Guest Column: The Dubsism-Meehan Primer on the Upcoming Election

Editor’s Note: This article is a collaborative effort between Dubsism’s own J-Dub and Ryan Meehan from First Order Historians. Ryan also has his own blog, East End Philadelphia, which is featured in our BlogRoll and it is well worth the read.

Introduction:

The United States of America offers to the rest of the world a classic example of what happens when a nation abandons the principles for which it stands.  At the beginning of the 20th Century, America was a country on the verge of becoming a world power; a power built on the freedom and prosperity a constitutional republic allows. It was the same 20th Century that saw the rise of America into the most dominant socio-economic and military force the world had ever seen.

We’ve totally fucked it up since then, and not just “kinda fucked it up.” We’ve fucked it up on a “Ron Jeremy on a Thermos full of Viagra in a Thai flesh pit” scale.  Let’s be honest, anytime you’re reading “Thai flesh pit,” that usually means that there is something seriously wrong.

If you don’t believe that, look around. We’ve got a nation full of dumbasses who think the government exists solely for their benefit, and don’t realize that at some point somebody has to provide all the shit the government gives away.  To make a long story short, the freedom provided by that constitutional republic has also allowed America to grow within its own ranks a group of people who believe that very same freedom is pernicious to a modern, progressive society.

This is now why the only difference between a “conservative” and a “liberal” is which set of self-serving interests they are out to protect; neither of then give a shit about you or the future of the country, but they both are running campaigns designed to get you to believe they do.  The filthy-ass “Occupy Something Except A Job” scumbag who wants to wallet-rape anybody who make five bucks a year more than he does so we can expand social “get money for nothing” programs and your sweet, cookie making grandmother who still votes for Ronald Reagan and who will stab you in the face with a knitting needle if you even mention touching her Social Security check…they are both cut from the same cloth…and it’s diaper cloth covered in that nuclear-waste green baby shit.

This is why constitutional republics like America get the kind of government they deserve. Hence, it’s no surprise we have a Congress that  was empowered by an electorate that chugged a bottle of NyQuil about 40 years ago and has been drooling on it’s pillow ever since.

The Democrats pretend they care about the little guy, and yet every solution to a problem they’ve devised involves getting into the middle class pocket somehow. The party has been hi-jacked by the new American left, which is largely why the Democrats haven’t had an original idea in 40 years, and they haven’t had a good idea in 60.

So, fuck them.

Meanwhile, while the Republicans have a better grasp on foreign policy and the economy, for some reason they love to act just like Democrats, and until recently, they’ve caved anytime they’ve taken the slightest criticism.

So, fuck them too.

Having said all that, here’s our rundown on all that you need to know on all these political blow-job hacks and the media that covers them.

I – The Candidates

Sure, you’ve heard of the two main boobs running for President, but there are some lesser known jock-itches running that need exposure as well.  Seriously, there’s like forty people running for this office, and only one of them is going to win.  But a few of them could get like 1% of the vote, and you’ve actually heard of another one, so those are the three we will be adding to the two you should already hate and distrust.

A) Democratic Candidate – President Barack Obama

• Pros:

It hard to come up with a lot of positive things to say about a guy who got elected on a load of bilge about “Hope” and “Change” and then turned out to be what you would get if George W. Bush’s great-great-great grand-daddy had knocked-up his housemaid (minus the venereal disease, of course).

Because J-Dub is black, white people look at him like he just shot their dog when he tells them he does not approve of Barack Obama.  What’s really funny about that is white liberals who assume he would vote for Obama simply because J-Dub is black completely miss that assuming behavior or beliefs based on skin color is as incredibly racist as anything the Klan believes.  But that’s another story.

Here’s why J-Dub doesn’t like Obama: he is an economic illiterate and a classic Marxist.  He simply doesn’t understand that you can’t stick the “1% crowd” with the tab for everything in this country because politicians like Obama, two Bushes, Clinton and just about everybody else except Reagan wrote every line of the gargantuan tax code in this country for exactly those uber-rich people.

In other words, the minute you hand them the tab for everybody else’s dinner, they are going to politely excuse themselves from the table undercover of needing to use the restroom, and by the time you realize they’ve ditched you and stuck you with the check, their money is conveniently secured out of reach in Switzerland; all done under laws the typical politician helped create. You just can’t fix the tax code overnight because rich people like to go to your grandmother’s nursing home and loosen all the bolts on her wheelchair, and politicians are the ones who will rape her corpse.

If you think Obama is somehow different, ask yourself this question. Did you ever notice that all the “limousine liberal” millionaires who support him want somebody else to pick up the tab?  There’s a never-ending supply of ass-pipes like Barbra Streisand willing to tell you what a greedy pig you are  for wanting to keep the money you earn, but we never hear her offering to cough up a couple of her multi-millions.  While we are at it, let’s not forget Sean Penn, who has taken plenty of his own personal time that he should be spending portraying the handicapped to support the liberal cause of defending backward ass places like Dick-wipe-istan.

OK, at this point you are wondering where are the pro-Obama comments in a section devoted to the “Pros?”

Barack Obama has the luxury of being the incumbent in this election, which ironically could work in his favor as people are generally scared of change, which is even more ironic, because that’s what he campaigned on four years ago.  Even though a great deal of the Anti-Obama crowd tends to fear change and favor more traditional methods of government (like waterboarding and forcing people to watch re-runs of “Friends,”) if they won it wouldn’t change the political landscape drastically.  That fact works for Obama in ways the media can’t show you, because people inherently fear doing things like buying new socks because they loved their old ones so much.

He is well-spoken, but only as long as he is rehearsed and prepared, which the first debate showed.

In many ways, Obama represents the future of politics; he ends the streak of lily-white guys in the White House.  This is crucial in the ever-changing United States where what used to be the white majority will very soon just be a plurality. Granted, white people built this country, but they also fucked it up. Fixing it will require the co-operation of at least two racial sub-sets of the population, and while Obama is not the guy to make that happen, he at least blazes the trail for the non-white President who will.

Mark it down right now…we are going  out on a limb here and telling you that non-white President will likely be Asian, if for no other reason than we already have a shitload of “panda eating” jokes, and we’d feel pretty fucking stupid if we never got to use them.

Oddly enough, the best thing we can say about Obama will be what really pisses off his supporters. There a group of people in this country who have completely guzzled the Kool-Aid on this guy, but history may very well look on him as the Richard Nixon of the War on Terror.  At the end of the Bush administration, the strategy on the war in Afghanistan was failing, just like the Tet Offensive had destroyed Lyndon Johnson presidency some 40 years earlier. Just like Nixon, Obama expanded the war into a neighboring country; Obama just happened to luck out and find Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan.  Either way, whether it was killing the world’s most notorious terrorist or interdicting the Ho Chi Minh trail, those were both pivotal points used to help end a war which also happened to be egregious breaches of international law.   Not that we’ve ever been really concerned with obeying international law; some people would consider this blog an atrocity, but if you couldn’t tell by now, we don’t really give a fuck.

Don’t misunderstand, we are not saying either of those things shouldn’t have been done; rather we would say quite the opposite. The war is one of the few things Obama has done correctly, despite the fact he campaigned a what was largely an anti-war platform.

In short, the beauty of being the incumbent in this country is that no matter who you are, the idealogues in this country will not give you credit where it is due, and will blame you, fairly or otherwise, for everything else.  You can dislike and disagree with Obama all you want, but all this stuff about how he is secretly gay or wasn’t born in this country – let’s be honest, even if its true, you’re too late for that.  But the Obama supporters who bitched about the way Bush handled “Bush’s War” are major hypocrites because they got silent just because their guy is now leading the band.

