Life On The World Of The Cross

Sarah Palin riding her dinner home

When I lived in Alaska, I lived in a suburban Anchorage neighborhood where there were no fences and the dogs were allowed to roam free ’till their meal tickets returned home from work. Mine, a 90 lb Rotweiller-Weimaraner mix, was no exception.

The winter of ‘92 was particularly bad. Snow piled so high on my driveway that I couldn’t toss it high enough on either side to prevent it from falling back down on my head. Even the moose were starving, abandoning their natural hillside habitats for the burbs in a desperate search for food.

One day my loyal doggie returned home reeking of some god-awful stench. Nothing like coming home after a hard day’s work and having to wash the dog. This repulsive routine continued for days. Consulting my neighbors, they had the same complaint.

One fine night (in winter the sun sets in Anchorage in mid to late afternoon) el doggo trotted proudly up the stairway with what looked like a tree limb in her mouth. Dropping it on the landing with a loud, heavy KERTHUNK, she looked at me expectantly for approval. Closer inspection revealed it was the foreleg of a moose.

Finally, it was discovered that someone in an adjacent neighborhood had lured one of those starving freight train sized beasts into his garage with a head of lettuce. Closing the door behind it, he proceeded to blow it away with a shotgun. After carving what he wanted from the carcass (perhaps with a mouthwatering Sarah Palin mooseburger recipe in mind), he dumped the remainder behind his house, creating  a holy rollin’ doggie pilgrimage site.

I was reminded of this sad event when I experienced my personal WTF moment this afternoon upon learning that Sarah Palin had suddenly resigned her office. After hearing her blathering stream of consciousness explanations, which included everything from fish, to refrigerator magnets, to taking apart the point guard on a basketball team, I was left with the impression that there is more to this rotting corpse than meets the nose.

Exhibit One was her statement that she was concerned that “millions of your dollars [are] going down the drain”, including the use of valuable staff time. What else was that but an admission that state taxpayer monies were being spent in connection with her national political ambitions? She seems to think that legitimate ethical investigations (instigated by her own party in their capacity as public officials) are all part of some insidious plot to deny her divinely appointed due.

The rest of her presser was all rationalization and sleight of hand,  including the old political saw of wanting to spend more time with her family. And because it worked so well for so long for the previous Rethuglican president, she tried to play the patriotism card, hoping to transfer the positive feelings Americans have towards the troops to herself.  (What better reason for them to sacrifice life and limb than to protect the right of American citizens everywhere to be the best narcissistic political drama queens that they can be?)

In terms of national politics, the calculation that positioning herself as a selfless maverick would somehow trump her being perceived as a flaky quitter would require a national political adviser with the IQ of a sponge. (Bill Kristol, anyone?)

I suspect, given the recent spate of revelations about her erratic conduct during the ‘08 political campaign currently being reported in media outlets like Vanity Fair and Politico, that another shoe is about to drop; and that Palin sees the door to her presidential ambitions being slammed in her face. Even her once sky high approval ratings inside Alaska have dropped significantly.

These are trying economic times for governors all over the country, requiring a skill and sagacity that Sister Sarah may suspect, deep down, she is incapable of.  Hell, she can’t even control her own family, let alone her public image.

In other words, this was an act of desperation.

[Image found here.]

Tags: Bill Kristol, Politico, Sarah Palin resignation, Vanity Fair

A decade ago, I was marooned along with a couple of dozen of other international tourists on the rocky lava islet of Palea Kameni, off the legendary Greek island of Thira (Santorini). While we were soaking in its geothermally heated pool, a violent storm suddenly blew into the Aegean. We were told that there was no way we could make it back to port, that we would just have to wait it out.

Sticking my head out into the lacerating wind and rain, I observed a compact cruise ship struggling towards the open waters get blown back and turn stern (tail). And noticing that our open air boat didn’t have any life jackets, I was inclined to agree. For me, there was nothing left to do but start up a round of a popular American song at the time, R.E.M.’s “It’s The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine).” Music really is the universal language…

In the context of the current world economic meltdown, it’s fair to ask: Is this the end of the world as we know it?

After reading Christopher Hedges’ latest article in Truthdig, titled The Corporate Media Circus: The Truth Alone Will Not Set You Free, I’d have to answer: I certainly hope so, as painful as the short term effects are and will continue to be.

