Assclowns of the Week #80: Don’t Get Your Panties in a Twist edition

If 2009 was a horse, any sensible man would’ve led it into a field, shot it, flayed it and sold it for dog meat. Because last year, and the entire decade in general, was for most Americans a giant hernia that was perfectly represented by the single descending ball in Times Square.

And the last of the Ought Nots didn’t end any more auspiciously than it or the decade had started. We were attacked on Christmas Day by a half wit then we were attacked five days later because the CIA (4) didn’t do its homework. And the Obama (9) administration’s nomination last November of a TSA administrator was still being held up by a stiff prick named Jim DeMint (2) on the dodgiest of reasons.

So let’s climb aboard the Waterford crystal ball as it descends straight to hell as we review this past week’s assclowns and much, much more!

10) The Salvation Army and the US Marine Corps

Ho, ho, ho. What do you want for Xmas, little boy? But before you answer that, give me proof of citizenship.

As Jayne Lyn Stahl asks, “What does it say about a country when two of its largest holiday gift givers, the Salvation Army's Angel Tree program, and the U.S. Marine Corps Reserve Toys for Tots, will decline applicants who are unable to demonstrate proof of citizenship, and income, according to an article in The Tennessian.”

Well, it says that the homophobic Salvation Army and US Marine Corps are also hostile toward illegal aliens in Nashville and their children even on Christmas. Salvation Army spokesman Maj. Rob Vincent tried to dance away from the unwelcome publicity of their conditional charity by stressing the organization’s mantra of addressing “local need” as if undocumented workers from hundreds or thousands of miles away would try to bilk the Salvation Army and Marine Corps for free toys. You know, sort of like companies such as Blackwater, Halliburton and KBR lining up for cost-plus no bid contracts doing work for which they weren’t qualified.

9) President Barack Obama

We’re used to hearing revisionist history from Republicans who always seem to conveniently forget taking positions and saying things that are no longer so expedient. What we’re not used to hearing is Democrats saying the same thing. That is, unless you listen to everything Obama has ever said.

Case in point: The Barack Obama Summer Brew edition was in favor of a public option as recently as July 2009. The 2009 Pale Winter Brew Obama now says that he never campaigned on a public option. Yet the 2008 Obama actually did just that.

In fact, Obama even threw this in during his phone interview with the Washington Post: “Nowhere has there been a bigger gap between the perceptions of compromise and the realities of compromise than in the health-care bill. Every single criteria for reform I put forward is in this bill.” That is, except for a public option in the Senate bill. I also don’t recall him advocating for mandates, especially one without a tempering public option or the threat of criminal penalties for noncompliance.

The internet may have gotten you elected, Mr. President, but the internet and many of us who populate it also have a long memory.

8) The Republican Party

”Get the fuck out of my way! They’re about to stop serving the early bird special!”
And teabaggers think we’re the enemy.

Whatever your thoughts and feelings about the Teabaggers, your heart has to go out to these poor bastards. Imagine starting up a grassroots organization doing what you think is your rightful patriotic duty. Then you find out that a Republican PAC hopped on your bandwagon and your populist appeal in order to churn up financial donations from corporations and special interest groups.

Now imagine being a working man, the founder of your local chapter, and finding out that that same Republican PAC then blew almost $1600 on a single steak dinner. Well, you’d be kind of pissed, wouldn’t you, especially since the party whose principles you think you’re championing is making people think you’re more affiliated with corporations than you already are.

In fact, you’d feel like some poor bastard whose crop just got eaten by locusts, which is essentially what Republicans are. And speaking of predatory Republican opportunistic douchebags…

7) Rep. Peter Hoekstra

Before Farouk Abdulmutallab’s undies were done smoking, Pete Hoekstra, who’s running for Governor of Michigan, passed around a fund-raising letter that said in part,

They just don’t get it. The system didn’t “work” here. Far from it! It is insulting that The Obama administration would make such a claim, but then again, these are the same weak-kneed liberals who have recently tried to bring Guantanamo Bay terrorists right here to Michigan!

Lost on Hoekstra are the crowning ironies that it was Dick Cheney who’d secretly released from Gitmo the clown who’d planned the Detroit attack, that Secretary Napolitano’s comments of the system working were about the response after the attack and that Abdulmutallab is currently sitting in a federal prison in Michigan that has yet to blow up.

One gets the nauseating sense that if the attack had been successful and many people had died, Hoekstra still wouldn’t have had any compunctions about using 12/25/09 for financial and political gain. Look at how much Giuliani makes to this day off 9/11.

6) Rush Limbaugh

Rush Limbaugh didn’t make the list for having chest pains. That’s a force of nature and we’re glad the rotund conservative pundit received a clean bill of health and will be around longer for us to harpoon. Rush didn’t even make this list for vacationing in Honolulu at the same time as the Obamas or doing so without his fiancée in tow.

No, Rush Limbaugh made the list by using his own personal medical emergency to crow about us having the greatest health care system in the world, which I suppose would be his impression since the EMT’s hustled Rush out of his hotel room through a back entrance, like they’d do for any of us, and since he’s a lionized windbag who’d not too long ago signed a $400 million contract gave him the best care money can buy (but when you make tens of millions a year, you don’t even need insurance.).