• Cons:

When we first discussed writing this piece, Meehan made the comment about how if he says anything critical about Obama, he’s going to get called a racist. The sad part is he’s absolutely correct about that. What’s really fucked up is there is this stupid double-standard about who can say what about who, and that even things that are simply critical of a person who happens to be black, are inherently racist if they are said by a white person.  Of course, this is the kind of shit created by the same white people who decided Obama is black, and these are the same people who keep telling you about how “tolerant and understanding” they are, yet none of them ever bothered to learn anything about black people…in other words, the suburban Klan who thought J-Dub would vote for Obama because they share a skin color.  As an American, you own the same right to be as hated as that guy who lives down the street with a Confederate flag in his window, a mullet on his head, and ears that can’t hear his heart crying.

J-Dub uses this description of Barack Obama all the time, but it is so fucking perfect we have to use it again.  If Obama were a waiter, he’d be the kind that brings you a burnt grilled cheese sandwich when you ordered a cheeseburger, and when you complain about it, he tries to make you feel stupid for wanting a cheeseburger in the first place.  When you get pissed and demand to speak to the restaurant manager, Obama cops out with some bullshit about “I didn’t understand which cheese thing you really wanted.”

That’s not only one reason we don’t trust this Mr. Potato Head look-alike.  He’s just another blind idealogue; his devotion to left-wing causes means he would have trouble leading a pack of wolves to fresh meat. Despite that, he still managed to sucker 55% of the American electorate, which means he is a symptom, not the problem.

Besides being a symptom, he’s also a perfect example of the messed up notion that white people have about race relations in this country.  J-Dub is always screaming about how white people don’t get that Obama isn’t black.  He’s mixed-race, and if you are white and want a real eye-opener, go talk to some black/white mixed-race kids and ask them how they’ve been treated by the black side of their families. The majority of them are going to tell you a less than positive story. The He’s only black by the same standard white people used to determine if the offspring of slaves and masters were still slaves.  As the product of a black father and a white mother, Obama is 50% black which prior to 1863 would have seen him as a slave.  But, to a lot of black people, Obama is known as “President Zebra.” The media will never tell you that, but to be fair, most blacks would never admit that in mixed company anyway.  While we are at it, to correct another injustice, we demand the band Living Colour change their name to “President Zebra,” if for no other reason they can’t put an extra “u” in it. This isn’t fucking England.  But we digress.

The real problem is that is not the only fundamental misconception about race that applies here.

Here’s the part that’s going to have white people clenching so tight they will be ripping dime-sized holes in their ridiculous looking upholstery. White people think that it is their attitude alone that determines how race relations in this country work.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  All you soccer moms out there who live on Deer Ridge Lane in Greater Suburbia need to understand that it doesn’t make a frog’s watertight ass worth of difference what you think, because every other group in the world is racist against blacks.  While you are feeling guilty for feeling nervous about being alone in an elevator with a black guy, understand that every other group out there has it’s own version of the dreaded “N-word.”

“Nig-nog” is just the British version.  Italians call blacks “Moolies,” which is short for “melanzane,” which literally means “eggplant.”  The Japanese term is “kurombo,” which translates from “kuro” (black color) and “bo” (casual suffix meaning “young man”). Even the Indians who buy convenience stores in black neighborhoods use the term “kalas,” which is just the N-bomb with a big load of curry on it.  Let’s face it…nobody fucking wants that.

Better yet, and the most important part for purposes of this discussion, is that this racism exists amongst blacks against other blacks, and that has been the case since the plantation days.  Out there on Deer Ridge Lane, you know nothing of the “Paper Bag Test,” which as much as the linked article would like you to believe doesn’t exist, it still quotes too many examples to show that it does.

This is one thing our current president and J-Dub have in common…they both pass the “paper bag test,” Had they both been around in the slave days, they would have been “house niggers;” meaning they would have been wearing white coats and saying shit like “More tea, Ma’am?” That is the genesis of the “light skinned-dark skinned” thing…if you were darker than a paper bag, your ass was busting out menial labor under that hot, southern sun.  Meanwhile the light-skins were living a life of relative comfort, doing domestic chores and generally living a relatively easy life.

Why does all this race stuff matter? Because as much as the folks on Deer Ridge Lane who voted for Obama four years ago want to disavow race had anything to do with their decision then, why is Obama not leading in the polls by the same margin by which he won?  Because everybody on Deer Ridge Lane realized that regardless of political stripe, and regardless of all that “Hope” and “Change” crap America swallowed four years ago, Obama is exactly the same as every other politician since the dawn of time.  Since the expectations of Obama were so high, those disappointments are that much more amplified because he’s black…just like what happened to LeBron James in Cleveland.

What really separates Obama is the way he spends money.  Whether you want to admit this or not,  in the vast majority of cases, poor people are poor for a reason. Obama acts just like the guy who just got $1,000 on a payday advance, and pisses it away because he just can’t handle money.  The problem is he never remembers that one large today will cost you two large tomorrow.  Obama has got this country on track to be spending every pay-day standing in line at one of those seedy-ass check-cashing places.

And he will fuck up your grilled cheese sandwich.

B) Republican Candidate Mitt Romney

• Pros:

Like it or not, the most important quality that Romney possesses is his voice.  The man has an impeccable speaking tone, and with that head of hair (which is his second best attribute) that bald guys like us would kill your children to have, he should be a news anchor, or maybe a hostage negotiator.

In an image contest, as much as the media hates this guy, and as much as they keep portraying him as some sort of mental pygmy, there’s really no denying that he bare-ass spanked Obama in the first debate. Yet, it is equally true  that while Obama looked nervous and fidgety during that initial debate,  nobody will remember anything beside the first and last debates unless one of these two mopes says something so stupid it literally makes your eyes start seeping brain matter, which in any election year has roughly the same odds as that of getting your drive-thru order fucked up.  No shit, J-Dub went to a McDonald’s the other day, and somehow ended up with a burrito. He swears the guy at the window was Obama. Again, we digress.

But what is also equally true is Romney has another key skill, which nobody seems to want to discuss.  He may very well be a goofy, overly blow-dried Mormon, but the motherfucker knows how to make money.  Hosting an Olympic games has historically been a losing proposition, but Romney managed to make a Winter Olympics held in a backwater like Utah profitable despite the fact it was held four months after 9/11 when everybody in this country thought anybody with an accent would have a bomb strapped to their skis.  That’s pretty goddamned impressive, even for a guy who has binders full of women.

The million-dollar question here is why we don’t trust people who know how to make money in this country?  Face facts, poor people don’t add anything to society. That may not give you a warm and fuzzy feeling in your nether regions, but that doesn’t change the fact that the guy who signs your paychecks isn’t on food stamps.  Whether you trust him or not, Romney WILL reduce government spending.  Like it or not the guy has leadership, even if it is the kind of leadership that means flies would leave fresh shit to follow him.

Speaking of shit…

•  Cons:

Boy, where do we start here?  First off,  Romney has a rap for being a notorious flip-flopper.  Of course he’s a flip-flopper, the guy is trying to win an election. All politicians change direction, because public opinion constantly changes, and politicians exist to curry the favor of that opinion. However, isn’t it ironic that public opinion never seems to favor curry, which is a bit stupid since telling the guys who answer your customer-service calls will bond with if you once you tell them you love that shit.