The Pulitizer Prize Award winning journalist and author of such books as War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning and I Don’t Believe In Atheists, describes a world economic system that has gone from bad to worse, from dysfunctional to dystopic. Welcome to the new age of post-apocalyptic corporate feudalism:

The ability of the corporate state to pacify the country by extending credit and providing cheap manufactured goods to the masses is gone. The pernicious idea that democracy lies in the choice between competing brands and the freedom to accumulate vast sums of personal wealth at the expense of others has collapsed. The conflation of freedom with the free market has been exposed as a sham. The travails of the poor are rapidly becoming the travails of the middle class, especially as unemployment insurance runs out and people get a taste of Bill Clinton’s draconian welfare reform. And class warfare, once buried under the happy illusion that we were all going to enter an age of prosperity with unfettered capitalism, is returning with a vengeance.

Now, in the greatest transfer of wealth in modern history (which W promised early on, BTW), they are dependent for their very survival on the toil and sweat of their taxpaying serfs. But before we consider where we go next, let’ review the techniques they employeded to bring us here, lest they rise from the dead and start a whole new reign.

Wielding the dual edge psychological sword of commercial advertising and political propaganda, the former designed to create the desire for specific company products and the latter to insure the election of political hacks willing to do their bidding, our corporate overlords succeeded in controlling the mindspace of their subjects.

The emergence of corporate and government public relations, which drew on the studies of mass psychology by Sigmund Freud and others after World War I, found its bible in Walter Lippmann’s book Public Opinion, a manual for the power elite’s shaping of popular sentiments. Lippmann argued that the key to leadership in the modern age would depend on the ability to manipulate “symbols which assemble emotions after they have been detached from their ideas.” The public mind could be mastered, he wrote, through an “intensification of feeling and a degradation of significance.”

Take, for instance, the ideas and feelings associated with the word symbol “patriotism.” Images of the Founding Fathers signing the Declaration of Independence, generations of soldiers who made the ultimate sacrifice on the battlefields come to mind. Yet these associations have undergone a slow and subtle transformation, running the gamut from “What’s good for General Motors is good for the country” to “product loyalty” in which corporate logos have been prominently and willingly displayed on just about every item of clothing and accessories made. Now, we might as well be walking around with advertising sandwich boards hung around our necks like they did during the last Great Depression.

Or consider the golden rule, once the premier ethic of western society. It was replaced by that most iconic and ironic of consumer rules: “The more you buy, the more you save.” To anybody with two functioning brain cells, this was a certain formula for economic disaster, given a culture where people regularly spent 120% of their paychecks and used their highly leveraged and inflated homes as ready teller machines.

The modern world, as Kafka predicted, has become a world where the irrational has become rational, where lies become true.

Just how Kafka-esque the world has become is evident in a front page story in today’s NY Times titled “Aspiring Lawyer Finds Debt Is Bigger Hurdle Than Bar Exam”: [Read the rest. . . →]

Tags: Bubbles the Chimp, Catch-22, Christopher Hedges, Declaration of Independence, Founding Fathers, General Motors, Great Depression, Jacobins, Jospeh Heller, Kafka, Michael Jackson, neocons, Public Opinion, R.E.M, Sigmund Freud, Urantia Book, Walter Lippmann

Yee haw! Ridin’ high at the Creation Museum’s triceratops rodeo

Among the many problems confronting the Rethuglicans in their attempt to rebuild themselves into a viable political party is this one, reflected in this poll last year from Gallup:

PRINCETON, NJ — There is a significant political divide in beliefs about the origin of human beings, with 60% of Republicans saying humans were created in their present form by God 10,000 years ago, a belief shared by only 40% of independents and 38% of Democrats.

Today’s NY Times has an article titled Paleontology and Creationism Meet but Don’t Mesh. It details a recent visit to the Creation Museum in Kentucky by a group of European paleontologists. It begins thusly:

PETERSBURG, Ky. — Tamaki Sato was confused by the dinosaur exhibit. The placards described the various dinosaurs as originating from different geological periods — the stegosaurus from the Upper Jurassic, the heterodontosaurus from the Lower Jurassic, the velociraptor from the Upper Cretaceous — yet in each case, the date of demise was the same: around 2348 B.C.

When you stop to think about it, the Creation Museum is a perfect metaphor for the whole Rethuglican narrative: The USA began in 1980 with the election of Ronald Reagan. The civil rights struggle,The New Deal, the Progressive Era, the Gilded Age, slavery, the Founding Fathers– all that never really existed, but are merely the product of fake fossils planted into the historical record by Satanic liberals meant to test and deceive the faithful.