Usually, Republicans piggy-back on the misery of others to make partisan political statements but Rush Limbaugh is a big enough man to use his own misery to those ends by saying that he “can’t think of a single thing wrong with our health care system.”


5) Brit Hume

Don’t ask me what Brit Hume was thinking last Sunday when he said on Fox of Buddhist Tiger Woods,

The extent to which he can recover seems to me depends on his faith. He is 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. My message to Tiger would, 'Tiger, turn to the Christian faith and you can make a total recovery and be a great example to the world.

Oh, you mean the Christian faith that persecutes gays and Muslims?











You mean proper, God-fearing bastions of morality such as these fine, upstanding Christians?

4) The CIA

It’s terribly disheartening that the CIA hasn’t come any further than the Trojans of the Bronze Age. On December 30th, the Jordanians brought into a meeting one Dr. Humam Khalil Mohammed, a criminal recently released from a Jordanian prison. The plan was for Mohammed to help the CIA capture al-Zawahiri, bin Laden’s second in command.

Not only was this in itself a fatal fuckup of monumental proportions, in trusting the Jordanians who in turn trusted a criminal with proven al Qaeda ties, but this guy was able to do something that none of us can while entering an airport, courthouse, sports stadium or even an inner city high school: He was able to penetrate this secret CIA base in southeastern Afghanistan, attend a super secret meeting with this elite squad of agents and blow himself up along with his Jordanian handler, at least five CIA officers and two Blackwater operatives.

And all they had to do was search and vet this guy or even take a cue from Virgil.

3) Scott Lively

The Uganda parliament, as we now know, is proposing legislation that would make homosexual behavior punishable by death in some cases. As if they needed any help or coaxing into hating gays even more, they brought in Caleb Lee Brundidge, Don Schmierer and Defend the Family’s Scott Lively, a man who himself has a delightfully ready-made name if you’re a gay porn star or chorus line dancer on Broadway.

The Ugandan government held a three day seminar presided over by three “missionaries” including the aforementioned Mr. Lively. As the most vocal member of the Ugandan three-way, Lively said,

It should be no surprise, therefore, that modern Ugandans are very unhappy that homosexual political activists from Europe and the United States are working aggressively to re-homosexualize their nation. Ugandan citizens report a growing number of foreign homosexual men coming to their country to turn desperately poor young men from the slums into their personal houseboys, and that some girls in public schools have being paid to recruit others into lesbianism. Foreign interests have exerted intense pressure on Uganda’s government to compromise its laws regarding sexual morality, often using their control over foreign aid funding for leverage.

This is coming from a bird who once published a book claiming that the Nazis actually loved homosexuals despite consigning many of them to the ovens.

It’s difficult to know where to begin tearing down the obvious falsehoods whether it be Uganda’s scant foreign aid funding being contingent on loving homosexuals, homosexual activists invading this poverty-stricken nation as if it was Africa’s version of Iwo Jima or girls being paid to turn straight girls into Rosie O’Donnells.

2) Sen. Jim DeMint

The headline is the perfect definition of a hardon: “Jim DeMint Still Standing Firm Against TSA Nominee Erroll Southers.”

Erroll Southers is the man tapped by President Obama to head up the Transportation Security Administration, which is already in the hot seat in light of the Christmas Day attack in Detroit. But Jim DeMint doesn’t want Southers exactly where he’s needed. Why, oh why would Jim DeMint want to keep Mr. Southers out of the administrator’s chair at a time when our national security most desperately needs him in it?

Because Southers would bring a union into the TSA, says DeMint, an intellectual and moral quadriplegic who’s paralyzed from the neck on up. Never mind that Mr. Southers had already been blessed with bipartisan support across two committees and that of law enforcement agencies. To make the union-loathing but terrorist-tolerant DeMint a little less lonely in the Senate, Rep. John Mica, who has no say in the matter, butted in, anyway, and sent DeMint a letter of support.

Oddly enough, neither of the Republicans opposing Southers’ nomination decided to make hay over his once illegally accessing his ex-wife’s boyfriend’s record, even though the transgression
was 22-23 years ago, a relatively minor infraction of the Federal Privacy act for which he’d already been disciplined. Mr. Southers, a former FBI agent, has some serious credentials but union organizing at the expense of national security doesn’t seem to be among them.

1) Republicans

The Republican hand-wringing and panty-twisting really all started when Dick Cheney said that Obama was “trying to pretend we are not at war,” which, even if true, is still a damn sight better than a president who only pretends we are.

Newt Gingrich said “In the Obama Administration, protecting the rights of terrorists has been more important than protecting the lives of Americans.” Which, I guess, begins to explain why Obama’s shysters in the DOJ lobbied the Supreme Court to deny personhood to suspected terrorists at Guantanamo Bay, which hasn’t closed, by the way, or why Obama suddenly did an about-face and refused to release photos and videos of us torturing other terrorism suspects.

Then Rep. Dan Burton followed Jonah Goldberg’s lead and called for DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano’s head. Funny, I don’t seem to recall any Republicans calling for Chertoff’s resignation in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Or maybe that was because most of the people who were killed were black.