Flip-flopping isn’t the big problem here.  The old saying goes that “intelligence allows for a change of mind.” There’s a lot of truth in that; we’ve all had an opinion on which we’ve changed our minds. do you know the classic example of people who simply will not change their view despite what evidence is presented to them? Catholics. They are clinging to shit that was debunked centuries ago, and that’s why they still don’t get that a religion based on dogma and sexual deprivation creates frocked child-raping degenerates.

That’s pretty sad because there are two opportunities to see why that doesn’t work:

1. On its face, it is just fucked up
2. Child rape and church shouldn’t have anything to do with each other

ASIDE: Can you imagine what would have happened if Jerry Sandusky had been a coach at Notre Dame? The joke world would have had this matter/anti-matter sort of collision (catholics…child rapists…guys who run  summer camps for “disadvantaged kids”…GAHHHHHH), and the resultant obliteration of the comedy world would have meant Dane Cook would wake up the next morning as the funniest man in the universe. That’s more than enough to make us hope the Mayans are right about the coming apocalypse.  Anyway…

With Romney, the problem isn’t that he’s flip-flopped, it’s the topics he’s on which he’s flip-flopped.  For example, he’s dished up more waffles than an IHOP franchise on the topic of abortion.

First of all, this is a very unlikely topic for such a reversal.  How does one go from anti-baby killing to pro-baby killing other than for a reason that involves some sort of personal gain? Not to mention, it potentially makes for a real mind-fuck if you are a guy like Romney who happens to be a devout believer in a Christian-like religion which espouses the sanctity of human life (but now apparently only after you are born), and yet believes in the after-life. How awkward would a meeting  in the afterlife be if Romney bumped into some of those aborted fetuses (“Well, well, well…if it isn’t ‘Mr. Too Late’…What the fuck, man?”).

OK, to properly explain why this is such a problem, we have to get all “McLaughlin Group” for a few paragraphs.  Rest assured, unlike the geriatric wheeze-bags at the real McLaughlin Group, we still can control our bowels…we understand why this was your first concern…

The real problem with abortion is that it actually a perfect example of a “hot-button’ issue to which everybody reacts viscerally, and that reaction is hiding a crucial fact which obviates the entire discussion.  Think about it, we’ve been quibbling over abortion for forty years in this country. Seriously, for four fucking decades, every election year we will get somebody yapping about “a woman’s right to choose,” and nobody seems to realize that technology has completely changed the equation.

Ask yourself this question: What has technology changed in our everyday lives since 1973?

• There was no such thing as a cell phone available to the general consumer, and even regular telephones were a four-pound chunk of plastic with a rotary-dial system. Now, even the cheapest, no-contract, deadbeat cell phone contains hundreds of thousands of times more computing power than the machines we used to travel to the moon…Unless of course you still own a Sanyo, in which case you still live in 1973, so  it’s time to go suck on the barrel of a shotgun.
• In 1973, a color television cost a thousand bucks, came in a 900-pound wooden cabinet that you could be buried in, it contained a cathode-ray gun that produced enough radiation to flash-cook a chicken in about three minutes, and there was no such thing bigger than a 27-inch screen.  Now you can buy a flat-screen TV which will cover half of your living room wall.  You can even put it over the fireplace so that when there’s even the slightest incident with that fireplace, the toxic fumes from the melting TV mean the firefighters will discover your body which stopped wretching and hacking about the time the fire truck pulled up to your curb.
• If you walked into a electronics store today with that same thousand bucks, not only could you walk out with a TV that resembles an indoor drive-in movie screen, but with the change you could buy a decent Blu-Ray player. Stop to consider that the earliest predecessor to such a device, the VCR, wouldn’t even exist until the late 1970’s, and when it is finally is invented, it’s about the size of a washing machine and also costs that same grand.
• DNA testing isn’t even on the future radar in 1973. Now, not only is DNA testing available in strip malls and seedy daytime television for “Who my baby daddy?” purposes, but now you can get a home DNA test kit at Wal-Mart for 30 bucks.  Even Magic Johnson thinks that’s a little weird. Maury Povich pisses out little chunks of his prostate just thinking about it.
• The biggest technological development pertintent to this discussion happened in 1978, when we created our first “test-tube” baby.

In other words, when it comes to the standard debate points about abortion like whether life begins at conception and/or the point in time when is a fetus a “viable” life form, nobody has realized that when you couple our ability to create human life outside the human body with other technological advancements in areas like computing, robotics, stem cell research, genetic engineering, and cloning, we’ve got far larger questions to deal with than the constitutionality of Roe v. Wade.

That alone is a good enough reason for a politician to do an about-face, but it may not be as simple as that.  Whether you like it or not, in the very near future we face  a potential scenario where “a woman’s right to choose” could become a completely irrelevant argument.  Because of various court decisions (or lack thereof) on various cases, we’ve got ourselves so wrapped around our own axles, “right to choose” is going to dick-morph into two hard philosophic points which will have to be defined:

1. What constitutes a living human being, and at what points do legalites such as competency and majority occur?
2. What is the value of human life, and more importantly, can human life be owned extracorporeally (can one human life own another?)

Do you think that sounds crazy? Consider the following.  We have court decisions in which embryos which were created in vitro have been determined to be property during a divorce proceeding.  If an embryo can be property, then at which point does an embryo become a person with rights? What if that embryo gets cloned into thousands of copies? What if those clones were genetically engineered not to meet the current standards for competency? Not to mention once we get into ownership of human life, majority and competency, we are right back to the slavery days.

If that weren’t enough of a cluster-fuck for you, we already have contradictory precedent on whether a fetus in utero has rights.  A pregnant woman who smokes a cigarette can get sent to Guantanamo for endangering a fetus, but if that same woman has somebody with the letters “M.D.” after their name yank that fetus out and toss it in a bio-hazard bucket, Gloria Steinem will give that doctor a blow-job.  Regardless of what you think about abortion, you can’t tell us that isn’t Level 10 fucked-up.

Now, you are asking yourself “what does this all have to do with Mitt Romney’s flip-flop on abortion?”  Like we said before, no politician is going to wade into this mess without having a reason, and after you consider all that we’ve mentioned, there would have to be a bigger reason than just to win an election. The only logical explanation is that Romney intends to obviate the entire discussion by using his gargantuan wealth to fund the last link in technology needed to become a “James Bond” style arch-villain who builds a super-army of clone Romney-droids. You can’t really a be guy who fire-bombs Planned Parenthood clinics while building a clone army, can you?

Now when it comes to Romney’s performance in the first debate, the memorable moment comes not from the debate itself but what happened the  next day on “Hardball with Chris Matthews” when he had John Sununu on his show.  What happened as far as content goes isn’t the point. The point is that our calendar says 2012, which means there is at least a decade between our time zone and the “when  Sununu mattered” time zone.

Why is John Fucking Sununu on our televisions telling us to vote for?  Now that Alexander “I’m In Charge Here” Haig is dead, Sununu must be next in line for the officially most outdated influence one can find on the Elephant side of the aisle.  Who are they going to have stump for them next?  Are they going to wheel Nancy Reagan onto the stage the night of the election to tell kids “Don’t Do Drugs” one last time while she is near-lethally medicated on three different kinds of Andy Dick-grade pharmaceuticals and her face is bouncing off the arms of her wheelchair?