The article continues:

“I’m very curious and fascinated,” Stefan Bengtson, a professor of paleozoology at the Swedish Museum of Natural History, said before the visit, “because we have little of that kind of thing in Sweden.”

When 60% of your party believes that the live action feature version of The Flintstones is a reality show, you’ve got a long row to hoe.

[slight edit]

[Image from John Scalzi]

Tags: Creation Museum, Flintstones, Founding Fathers, Gilded Age, Progressive Era, Rethuglicans, Ronald Reagan. FDR, salvery

Well, Norm, the jokes on you

Just want to congratulate Al Franken not only for his hard won victory per today’s MN Supreme Court ruling; but for the political class he has showed during the whole sorry-ass, post-election ordeal. Hard to think of another US senator, let alone a rookie, who has been the target of so much Rethuglican obstructionism, and yet who has it endured with so much political grace.

(Reports that Bully O’Reilly’s entire upper torso exploded when the decision was handed down is unconfirmed, though he didn’t appear during his regularly scheduled spot opposite Keith Oberman this evening.)

How much stronger would the recovery bill have been, for instance, had Franken been seated at the beginning of President Obama’s term? As it turned out, the Dems capitulated to the demands of the three Rethugs who did vote for it (especially Susan Collins, who engineered the “compromise”). The price of their support was far larger tax cuts and far less actual stimulus, a price that Paul Krugman says might yet doom it to failure.

As for Norm Coleman’s concession speech, though all noble sounding on the surface, who among us believes that he didn’t do it for crass political self-interest? Apart from the additional legal costs of pursuing the matter to the US Supreme Court (Coleman has already been ordered to pay nearly $100k of Franken’s legal bills), the fact that the sitting Minnesota governor, Tim Pawlenty, wants to run for president in 2012 will leave his office open.

Any chance that Coleman has of becoming governor depends on recapturing the goodwill of Minnesota voters whose patience he has strained to the breaking point with his protracted legal actions. Coleman has a long way to go before he can make them forget his flights into denial, obstructionism, self-interest, and hypocrisy.

But having already elected a pro wrestler to the governor’s mansion; having elected a former Democrat moderate turned Retuglican hardliner to the US senate; and now having elected a former Saturday Night Live comedian to replace him, Coleman probably believes that anything is possible in Minnesota politics and decided to cut his losses.

Expect to see him hired as a special Fux News commentator any day now.

Tags: Al Franken, Bill O'Reilly, Fux News, Norm Coleman, Paul Krugman, President Obama, Tim Pawlenty

Transforming the Middle East, one neocon deception at a time

No, this isn’t a review of the new film sequel Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (worldwide 5 day gross $381 million), in which a race of evil alien robots known as the Decepticons return to earth in an attempt to redeem their former glory.

Rather, it’s a commentary on an op-ed in today’s LA Times written by the guy who replaced the treasonous Scooter Libby in Darth Cheney’s Little Shop of Horrors, John P. Hannah.

Prior to his elevation to Cheney’s inner national security sanctum, Hannah was a member of the infamous White House Iraq Group, charged with ginning up a case for the invasion of Iraq. Central to that effort  was a presentation to the UN, embodied in a 48 page draft of fabricated WMD evidence so atrocious that Colin Powell immediately placed the whole thing into the shredder. Just how bad it was can be inferred from the alternate “evidence” that Powell did submit — cartoon drawings of mobile bioweapons labs and other props like a little glass vial of faux anthrax to be delivered to America’s shores by a non-existent fleet of Iraqi drones launched from ships at sea.

Hannah was also Cheney’s main liason to Ahmed Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress. Chalabi’s main job, for which he was paid an astounding $300,000 per month by the American taxpayer, was to provide Iraqi ex-pats like the notorious “Curveball” willing to lie about Saddam Hussein’s non-existant WMD operation. But like his Dark Lord, Hannah is not content to go quietly into the night to contemplate the disaster he help unleash in the Middle East. On the eve of the first stage of the Bush negotiated US pullback, removal of combat troops from most of Iraq’s major cities, Hannah casts doubt on President Obama’s strategy, writing:

Although President Obama has largely endorsed the Bush timeline for reducing the U.S. military presence in Iraq, far less clear is the extent to which he has also adopted his predecessor’s appreciation for the importance of achieving America’s strategic goals there…Under Obama, Bush’s commitment to winning in Iraq has all but vanished. Convinced from the start that the war was a mistake (a conviction fortified by the Bush team’s post-invasion bungling), Obama has for years been the salesman in chief for a narrative of failure: Iraq is seen as a colossal disaster — a senseless distraction that drained U.S. resources while alienating the rest of the world. While recognizing a vague obligation to help Iraqis forge a better future, Obama’s bottom line comes through loud and clear: The war was a strategic blunder, and the sooner the U.S. can wash its hands of it and re-focus on our “real” priorities in the Middle East, the better.

