a huge disappointment. I jerk off to hotter things than this twice before dawn every day. I just can't lie to you.

For these pictures to be considered truly epic, they would have had to have been shot by Paul Little. Sure, we can all do without the urine and vomit that ultimately sent the erstwhile Mr. Hardcore to the federal pokey, but the shots would have at least been interesting. The man really could wield a specula like no other.

Of course that shouldn't be taken to mean that I don't have a giant erection looking at Lindsay Lohan naked. Because I do.

Am I sharing too much?

Black snake moan: Sad dispatches from the Cain train

You know, I was just starting to admire Herman Cain and then this happens.

It wasn't always so. For most of the year, I thought that Mr. Cain was a dick and emblematic of everything that's wrong with politics. Not only was everything that he knew wrong, he couldn't have been more smug about it. More importantly, the nickname that he gave his economic plan had the disquieting tendency of making Schindler's List sound like a friggin' sitcom.

While everything he said was silly in ways that learned adults have trouble comprehending, I still grew to respect Herman Cain. More specifically, I grew to respect his penis.

Lookee, say what you will about the man, but he managed to be married, carry on a thirteen-year long affair and have no fewer than four sexual harassees, all the while lobbying his ass off. What energy!  I ask you, how can you not admire the dedication it takes to put your wang in so many strange places?

Of course, that's ultimately what sunk his jokey presidential campaign. No self-respecting Republican would be caught cheating on his wife with adult women. If it were meth addled teenage boys that were the object of ol' Herm's affections, he'd probably have won the nomination by acclimation, but it wasn't to be. This is what happens when novices get into politics.

I will say one thing about the Cain train. As their sad and strange campaign ground to a fucking dead stop, it did become pretty expert in the very identity politics that Republicans used to mock. Cain, his idiot blogosphere cheerleaders, and the ghouls at Fox News never failed to point out that the candidate was black, which they imply was the source of his recent misery. Granted, they had some practice, having spent the last three years passionately displaying the genitals of both Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann whenever one of them said anything impossibly dumb. The GOP really has come a long way from making gender-based jokes about Hillary Clinton and Janet Reno, haven't they?

The persecution complex of these fucking people is nothing less than phenomenal. The way that modern conservatives - very few of whom are actually conservative in a traditional sense, or under the dictionary definition of the word - play identity politics almost brings a tear to your eye. I'm pretty sure that's ultimately why Barney Frank is retiring. When even the most revolutionary Republicans can't go before a television camera without being a whimpering cocksucker and asking why everybody keeps picking on them, his work is pretty much done. It seems like only twenty years ago that conservative thinkers were publishing innumerable books condemning "the culture of victimhood", a number of which I read.  Now they actually define that culture . Progress!

There is a distinction, however. Herman Cain, Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann rarely play the race card themselves. They let white males - which sort of includes Ann Coulter - do it for them.

Lest you think the Pizza Train is going off track, be schooled, teenagers!

In suspending his candidacy, as opposed to saying that he was quitting the race or ending his bid, Mr. Cain maintained his ability to accept money to pay for his campaign so far and to finance the new venture that he called his Plan B: to travel the country promoting his tax and foreign policy plans. If Mr. Cain had decided to formally close his campaign organization, he would not be able to use donations that may come in. 

Let's see, Cain is shutting down shop in all but name, so that folks can continue donating money to what's billing itself as a presidential campaign, although the head of said campaign is no longer seeking the presidency. Shifty and devious, just like a ... Republican.

Having said that, I agree that he should "travel the country promoting his tax and foreign policy plans." Especially his foreign policy plans, since they're so thoroughly thought out.





People really need to hear this, and Herman Cain is just the kind of cat to tell you. Plus, he'll try to fuck you. Just don't tell his wife, okay?

People of British Columbia: Go Fuck Yourselves!

Sometimes people wonder why I seem to hate democracy so much. In actual fact, it isn't democracy that I hate so much as it is people. Despite living in an age where more information is available to more people than at any other time in human history, most people are not only getting deliberately dumber, they seem so fucking proud of it. Anyone who has been following the Republican primaries has probably noticed this. And since you can't really have a democracy without people, my faith in the institution is more than somewhat undermined.

The triumph of ignorance is probably best exemplified by the recent Resurrection of populism in our body politic. Populism has always been a fundamental misunderstanding of how governmental systems work, and is therefore crass, deplorable and should be destroyed every time it rears its misshapen goddamned head.

Populism is predicated on the idea that we live in a pure democracy, which no one does. Western nation states universally live under one form or another of representative government, which means that we elect people to make decisions for us and get the fuck out their way for about four years. Populists think that we live in an Athenian democracy, where everybody gets to vote on everything, or that we even should.