Raise your hand if as a kid you were told that you are looked upon by the company you keep.  If that is true,  Romney is a USDA Grade A shithead. Just look at his crew. The one clip we’ve seen of Paul Ryan where he is actually not a dilweed was one where he was actually poking fun at Romney for his musical tastes or lack thereof.  To paraphrase,  Ryan said something about how he was an American through and through and his playlist “starts with AC/DC and ends with Zeppelin.”

That’s right. A guy who just tried to make an “all-American” point just book-ended his musical choices starting with a band from Australia and ended it with one from Birmingham, and not the one in Alabama. Not only did he end his “A to Z” list with an English band, but the name of the band is not “Zeppelin,” it’s Led Zeppelin.  So, this shit-for-brain’s “A to Z” list ends with “L.”  Doesn’t anybody proofread this shit?

Not to mention, that likely isn’t an accurate representation of what’s really on his Ipod, but that guy actually suggested his awareness of alphabetized music stops eight letters  before the Sex Pistols and Suicidal Tendencies, and there’s just no fucking way we can pretend that’s acceptable.  Fuck him…in his pink, puckered ass with Rachel Maddow’s horse cock (more on that later).

C) Libertarian Candidate Gary Johnson

• Pros:

Recently, Meehan went to see comedian and free speech enthusiast Doug Stanhope.  Stanhope supports Johnson because he wants to get rid of the Internal Revenue Service and decriminalize drugs.

Both those ideas have some serious merits, but let’s just focus on the “comedian/free speech” angle for a moment.  Comedians, like bloggers, owe their existence to saying things that may piss off some people.  Do you want to know what kind of comedian supports censorship? Yakov Smirnoff, and we call him a comedian by the absolutely loosest definition of the word.  Smirnoff is a guy who built a whole career and a theater in Branson, Missouri on those “in Soviet Russia” gags, which are really just the expired Cold War version of “Knock-Knock” jokes.

• Cons:

Nobody has any fucking idea who Gary Johnson is, and short of that link, we aren’t going to tell you.  Face it, a big point in the introduction to all this shit was that Americans don’t do their homework on this stuff. You’re reading this on a device connected to that miracle tool called the Internet.  Put “Gary Johnson” in the search engine of your choosing and learn something.

However, we will tell you this. Johnson’s campaign has one over-arching and fundamental problem.

The fact that he is getting 3% in the polls means that he is 0% of a factor based on the fact the Electoral College is an all-or-nothing game. 3% won’t win a single electoral vote, and you need 270 of those to win the election.  To make a long story short, Gary Johnson isn’t going to win anything.  Regardless of what his policies and belief system might represent, he’s not going to be the president and we would be willing to bet anybody that will be the case.

D) Green Party Candidate Jill Stein

• Pros:

She’s not  Obama or Romney.  Like many other third party candidates, Stein has a veritable smorgasbord of fringe campaign platforms that nobody in the major parties gives a shit about, which means she can really focus on her party’s core beliefs.

• Cons:

Who the fuck is Jill Stein? Even Jill Stein doesn’t know who the fuck Jill Stein is.  The genesis of her whole campaign is based on “a mock election at Western Illinois University” where she fared well.  Meehan is an alum of Western Illinois University and even he doesn’t know who the fuck she is.

But that doesn’t mean Meehan doesn’t know what this is really all about.  Meehan says that one thing he learned at WIU was that most of the school’s graduates go on to work in the lucrative field of calling up other WIU graduates on their cell phones and asking them to donate money to a school whose “Career Services Center” left them with no other option for employment.  The fact that Stein’s campaign relied on these people to get the word out, the fact that they couldn’t even cross-reference their call list with the same one they use to hit up alumni for donations pretty much tells you all you need to know about Stein and her supporters.

Here’s the most damning part. During an interview with Grist Magazine, Stein said:

“If I can quote Alice Walker, ‘The biggest way people give up power is by not knowing they have it to start with.’ And that’s true, for the environmental movement, the student movement, the antiwar movement, health-care-as-a-human-right movement—you put us all together, we have the potential for a Tahrir Square type event, and [to] turn the White House into a Green House in November.”

Yeah, and right after that happens, we as a nation can all join hands and sing a chorus of “Kumbayah.”

There’s a shitload of truth in that, but it is also a perfect illustration that truth and practicality do not always intersect. The new American left exemplifies this. All those groups she mentioned don’t have a single unifying issue to unite them as a political force.  Not to mention, most of those ass-loafs think political change means posting shit on their Facebook pages or wearing some sort of ribbon.  Even the goofiest dipshit Tea Bag Republicans all want smaller government and lower taxes, and they actually show up to vote.

In other words, Jill, your “Green House” isn’t going to happen. We all have big dreams, but those of us who aren’t delusional know what is practical and build from there. If you want to get results, pull your head out of the fucking clouds and get back down to reality where the rest of us live and work.

Moreover, for God’s sake,  please stay in Macomb, Illinois…this is where you are guaranteed to remain as relevant as the skin tag J-Dub just removed with a toe-nail clipper.

P.S.  She also happens to be an Ivy League-educated physician. Remember the last time we had one of those in politics?

P.P.S.  Fuck you.

E) Peace and Freedom Party Candidate Roseanne Barr

• Pros:

Barr is the only one of these third-party candidates that has any name-recognition whatsoever.  She is in favor of marijuana legalization, which although our country likely isn’t smart enough to handle, it would keep us from wasting law enforcement resources hassling guys who do absolutely nothing besides live in their parent’s basement, hang out at Phish concerts, and eat microwave burritos.

• Cons:

We pretty much know all we need to know about Roseanne Barr, and what we know pretty much screams “unfit for any public office.”

First of all, she married Tom Arnold. That in and of itself should get her banished to a deserted island populated by vicious, herpes-infected spider monkeys.

She hired John Popper from Blues Traveler to compose the theme song for her television show. With decision-making skills like that, you have to wonder if this would lead to America having Gwen Stefani from No Doubt as our Secretary of State  (“We’re like, totally going to tell Libya to chill…”).

She picked anti-war kook Cindy Sheehan as her running mate.  Obviously her son paid the ultimate price when he was killed in the Iraq War, and we certainly would never make light of that, but the fact she chose to bring light to that situation by camping in a ditch means her ideas of effective problem-solving are actually worse than Barr’s.

Then there’s that whole National Anthem thing. Did you really think we weren’t going to mention that?

Thankfully, like all the other third-party candidates, there’s no way Barr can actually be a factor in the election.  Hell, she couldn’t even win the Green Party’s nomination, largely because she is nuttier than a pile of squirrel shit.

What it all boils down to is this.  Any vote for a third party is a wasted vote.  Stop and think about it…even if the third-party candidate wins the presidency, he won’t have any supporters in Congress. Look at what happened in Minnesota when Jesse Ventura was elected Governor.  He was a colossal failure because both sides joined forces to destroy him.  The fact of the matter is that all of the flesh on our corpses will have been eaten away by maggots and our bones will have been bleaching in the sun for decades before there will be any chance of a third party being relevant in America.

II – The Media

Since we live in a country with a free press, what these media butt-loafs tell you is nearly as important as the butt-loafs running for office.  As such, you should know what they are all really about.

A) CNN

• Pros:

The best thing about CNN is Anderson Cooper.  His book was absolutely awesome and was a real eye-opener to the horrors of both the wars in Iraq and what life was like in post-Katrina New Orleans.  Even though he was born into a position of great wealth, he worked his ass off as a war correspondent only to have it worked in another way years later (you know we had to make a “gay” joke; there’s no rule saying you can’t be over thirty and completely juvenile).  The rest of CNN seems to be well-structured and covers most elections well, that is when they have the focus to do so.