Couldn’t have said it better myself. Hannah goes on to demonstrate his irony deficient worldview by warning that:

Iraqis listen to his [Obama's] speeches and hear that withdrawal, not victory, is his highest priority. They see that America appears more concerned with engaging a hegemonic Iran than consolidating a democratic Iraq.

Excuse me? If Hannah was truly worried about “a hegemonic Iran”, he wouldn’t have helped transform what was once a possibility into an all too stark reality by engineering the removal of the one man that had, at and with US bidding and support, successfully kept Iranian expansionism in check, Saddam Hussein.

I imagine that in his current digs as a senior fellow at the AIPAC funded Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Hannah is busily preparing a case for invading the next country on the Neocon hit list. After all, as a senior member of the Bush Administration once exhorted:

“Real men don’t go to Baghdad, they go to Tehran.”

Is Joseph P. Hannah a real man?

Or is he a Neo-Decepticon?

Tags: Ahmed Chalabi, Colin Powell, Curveball, Darth Cheney, DeceptiCons, John P. Hannah, Middle East, Saddam Hussein, Scooter Libby, Transformers, White House Iraq Group

When Michelle Bachmann is even too much for Glenn Beck

The leaderless Rethuglican Party has no shortage of members eager to grab headlines with ever more outrageous claims and demonizations of the Democrats and President Obama.

And I am not referring here to the kind of vitriol vomited out daily by the demented talking heads of professional right wing media. We’re all too familiar with them. At the very least one can attribute their motives to annual paychecks in the millions of dollars, whatever their personal beliefs might be.

Of greater interest, at least from the perspective of social psychology, is what we are hearing from The True Believers. Two examples from this week are worth noting.

The first is provided by that ever  quotable representative from Minnesota, Michelle Bachmann. A guest on the Glenn Beck tv show, she doubled down on her prior claim that the Obama administration has a secret plan to incarcerate political dissidents, just like the US did to the Japanese during Word War Two.

Exhibit one was the new census form, which she waved in front of the camera like a bloody shirt. So over the top was she that even Beck got tired of rolling his eyeballs and hastily went to commercial.

Next, we find that great champion of lower taxes for billionaires everywhere, Samuel “The Unlicensed Plumber” Joe Wurzelbacher. Last Thursday in Wisconsin, he addressed a standing room only crowd of 75 at Wausau’s The Plaza Hotel Suites, at an event sponsored by the Wisconsin chapter of Americans for Prosperity (an “organizer” of the great American teabagger demonstrations). Joe, while denying that he had ever really quit the Republican Party, put the Dems on notice for trying to turn America into a socialist country. Singling out Senator Chris Dodd, he asked repeatedly:

“Why hasn’t he been strung up?“

And Joe wasn’t alone in his crusade to rid America of people not like him. At that same event, The Wausau Daily Herald reported that:

Christopher Magiera of Wausau, a board member of Americans for Prosperity and a local political activist, said he saw a “Stalinization of America” taking place and that “the only thing that separates Stalinist Russia from what we have in Washington right now are the re-education and death camps.”

Meanwhile, in the latest edition of  I’m A Republican presidential candidate…Get me out of here!, two leading presidential contenders got kicked out of the jungle. Last week, Nevada Senator John Ensign had to resign his powerful post as chairman of the Republican Policy Committee because of an extra-marital affair.

And this week, South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford had to resign his powerful post as head of the Republican Governors Association because of, well, an extra-marital affair. Not only did he bill a prior trip to see his hottie to the taxpayers of SC, but he likely was responsible for wasting more of their money by disabling the GPS tracker on his state supplied security vehicle that he left at the airport. I imagine that they worked overtime trying to locate his ass.

Oh, and it was announced this week that former vice president, The Dick Man Cheney, has signed with Simon and Schuster to publish his memoirs.

Inside Perdition got a hold of a chapter outline, one of which is reportedly titled: Destroying A Major Political Party– How I Learned to Embrace My Inner Whig.