The fact is that we don't and we shouldn't. Moreover, Athenian democracy wasn't all that and a bag of chips. As a matter of fact, "only adult male Athenian citizens who had completed their military training as ephebes had the right to vote in Athens", thereby restricting the franchise to about 20% of the population. I'll grant you that this did weed out the retards and reprobates who currently determine our  fate, but it was hardly the perfect picture of "the people's voice" that populist morons try to paint for you.

You know what you get when you let everyone vote on everything? California is fucking what! Conservatives like to paint California as a horribly liberal place. It really isn't. It's just a perfect representation of self-interested human stupidity, which populism enables. When given the choice, folks will always vote themselves free shit, while retarding their ability to pay for it. Do that long enough, and you wind up being California. Or Greece. Or Italy. Or the United States of America.

Which brings me to British Columbia.

One thing you need to know about Canada is that we have a federal sales tax, the GST, which was introduced in 1991. Since then, no fewer than five federal governments have been trying to entice the provinces to merge their sales taxes with the GST.

A couple of years ago, the Harper Government (which I think that I'm now legally obligated to call it) struck harmonization agreements with Ontario and B.C. Because harmonization extends the reach of provincial taxes, Ontarians were furious for about twenty minutes, but Ontarians are only ever furious about anything for about twenty minutes.

The hillbillies in B.C stayed mad. For the most part, this had a lot to do with being governed by Gordon Campbell, who, despite being massively unpopular, governed for a full decade when he wasn't being arrested for drunk driving in foreign countries. He was able to do this because he lacked any real opposition, the provincial NDP having imploded years earlier and the Conservative party not existing there at all. When his approval numbers fell beneath even Jerry Sandusky's, he got the fuck out of Dodge and fled to Limeyland. Campbell was succeeded by talk-radio host and professional nobody, Christy Clark.

Clark, for reasons that escape anyone with even the slightest understanding of how life works, allowed the HST issue go before the people in a referendum. She supposedly thought that people would enthusiastically vote to expand their own tax liability. Guess how well that went?

There was a small catch. Ottawa isn't exactly stupid. When the deals with Ontario and British Columbia were sealed, the provinces got a ton of money, roughly $4 billion and $1.6 billion respectively. Ontario premier Dalton McGuinty, who at the time was also about as popular as kidfucking, gave it away to taxpayers as a way to successfully bribe himself into reelection. The Campbell and Clark governments just spent it on horseshit.

Harper's dimwitted finance minister, Jim Flaherty, in perhaps the only smart thing he's ever done, included a clause in the Ontario and B.C agreements that said if either province fucked with tax structure in any way in the first two years, he got his money back.

Is Premier Clark proposing to do the responsible thing and live up to the agreement her government signed? Fuck, no!

The B.C. government is exchanging ideas with the Harper government on ways to ease the province’s burden in paying back the $1.6-billion advance it received from Ottawa to establish the Harmonized Sales Tax in 2010, Premier Christy Clark said Wednesday.

Clark, who spent Tuesday in Ottawa meeting with Conservative politicians on various federal-provincial issues, said her government is floating several payback options.

Clark said her government has suggested that B.C. receive some credit for the more than two and a half years the HST will be in place before it is dismantled.

Turns out that B.C is over $3 billion in the hole, and can't afford to just pay back Ottawa, like it is obligated to do.

To which I say, "Tough shit! Give back the fucking money, you dumb cunts! Do it NOW!" You got the money all at once, pay it back all at once, you dipshits.

Here's my issue. Once you let one dickhead province renege on a deal because it isn't prom-queen fucking popular, you're left with no choice but to let them all do it. And then you're left with no government at all.

Besides which, people need to know that their idiotic opinions have costs, if they think that they can be governed by them. The stupid goddamned B.C HST referendum chipped away at the very idea that a duly elected government can be held accountable for anything at all.

That might sound like a middling point, but imagine that you're an international baker, or just hold bonds on that province's debt. Are you going to go out of your way to extend credit to crazy cocksuckers that renege on deals on a fucking whimsy and expect no consequences to arise from it?

Fuck each and every person in British Columbia. I hope that those dumb motherfuckers are forced to pay higher taxes at goddamned gunpoint to pay back Ottawa immediately, not that I expect Harper and Flaherty to have the balls to do it. They might be the biggest fiscal cowards and ward-heeling motherfuckers that this country has ever shit out. I suspect that they'll both gladly let Christy Clark peg them infinitely if they think that they can get a few Vancouver seats in the next election out of it.

Those crazy bastards need to be taught that, in the words of the great Dr. Hunter Thompson, if you buy the ticket, you take the fucking ride. And if Harper doesn't do it, I hope to Christ that the financial markets do.

The funniest part about this who fiasco is that the same stupid pricks who voted against the HST in B.C also voted for Harper in the federal election three months earlier.

And you people expect me to take popular democracy seriously?