• Cons:

They rarely have the focus to do so.  Every once in a while, they let their biases show. CNN’s ranks are filled with the same commie-pinko-liberals you find at every media outlet, but they do a honest job of hiding that because even they know Al Gore is a dipshit.  As much as we like Anderson Cooper, he looks like a hedgehog, if a hedgehog could get the same hair-cut as Oliver North.  Wolf Blitzer is a complete numb-nut, and that beard makes him look like either a rabid macaque or the “Men’s Wearhouse” guy in the final stages of syphillis, but everybody gives him a pass because he seems like he has his shit somewhat together, but if you look close enough you can see that is the biggest illusion CNN perpetrated since they electronically reproduced Larry King for years after his hushed-up death in a Colombian cocaine brawl in 1985.  Don’t think for one second we weren’t going to mention that.

B) C-SPAN

• Pros:

C-SPAN is without a doubt the be-all, end-all source for everything that happens in Washington, D.C.  If you want to know anything about what’s happened in either chamber of Congress on any given day, you can flip to one of the myriad of C-SPAN channels and get ten or so hours of uncut, un-commented, live-feed stuff as if you were actually there. Not only do you get the events as they actually happen, but you get the chance to see some seriously hilarious shit in the background. There nothing like watching a congressional hearing in which some really serious shit may be decided, and over the shoulder of the star witness, you see a guy picking his nose while jamming out to what the fuck ever is on his Ipod.

• Cons:

There’s really no debating that C-SPAN is  Capitol Hill’s greatest television resource, but until we plumb every household in America with hot and cold running Valium, C-SPAN could also be America’s greatest reason for falling asleep in front of the television.  While the on-air documentation of our government’s minute -to-minute tasks won’t ever be covered better by ANY news outlet, what will never cease to amaze me about C-SPAN is that the commentary and interviews between sessions have almost no difference in speed.  Seriously, watch it and pay attention to the fact everybody speaks with exactly the same cadence.  While it allows you to focus on what is happening, it also has an ironic mind-numbing effect.

C) Fox News

• Pros:

Fox News is a very well-combed, well-produced news organization that knows its market and does not stray from making sure those individuals get to see a hearty amount of the opinions of the demographics that allow Fox to draw the biggest viewership of any of the cable news networks. In other words, Fox does a terrific job of catering to white people who enjoy being pissed off. In addition, Fox is also the home to the most unintentionally funny show on television. If Fox were ever to put “Red Eye” on in prime-time instead burying it at at 2 a.m. Eastern Time, Greg Gutfeld would be the media figure liberals hate the most, because he uses their own tactics against them, namely he’s sarcastic, condescending, takes shit out of context, and generally cherry-picks facts to make his points.

• Cons:

Ok, here’s the ugly truth nobody wants to admit.  For every media clown that bangs on Fox for being a “conservative” network, there’s another media clown who ignores the fact that MSNBC is Fox News for liberals and other mental defectives (more on that later).  Like we already mentioned, the difference is that Fox actually draws the biggest ratings of any basic-cable news outlet, so they don’t really have to give a shit about people who don’t like them.  Michael Jordan didn’t worry about guys that could ball on the playground just around the corner from the old Chicago Stadium, mainly because he was Michael Jordan.  As long as Fox News is making plenty of money, there is about the same odds of them caring what liberals think about the empire they’ve built as there is Wendy’s coming out with a ketchup-flavored Frosty.

So, they are obviously slanted toward the conservative point of view.  So what? They aren’t CNN who tries to hide their biases; Fox actually embraces them.   But they do it in a totally chicken-shit way.  Look at Bill O’Reilly, who is their big “rock star.” He really is neither conservative nor liberal, but he is is a self-absorbed windbag who simply shouts over anybody who disagrees with him. Not to mention anybody who is supposed to articulate an opposing view point is either made sure to be completely incapable of doing so or given no real opportunity to do it.  But it is a recipe that works, which is why every single other news outlet does it in varying degrees.

If you don’t like rap music, then don’t listen to it. If you don’t like Fox News, then don’t watch it. The world is full of information sources, and it is really only the true dim-wits who stick to just one.  If you really believe that all liberals are the spawn of Satan, if you really believe all democrats are second-rate human beings who hates their country, and you are convinced that unless America is run by only bible-banging homophobic hate-mongers this country doesn’t have a snowflake’s chance in hell at getting back on track, then spend your weeknights jacking off to Sean Hannity. If you believe the opposite, then go beat off to whoever they have on MSNBC.

The real point is that if you only avail yourself to only one source of information, nobody needs to care what you think because you are the definition of a dumb-ass.

D) MSNBC

• Pros:

Meehan thinks MSNBC’s daytime programming is very good.  He says they have decent anchors, and during the daytime they seem to be relatively sensible and unbiased. But Meehan also entertains himself by going to his local pet store and watching the cats hack up hairballs. This is the point where Meehan insists that you know that he knows Russian Blues aren’t really blue at all, they are grey.  Do with that what you will.

• Cons:

Despite what Meehan thinks about MSNBC during the daytime, we both agree that some really odd shit happens there after sundown.  This is when MSNBC becomes a big electronic bowl of Granola; full of fruits, nuts, and flakes bleating about massive conspiracy theories about the government is logging everybody’s Tweets and impregnating the soles of your shoes with surveillance equipment.  This is where you can hear shit like unmanned drone aircraft are responsible for Justin Bieber’s super-star status.

It really isn’t hard to figure out why this happens when you look at their line-up. For openers, there’s lunatics like Rachel Maddow and complete frauds like Al Sharpton (we’ll come back to those two rectal fissures later). There’s ass-wipes like Ed Schultz, who began his career as a sports broadcaster in Fargo, North Dakota. We don’t have anything against North Dakota in particular, in fact J-Dub spent some time as the token black guy living there.  But when you are a sportscaster in a place that has no sports, that’s the prefect training to be a talking hemmorhoid on a channel nobody watches.

But the real flag-bearer as to why MSNBC is completely unwatchable was the failed Keith Olbermann experiment. We were both excited when they hired Olbermann because we both thought he fucking rocked as a sportscaster in his heyday at ESPN.  But he quickly became a vapid resource of all things anti-Bush to the point that it was unbearable to listen to.  Olbermann’s rants often bordered on the maniacal; complete with non-sense connections in the manner of the aforementioned conspiracy theorists.  The typical Olbermann formula went something like “Something Bush did…and Rush Limbaugh said…(Olbermann begins foaming at the mouth and losing his control of his bodily functions).

It was not only sad because we were seeing a sports  broadcasting legend unravel, it was sad because it was just fucking sad.  It was even more sad because we haven’t seen Chris Berman commit suicide, and we can’t think of anything more depressing than that fat-hump still drawing breath.

Eventually, even the people who agreed with Olbermann wore thin of his bullshit; you can only beat on Rush Limbaugh so long because it’s not like he’s a terribly complex figure constantly giving you new reasons to hate him.  He’s actually the photo-negative of Olbermann, which is what really pissed him off. Well, that and the fact that there’s no money in being a left-wing pain in the ass, where Limbaugh makes like eleventy bazillion dollars a year.

E) PBS

• Pros:

Somehow, even though its model is ridiculously out-dated, and the fact that it is immensely liberal, PBS somehow has hung on to it’s niche despite itself, largely because it does offer a little something for everybody. No matter who you are, you have at least one thing on PBS you like.