Stay tuned.

Tags: Americans for Prosperity, Christopher Magiera, Dick Cheney, Dick Cheney book, Glenn Beck, Governor Mark Sanford, Joe-the-plumber, Michelle Bachmann, President Obama, Republican Governors Association, Republican Policy Committee, Senator Chris Dodd, Senator John Ensign, Stalinist Russia, Teabaggers, True believers, Whig Party

President Obama’s balancing act

Despite receiving a thumbs up from a number of conservative foreign policy observers, and the public at large, for his handling of the current Iranian domestic turmoil, the wingers seem to have settled on a narrative that President Obama has been too timid in his response to same.

It was a theme dutifully picked up by the MSM at Tuesday’s presser at the White House. Asked by CBS’ Chip Reed about John Bomb Bomb Bomb Iran McCain’s criticisms, Obama swatted him down, reminding him about who is president. When pressed by MSNB’s Chuck Todd about why he wouldn’t identify specific consequences, Obama replied that unlike the reporters, he’s not lashed to the wheel of a 24 hour news cycle. (Snap!) And when Fux News reporter Major Garret rudely demanded to know why it took him so long to ratchet up his condemnation of violence against protesters, O pointed out that his rhetoric has evolved in phase with– “tracked”– unfolding events.

After eight years of self-defeating Dick swinging, cowboy diplomacy, it’s obviously going to take some time to re-introduce the press to the idea of a measured, tempered response to international events. Events over which the US, despite all its military might and self-importance, has little, if any, ability to influence; and can make a whole lot worse by indulging the kind of rhetoric that flows unhindered from the McCaniac id.

Noted Middle East scholar Professor Juan Cole in his blog yesterday reminds us how the Rethugs responded to US protesters when they were running things and the legacy they left behind:

At the Republican National Committee convention in St. Paul,  250 protesters were arrested shortly before John McCain took the podium. Most were innocent activists and even journalists. Amy Goodman and her staff were assaulted. In New York in 2004, ‘protest zones’ were assigned, and 1800 protesters were arrested, who have now been awarded civil damages by the courts. Spontaneous, city-wide demonstrations outside designated ‘protest zones’ would be illegal in New York City, apparently. In fact, the Republican National Committee has undertaken to pay for the cost of any lawsuits by wronged protesters, which many observers fear will make the police more aggressive, since they will know that their municipal authorities will not have to pay for civil damages.

The number of demonstrators arrested in Tehran on Saturday is estimated at 550 or so, which is less than those arrested by the NYPD for protesting Bush policies in 2004.

I applaud the Iranian public’s protests against a clearly fraudulent election, and deplore the jackboot tactics that the regime is using to quell them. But it is important to remember that the US itself was moved by Bush and McCain toward a ‘Homeland Security’ national security state that is intolerant of public protest and throws the word ‘terrorist’ around about dissidents. Obama and the Democrats have not addressed this creeping desecration of the Bill of Rights, and until they do, the pronouncements of self-righteous US senators and congressmen on the travesty in Tehran will be nothing more that imperialist hypocrisy of the most abject sort.

Cole recommends the following:

American politicians should keep their hands off Iran and let the Iranians work this out. If the reformers have enough widespread public support, they will develop tactics that will change the situation. If they do not, then they will have to regroup and work toward future change. US covert operations and military interventions have caused enough bloodshed and chaos. If the US had left Mosaddegh alone in 1953, Iran might now be a flourishing democracy and no Green Movement would have been necessary.

Bombing Iran back into the stone age has been a longtime dream of the warmongering denizens of the wingnut universe. Naturally, they have seized on the current turmoil inside the country as a means of pushing that agenda forward.

While the increasingly brutal repression of the Iranian people is something the whole world should condemn (and is), Obama has additional concerns– preventing a war between Israel and Iran, the closing of the Persian Gulf to 25% of the world’s oil supplies, stopping nuclear weapons proliferation throughout the Middle East, and (per Bob Baer)  preventing a new cold war that would pit the US against an anti-US Russo-China-Iran coalition.

When walking a tightrope, sometimes you have to lean a little one way or the other. Right now the president is striking the proper balance between confrontation and cooperation.

Tags: Amy Goodman, Bob Baer, Chip Reed, Chuck Todd, Fux News, George W. Bush, John McCain, Juan Cole, Lindsay Graham, Major Garret, President Obama, Republican National Committee, Rethugs, Russo-China-Iran coalition

A little song to sooth the pain of infidelity.  And appreciate the tape warble near the end as a fitting tribute to Mark Sanford’s sense of decency.