• Cons:

PBS needs to go away. It’s the brain-child of a bunch of 1960’s liberals who haven’t recognized that cable television and the internet have made the concept of PBS completely obsolete. When PBS was launched in 1970, there were three television networks and a handful of independent television stations, so PBS had a accurate claim when it said it was filling a need that wasn’t being met anywhere else.

Harsh reality time…

That’s no longer true, and the fact that PBS is run by a bunch of “flower children” who inherently suck at business is the reason why PBS is still latched on to the public tit.  That’s weaker than  Freddie Mercury’s T-Cell count in 1988, and we as citizens have every reason to question it.

Look at what PBS does every time they want money. They trot out a bunch of shit that appeals only to aging hippies.  Where else can you still see Peter, Paul, and Mary? Who else gives a fuck about them anymore, other than your aging hippie parents who probably conceived you in the back of some piece-of-shit VW van to “Puff the Magic Dragon.” Not to mention, they will hound you with those interminable pledge breaks where they try to sell you a coffee mug for $50, a tote bag for $100, or a Peter, Paul, and Mary DVD set for $200.

They fucked up the only thing they used to do well, which was educational programming.  Nova used to be the best science show on television, now it might as well be called the “Al Gore Hypocritical Greeny Suck-Off Hour.”

But the most unforgivable thing they’ve done was to  screw around with the iconic Sesame Street. If you want to convince a kid that he might be the last white kid left in America, let him watch an hour of the all-new Sesame Street/Benetton Ad.  Watch it with him, and you will see the lefty propaganda leaking out of this show. They didn’t have the balls to admit Bert and Ernie are gay, but they did turn the Cookie Monster into a vegetarian. Let that sink in for a moment. I hope Jim Henson is reincarnated as a rabid squirrel that runs up the pant leg of the president of PBS.

The only thing PBS has left that they haven’t fucked up is “Austin City Limits,” but even that no longer has the monopoly for exposing new music to the American audience. In fact, I would bet you the number of people under 30 who even know that “Austin City Limits” exists is pretty slim.  Face it, in an era where every little indie band from East Tree Stump, Ohio can make and release their own podcasts, even ACL is teetering on the brink of obsolescence. It’s sad, but it’s also an “inconvenient truth” as Pal Bore would say.

Then’s there’s the news division.  PBS used to actually be the most balanced thing out there, it had real honest-to-goodness conservatives like William F. Buckley, and good, old-fashioned wild-eyed liberals like Bill Moyers.  But now, the “liberals” on PBS are flat-out communists, and what they call “conservatives” are a bunch of wheezing mouth-breathers who voted for Harry Truman (e.g. John McLaughlin) and wouldn’t even be let on the property at Fox.  Pat Buchanan doesn’t count, because we all know he’s a Nazi.

F) Political Blogs

• Pros:

The blogosphere provides everyone who can use a computer the opportunity to share their opinion regarding all things political and otherwise.

• Cons:

The blogosphere provides everyone who can use a computer the opportunity to share their opinion regarding all things political and otherwise.

Don’t think the we don’t get the irony of chastising blogs on a blog.  Having said that, we are deluded enough to think that what we are saying here matters; that really isn’t the point. We’ve already stated in our blogs that we are just as unqualified to speak on anything that we cover as anybody else is.

The big problem is the sometimes the benefit of a particular form of media can be its biggest detriment, and blogs exemplify that.  The reason bloggers can quickly get into deep water with stuff like this is they start to believe their opinions matter more than others.  Arianna Huffington and that bilge-water site of hers, The Huffington Post, is a classic example.

If you trace her history, it becomes clear this woman has no core beliefs, she simply grabss on to whichever issue with which she feels will provide her with the most publicity. She then trumpets her bullshit with the theme being since she went to Cambridge, she’s way smarter than you and her opinions are far more informed than yours could ever be.

Not only is it amazing how sniffing elitism and rampant, self-serving liberalism go hand in hand, but this is exactly why you can take your Cambridge degree and shove it up your wrinkled, old ass, Arianna. We see you for what you are, and we don’t give a flying fuck where you have a degree from, because it just means you were schooled in elitist propaganda and you have a piece of paper to certify you were dumb enough to sit through that shit.

This is why we consider the Huffington Post and one-sided blogs just like it to be so much electronic fish-wrap.

G) Talk Radio

• Pros:

Talk radio offers a great alternative to regular broadcast radio because all it is going to take to get J-Dub and Meehan to pour white-hot molten steel into each other’s ear canals is one more airplay of “Moves Like Jagger” by Maroon 5.  Contrary to popular belief, talk radio is not populated by a bunch of shut-ins and sore-headed old cranks.  Much of dialogue is very informed, comes from reasonably educated people, and most talk-radio shows do a good job of screening their calls so that they can get good content that moves the discussion forward from callers.  That’s why when the occasional nut-job gets through to the air, his kookiness is highly magnified for maximum entertainment value.

NOTE: None of what we just said applies to sports talk radio.

• Cons:

Talk radio has two main problems. First, is that it is broken into two main outlets. There’s the over-the-air stations, which are dominated by Rush Limbaugh and a quarter-century of failed liberals who have tried to compete with him. Then there’s the satellite-based guys who tend to be more like comedians who also happen to have opinions about life and politics.  The two best examples are Howard Stern and the Opie and Anthony show. On serious issues, they don’t have the gravitas of the over-the-air guys, but they sure as shit are a better option than a sanctimonious ass-hat like Jon Stewart.

The second problem talk radio has is that it is also a dying media.  This is a visual world we live in, and with talk radio you can’t see any of the people that are speaking unless you stream the show on the internet.  What that means is that radio is slowly becoming a hybrid of podcasting and television.

The bottom line is that we love listening to talk radio; sometimes it is awesome and sometimes it makes us wants to drink all of our household cleaning products.  It’s that sort of love/hate relationship we have with it (along with the internet) that has dragged it to the point where the body is still alive but the vultures are circling because they know better.

H) What’s Left of the Dying Print Media

• Pros:

The fact that print media has continued to maintain its existence in the ever expanding universe of electronic media is very respectable, and you have to hand it to publications like the New York Times for still being able to stay in business when you consider how their subcribers have dipped year after year.

• Cons:

Let’s face it, cable killed the relevance of PBS, podcasting and satellite is killing radio, and the internet has made print media a waste of paper.  Those tree-hugging actually have something right for a change, but they will never do anything with that success because they are weak and spineless and just as easy to kick over as the birch trees they chain themselves to on a regular basis.

We laugh when we see someone reading a newspaper, and we might even live long enough to see the day when the same thing will hold true for magazines.  Let’s put it this way… Where do you get a majority of your porn?  Remember when you used to buy “Hustler” at the convenience store?  That’s precisely the point.

III – Four Media Stooges Worthy of Special Attention

A) Brit Hume

• Pros:

Brit Hume is really the Mel Kiper Jr. of politics.  Like Kiper, Hume has built an entire career off saying completely obvious shit like “Obama is a failure.” That puts him on the same level of political astuteness as the noted scholar Kid Rock.  You just know Hume is the guy they keep at Fox because he makes guys like Sean Hannity look smart.

• Cons:

Brit Hume may actually be the Peyton Manning of politics. He’s well respected in the journalism community despite the fact his career has largely been living off his single Super Bowl moment, the Monica Lewinsky scandal.  Not to mention he also has Manning’s fetus-head and those stupid pouty facial expressions.

The one thing we know is that Brit Hume is an unconscionable asshole. His comments immediately after the Tiger Woods fiasco sealed that fate.

“Tiger Woods will recover as a golfer. Whether he can recover as a person I think is a very open question, and it’s a tragic situation for him. I think he’s lost his family, it’s not clear to me if he’ll be able to have a relationship with his children, but the Tiger Woods that emerges once the news value dies out of this scandal—the extent to which he can recover—seems to me to depend on his faith. He’s said to be a Buddhist; I don’t think that faith offers the kind of forgiveness and redemption that is offered by the Christian faith. So my message to Tiger would be, ‘Tiger, turn to the Christian faith and you can make a total recovery and be a great example to the world.'”

Re-read that very carefully. This ass-loaf went on national television and said the only way you can get forgiveness is to become a Christian. That’s right…he gave every Buddhist in the world a gigantic “Fuck You” over a golfer who got caught banging IHOP waitresses.

See, Brit, here’s the problem. Even in politically-correct, “can’t offend anybody” America, you can say the nastiest shit you want about white Christian males. You know that’s true because you and every other conservative wheeze out there bitches about it constantly.  See if you can work this through your misshapen Manning fetus-head, Brit…IT’S BECAUSE YOU GIVE EVERY CHRISTIAN IN THE WORLD A BAD NAME WHEN YOU SAY STUPID SHIT LIKE THIS!

We’ve vented…we’ve had a Xanax…all is now good…

B) Rachel Maddow

• Pros:

While we really don’t know for sure, all signs point to Rachel Maddow having a huge, veiny cock, and for a couple of guys who are very confident in their sexuality, we must admit she is a very handsome young man. In fact she kind of looks like a young Anderson Cooper, but in a much less hedgehog-like fashion.

• Cons:

For those of you who haven’t noticed, and judging by the ratings, most of you haven’t (God bless you, Harry Doyle), Rachel Maddow is the host of her own weeknight talk-show on MSNBC. By talk show, we mean “ultra-leftist shriek fest.”  Only the most off-the-hinges liberals can’t stomach this alleged woman. If you’ve ever been stuck at the residence of any uber-liberal, you may have seen this show and if you aren’t and uber-liberal, it probably made your colon twist like an over-used phone cord.

In many ways, Maddow is a liberal Brit Hume. Like Hume does for conservatives, Maddow embodies every single fucking thing that is bad about American liberalism, and not one single fucking thing that’s good about it.

She hates Rush Limbaugh not because he’s a conservative, but because she’s one of the aforementioned “quarter-century of failed liberals who tried to compete with him.”  Unless you are one of the seventeen listeners Air America had, you don’t remember that failed attempt at liberal talk radio. She failed miserably in radio, and you know that the fact that Limbaugh has a semester at Southeast Missouri State compared to Maddow’s PhD in Politics from Oxford means there’s no way she should have been crushed by an uneducated lout.  Don’t forget, we say that usingher logic.

Oops, there’s that pesky elitism again. All you have to do is watch this alleged woman’s show for ten minutes to see that her primary modus operandi is to heap scorn and derision on anybody who disagrees with him/her, because he/she is far smarter than those of us who just can’t possibly see the world as he/she does.

She’s a perfect fit for the kooks at MSNBC, and it was head kook Keith Olbermann that hand-picked her for he current role. It really doesn’t get more damning than that, but like the commercials say…wait, there’s more.

Lastly, she’s a complete liar, to an almost absurd level.  This alleged woman actually tells people gems like:  “I have never and still don’t think of myself as an Obama supporter, either professionally or actually”  Once again, if you’ve ever this show, you know what a ridiculous statement that is.  You could really rename his/her show the “Barack Obama Knob-Slob Suck and Swallow Jamboree” and it would be totally accurate.  It’s completely berserk that she thinks she can say that and not get called on it.

What’s worse, is he/she shares one of Obama’s most annoying characteristics. Maddow is such a fucking narcissist he/she thinks simply pressing his/her lips together and pumping out words, that somehow we underlings are all supposed to delight in her oral feces and make her words the screed by which we all live our wretched little lives.

Rachel, there’s a special place in hell for people like you, and when you get there, I hope you are sandwiched in between Brit Hume and Keith Olbermann.

C) Al Sharpton

• Pros:

If nothing else, that’s 60 minutes MSNBC won’t give to Rachel Maddow, and he provides a shitload of business for the SoftSheen people.

• Cons:

We really can’t understand why anybody listens to anything this talking shit-burger says. Al Sharpton is a complete fraud, and every time he opens his mouth he sets race relations in this country back 15 years.

Raise your hand if you remember how Al Sharpton came to national prominence?  Set the Way-Back Machine to 1984, when Bernhard Goetz shot four black guys who tired to rob him on a New York City subway. During his trial, the rest of the world saw these four mopes picked the wrong dude to wrong to rob, and the jury cleared Goetz of all charges except criminal possession of a weapon.

Sharpton jumped in, played the race card and led several marches protesting what he saw as the weak prosecution of the case.  Sharpton claimed Goetz’s actions were racist and requested a federal civil rights investigation. Well, guess what? The feds agreed with the rest of the world and agreed these dipshits got shot because they tried to the wrong guy and not because they were black.

Three years later came Sharpton’s defining moment.

In  1987,  a 15-year-old black girl named Tawana Brawley was found in the woods near Wappinger, New York. She was smeared with feces, lying in a garbage bag, her clothing torn and burned and with various slurs and epithets written on her body in charcoal. Brawley claimed she had been assaulted and raped by six white men, some of them Wappinger police officers.

Sharpton again entered the fray in support of Brawley.  A grand jury was convened and in 1988, that grand jury released a 170-page report concluding Brawley had not been abducted, had not been assaulted, and had not been raped and/or sodomized as had been claimed by Brawley and Sharpton.  Not only did the grand jury not buy Brawley’s story, they gave specific reasons why they didn’t.

• The rape kit results collected at the hospital did not indicate sexual assault
• Despite her claim of having been held captive for days, Brawley was not suffering from exposure, was well-nourished, and appeared to have brushed her teeth recently
• Despite her clothing being charred, there were no burns on her body
• Although a shoe she was wearing was cut through, Brawley had no injuries to her foot
• The racial epithets written on her were upside down, which led to suspicion that Brawley had written the words herself
• Testimony from her schoolmates indicated she had attended a local party during the time of her supposed abduction
•  One witness testified she saw Brawley climbing into the garbage bag

At this point, and despite the overwhelming evidence that he had bought a pig in a poke, Sharpton upped the ante.  Sharpton accused Steven Pagones, the then Dutchess County prosecutor, of racism and of being one of the perpetrators of the alleged abduction and rape.  Pangnones successfully sued Sharpton for slander and he was subsequently ordered to pay $345,000 in damages as the jury found Sharpton liable for making seven defamatory statements about Pagones.  Naturally, Sharpton refused to pay his share of the damages.