*

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The hunger of the soul cannot be satisfied with physical pleasures; the love of home and children is not augmented by the unwise pursuit of pleasure.
—The Urantia Book

The Sanford family during happier times

10.  Needed a break from his family…values.

9.  Has a Senator Ensign problem (affair with another woman).

8.  Has a Senator Craig problem (affair with a gay lover).

7.  Has a Senator Vitter problem (chatty prostitute).

6. Was hospitalized for an ass transplant after getting his butt kicked by the South Carolina legislature for refusing 1os of millions of sorely needed federal dollars.

5. Was testing his staff for loyalty and the national press for gullibility.

4.  Met in Argentina with an ex-pat German consultant to plot strategy for winning the Rethug presidential nomination.

3. Was ordered rendered by Rahm Emanuel to be turned into a Democratic Manchurian  Presidential Candidate.

2.  Threw his hat in the ring for a Political Darwin Award.

And the number one reason why Governor Sanford disappeared?

1.  He was kidnapped by alien social psychologists  to answer the question that has the cosmos all a-twitter:

Rethuglicans– WTF?

Difficile est saturam non scribere: It is difficult not to write satire.

Tags: Darwin Award, Governor Sanford, Rahm Emanuel, Senator Craig, Senator Ensign, Senator Vitter

This will become my backyard.

You wouldn’t believe the crap I save.  Not just the crap everybody seems to save, but a lot of other stuff most people put in the incinerator with glee.  Not me.  I cart it from house to house, moving van to moving van. If you wrote me a letter or even a postcard back in the seventies, I have it.  Uh, no, not neatly filed in a folder in a cabinet, but in a jumbled mass of papers from multiple decades, all nicely slammed into a cardboard legal box.  My ex insisted on packing that stuff for me, and out of a sense of packing paralysis, I leave it that way.

And that’s also why when I move, like I am right now, I need time away from pleasant things to get it done.  And that means my local comrades will be pressed into service, too.  That means Saitia— the best Uhaul move director I’ve ever seen— and Terry— yeah he says he has a bad back, but how do you get a bad back photochopping— will have an additional excuse not to be producing the uh, how does “Majeston” put it— “shit” we call satire— for a few days.

Meanwhile, you can follow my pain in the neck on Twitter, or just ramble aimlessly through our archives;  you’ll be amazed at the excellent work shit you’ll find there…  hmm… it seems like only yesterday this nation was actually flirting with the idea of making an ex-sportscaster wolf-hunting halfwit the vice president of some old batshit bastid phony from Arizony.  And you think things changed for the worst?

BWWWAAAHAAAHAAAAAHAAAAA!!

Meanwhile. Propagandee has promised to pick up the slack while we’re moving stuff;  but that could mean anything from a brilliant new post every day, to him taking an acid trip until next Wednesday.  But that’s why we love him.

Ciao, droogies.

Tags: Michael Hart, moving time, Propagandee, Saitia, Terry

Madam Lindsay Graham hobnobs with the rotting corpse of John McCain at GOP headquarters, Sunday.

WASHINGTON D.C. — A puffy but erect Lindsey Graham appeared at the Washington DC GOP Headquarters, Sunday, with the obviously deceased, desiccated, and decaying Arizona Senator John McCain, where the duo attacked President Obama for not doing enough to lead the free world.  Clearly frustrated, Graham said the president had been “timid and passive” more than he would like, and that the president was “S’pose teh lead the free world, not foller it.”  When asked what specifically he wanted the president to say, Graham stroked his tie briefly and said President Obama should just be more “aggressive” and “hands on.”

McCain, officially deceased since election day ‘08, was held upright by the ever-solicitous Graham, but appeared to have difficulty collecting any thoughts worth speaking, but eventually said the prezdint could be “stronger,” and then mumbled “Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb bomb Iran,” to the cadence of the Beach Boys song, “Barbara Ann.”

The news conference was cut short when the wind shifted, wafting the virilent stench of nearly four decades worth of Republican trash talk, which litters the entire headquarters grounds and averages over forty-seven feet deep in recent years.  The Republicans, long oblivious to the gastly sight and horrendous odor, actually take great pride in the fact that all their trash talk is kept on premises and continually recycled.

Tags: Barbara Ann, Beach Boys, John McCain, Lindsey Graham