That’s why it shouldn’t come as a shock to anybody that Sharpton has been described as “a political radical who is to blame, in part, for the deterioration of race relations.”Sociologist Orlando Patterson has referred to him as a “racial arsonist,” while liberal columnist Derrick Z. Jackson has called him the black equivalent of Richard Nixon and Pat Robertson. You’d have to be pretty delusional to see that as a positive, which Sharpton does.  Al thinks criticisms like that are proof that he is effective as an activist.  Wow…

Oh, did we mention he’s a tax cheat? In 2008, the Associated Press reported that Sharpton and his businesses owed almost $1.5 million in unpaid taxes and penalties.  That borke down to Sharpton owing $931,000 in federal income tax and $366,000 to the state New York, and his for-profit company, Rev. Al Communications, owed another $176,000 to New York

Also in 2008, the New York Post reported that the Internal Revenue Service had sent subpoenas to several corporations that had donated to Sharpton’s National Action Network because in 2007 New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo began investigating the National Action Network because it failed to make proper financial reports, as required for non-profit organizations.

According to the New York Post, several major corporations, including Anheuser-Busch and Colgate-Palmolive, have donated thousands of dollars to the National Action Networ, and the Post asserted that the donations were made to prevent boycotts or rallies by Sharpton’s organization.

Again, Sharpton played off the tax charges by stating they reflected a political agenda against him perpetrated by the Bush administration, despite the fact that when the IRS filed a tax lien against Sharpton in 2010, Barack Obama had already been in the White House for almost two years.

Sharpton’s bullshit is so obvious that even 20 years ago, black people knew Al Sharpton was the sort of guy who would go on a hunger strike and get caught elbows-deep in a bucket of the Colonel’s Extra Crispy.

Sharpton’s bullshit is so obvious even a lily-white guy like Meehan sees through it.  When we say Meehan is white, we mean he is that special Irish, bug-light sort of white.  His skin is almost translucent, like if he drank a dark liquor like bourbon, you could see it coursing through his veins.  The point is Meehan has lived his whole life in a place that enjoys relative racial peace and quiet, and without years the years of experience J-Dub has with flame-fanners like Sharpton, he still nailed Sharpton on his first swing; the following numbered items are unedited from the initial rough draft of this piece, because they were so dead-on, there was no improving them.

There are countless negative aspects of all things Sharpton, but as one might expect they always tend to go back to his non-stop desire to play the race card when the opportunity arises.  There are two things you need to know about Al Sharpton:

1. When it is believed that race may have been responsible for a social injustice, then Al will be there to stand up for his heritage and livelihood by exposing such injustices.
2. When it is not believed that race may have been responsible for a social injustice, then Al will be there to do everything in his power to make sure that it is exposed as a race issue anyway, therefore jeopardizing that same heritage while promoting that same livelihood mentioned in point #1.

There’s Al Sharpton in two bullet points, and there’s really no debating that.  The fact that he’s on television offering opinions about ANYTHING is a reflection that there’s a selection of Americans who will listen to just about anything.

And that’s more evidence why we are fucked as a nation.

D) Jon Stewart

• Pros:

Believe it or not, we used to be huge fans of Jon Stewart.  We enjoyed his stand-up stuff and enjoyed the initial incarnation of The Daily Show when Stewart became the host after Craig Kilborn left to start a suicidal bid to be a warmed-over, blonder Conan O’Brien.  By the time Kilborn was replaced by the unfortunately sober and no longer suicidal Craig Ferguson, Stewart had already turned his back on the stuff that made him funny in the first place.  Gone were his timing, his delivery, and the fact that he was far more talented than most of the comedians that came out of New York City at the time Stewart was becoming part of comedy scene.  To be fair, his competition consisted mostly of piss-drips like Colin Quinn.

• Cons:

Somewhere along the line, Jon Stewart fell victim to a malady which kills a lot of great satirists. We like to call it Michael Moore Syndrome. When a comedian begins to take themselves seriously, only bad things can happen.  As much a a left-wing doofus as Michael Moore was, at first he was still funny.  That disappeared right around “Bowling for Columbine” when Moore deluded himself that America would listen to the celluloid rantings of self-annoited crusader in 56-inch waist pants.

He seriously miscalculated, and so did Stewart when he genuinely believed that he could change the face of politics with a fake news show on a basic cable outlet that used to run after a program featuring puppets making prank phone calls.  Not only is that belief far-fetched, Stewart has topped with the delusion that he is the savior of American politics because every once in a while he snaps off a witty line on television.

Right now, we would bet we could find five local news weather guys who are funnier than Jon Stewart.  Not only has Stewart abandoned the holy trinity of true comedy because he thinks he’s above it (oops, there’s that pesky elitism again…), but the writing on The Daily Show has gone so far south it has penguins shitting on it.  Stewart needs to quit trying to take on guys like Bill O’Reilly, and go back to being a comedian.

Conclusion:

Here’s the bazillion dollar question, America. Do you know why we have this shitty two-party system that keeps giving us shitty candidates? Because that’s what we deserve. Do you want to know why?  Because too many people listen to the Brit Humes and the Rachel Maddows of the world.  Those two guys have dome more to fuck up this country than Roger Goodell, Jerry Sandusky, and Justin Bieber combined.

As long as Americans stay as disconnected for that system, we are going to continue to keep getting the choice of a rich, uptight, windbag who is trying to trick us into voting for him because he can deliver in front of a camera and microphone versus a windbag who has connections to a lot of rich people who is also trying to trick us into voting for him because he can deliver in front of a camera and microphone.

Did you wonder why in a piece about politics there were so many sports references? One reason is that all J-Dub writes about is sports. But another reason is that it’s one of those “does life imitate art or vice versa” situations.

Think about it. If Americans treated politics like they treated sports, we wouldn’t have such shitty candidates. This is a country which has 150 million guys who spend hours contemplating meaningless fantasy football decisions, but will let the Humes and Maddows of the world tell them who is best equipped to make decisions that will effect their every day lives.

Yeah, that’s not fucked up at all.

Here’s another thing to think about.  How long do you think Brit Hume or Rachel Maddow would last on ESPN? Probably about as long as Rush Limbaugh did. Limbaugh got fired by the Mothership for doing exactly that for which he was hired…saying controversial shit.  That means a Hume or a Maddow would take no time at all to step on the wrong toes and get the eject button. The first time Rachel Maddow told the world Tom Brady gives terrible anilingus he/she would be out on her unsatisfactorily-licked ass.

The inverse of that scenario doesn’t work any better. Can you imagine Ron Jaworski on C-SPAN? “Shit, son, you gotta pass that bill!” It’s not going to happen.

This is why Dennis Miller failed on Monday Night Football. He tried to add intelligence to football, and there’s just no room for that. You can’t make references to the House of Plantagenet to football fans and expect to survive.  No football fans know or care that the Plantagenets were a royal dynasty that produced fourteen kings of England between 1154 and 1485.  Nor do they care that the Plantagenets originated from the Angevin dynasty, their paternal  ancestors coming from the French province of Gâtinais.

Miller drew the comparison to the Plantagenets to make a point about how NFL coaching connections are incredibly inbred, much like the European houses of royalty.  Had he made it more about families in Appalachia who have 33-year old grandmothers and uncles who are their own grandfathers he may have lasted more than one season at ESPN.

Here’s the bottom line, America.  If you refuse to be smart about who you elect to public office, then you’ve got no right to bitch when you end up with a bunch of elected dumbfucks.  Right now, you are electing presidents based on who performs better on camera.  That’s really stupid since most big decisions made by a president don’t happen anywhere near a camera.  That’s really stupid since most big decisions made by a president don’t happen anywhere near a camera, they happen over $400 bottles of wine in a room where it’s none of your damn business.

Think about what that means. We have a class of people eligible to vote in the presidential election who also think  Dane Cook is the greatest comedian of all time.

That’s really the only thing scarier than a Roseanne Barr presidency.

-J-Dub and Meehan