Assclowns of the Week #94: House of 'Tards edition

     Well, peeps, it's been a long time coming. ACOTW hasn't reared its magnificently ugly head for over a year now. But with the right wing lunacy being ratcheted up on all fronts this past week, how could yours truly give these rubber room candidates another free pass? What am I talking about? Put it this way: If America was a movie, the title would be, "Dude, Where's My Government?" To wit: Robert Benmosche (10) who showed incredible empathy by knowing exactly what it feels like to be hung as a black man; Guido Barilla (2) who put his own company in hot water while taking his product out of it; Tony Makris (4), who pulled a Dick Cheney then got pulled by NBC and Tailgunner Ted Cruz (3) for his childrens' book reading telethon. So squeeze yourself into the Konservative Klown Kar as we do a full lap around all three rings to review this week's lunacy and much, much more!

10) AIG CEO Robert Benmosche

     To recap: In 2008, the Federal Treasury and the NY Fed pumped nearly $200 billion into AIG's coffers in three separate bailouts after they nearly tanked the national, and global, economy. AIG was a such a mess when its own greed finally caught up to it that Uncle Sam had to step in and virtually put the insurance giant under receivership. Unfazed by this, Robert Benmosche, AIG's CEO even to this day, decided it would be a good idea to continue paying out lavish bonuses to precisely those who'd caused the meltdown, specifically up to $1,200,000,000 in taxpayer funds, as if nothing happened. This past week, Benmosche was interviewed by the WSJ in which he'd compared impotent criticism of this practice to being lynched. Sure, Bob. Being called on your rapacity is exactly what Emmett Till must have felt. To find such a sense of entitlement, one has to look at my cat Popeye. But you know something? My cat didn't crash the global economy.
     Seriously, folks, he actually said that. In a national newspaper. With a tanned, jiggling, straight face. Unlike these jiggling, nervously laughing faces who couldn't coherently respond to Barney Frank's frankness when he asked why Wall St is paying itself so much when they can't fulfill their basic functions. (Tip o' the tinfoil hat to Constant Reader Stan the Man Banos.)

9) David Schweikert

     Luckily, it isn't all doom and gloom in Washington, DC today. Take Born Again Hobbit Rep. David Schweikert of Arizona, for instance. Sunny D thinks shutting down the government is his "idea of fun", as he told NPR today. He's one of those right wing nut jobs who's now calling for Obama to sit down with them and compromise when they've been ducking doing just that since last April. David doesn't seem to have much of a problem with putting nearly a million federal employees on unpaid furlough, probably because he's one of the richest members of Arizona's delegation with a net worth of over $6,000,000. Even if the Six Million Dollar Man had his pay suspended (and none of them will), I'm sure he could afford a dry spell better than most of the federal workers now affected by the GOP's shutdown.
     It still eludes me why a class of... people, let's call them, fight tooth and nail to get elected into the government just so they can fight tooth and nail to shut it down. According to military tactic and political science textbooks, isn't that, like, the very definition of a Fifth Column?

8) Texas Governor Rick Perry

     "The li'l lady just misspoke, is all, heh heh. Of course abortion ain't a woman's choice! In fact, ev'ry Republican-American knows there ain't no choice 'cuz rapists an' them incestites got rights, too. Y'all in the lib'ral media done got thangs twisted up again like y'all always do. Must'a been Anita's hormones kicking up like a spring colt, heh heh. Whar'd ya ever git that idea, woman? Oh, and trust neither o' them there niggers."
     Go fuck yourself with a cactus, Rick.

7) NSA Director General Keith Alexander

     If you were to talk with Keith Alexander, he'd assure you as he did the Senate Intelligence Committee during their softball game the other day that there's no way we're listening in your phone calls despite the fact the British Guardian essentially proved they were collecting more metadata on as many Americans as possible regardless of whether or not they were a person of interest and hanging on to that information for a year. Oh, and it's all the lib'ral media's fault for "sensationalizing" the scandal. As if a people who thought they were protected by a fourth amendment outlawing illegal search and seizure being concerned their privacy was being systematically violated is just so many Chicken Little conspiracy theories.
     Of course, as any tech geek can tell you, metadata is everything about everything. It's like the cyber equivalent of your Social Security number or your DNA. And once they get your metadata, they can literally find out out how many times you jerked off to Tommy Lee and Pamela Anderson's sex tape. So, no, Keith, reporting on the facts about our paranoid King Learean government isn't sensationalism: It's the media finally getting off its collective fat ass on the White House briefing room chairs and addressing a super serious problem about privacy on a national level, breaches of privacy that we used to see only in third world banana republics.

6) Half Term Alaskan Governor Sarah Palin

     To Dick Cheney, deficits didn't matter any more than dead Iraqi children bothered George W. Bush. And to fired Fox host Sarah Palin, who's mightily struggling against the disease of irrelevance, neither does the government shutdown/meltdown. On Sean Handjob's show on Fox last night, Bible Spice echoed Fox's mantra that the shutdown is just a "slimdown" and, predictably, laid the blame on the doorstep of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. But she didn't stop there. Oh, no. Caribou Barbie then had to elevate her wingnuttery to another level by making a penis joke about the President:

     “President Obama, a couple of weeks ago when he was hell-bent on dropping bombs on Syria, he said America doesn’t do pinpricks. Well, we don’t do pinpricks, but sometimes we elect them.” I bet she was just dying to use that joke ever since Todd ad libbed it during wild sex after a day of shooting wolves from a helicopter.

5) House Speaker John Boehner

     Last night, House Republicans (Read: John Boehner) refused to allow a vote to come to the House floor on a clean CR. A similar measure had been passed in the Senate with some bipartisan support and, knowing it would also fly in the lower chamber, Boehner refused to even hold a roll call vote. The Republicans were willing to fund the government for only six weeks as long as ObamaCare was held up for another three months. Earlier, the GOP was withholding all non-essential funding until the ACA was delayed by a year. As their demands got scaled back more and more last night, the President and Democrats in both chambers were consistently giving the GOP the middle finger. Never in my memory has the Republican Party been this unpopular and, after Obama's pretzel-challenged predecessor, that's saying a mouthful.

     Let's take a stroll down Memory Lane: Three years ago, John Boehner went on record on 60 Minutes as saying, "I reject the word 'compromise'." Last night, Boehner was essentially demanding that the President "compromise" with the GOP yet again (and considering Obama's previous cave-ins, can you blame Speaker Oompa Loompa for being gobsmacked when told No?) So Boehner basically single-handedly shut down the government even knowing he had the votes to prevent that because he didn't want to walk away from his latest spat with the President empty-handed. Except America's sporting the lumps and bruises, not Boehner. (Bonus material: If you want to see the Democratic Party's humorous take on the worst Congress in American history, download this .pdf file which is a parody of Netflix's HOUSE OF CARDS.)

4) NBC Sports and Tony Makris

 

     Speaking of right wingers with a persecution complex...
     NRA lobbyist Tony Makris was recently featured on an NBC Sports show entitled Under Wild Skies in which he shot an elephant in the face numerous times then laughed over the dying animal's death rattle and drank champagne afterwards. One has to wonder what the fuck NBC Sports was thinking in putting such a barbaric show on their network, which alone makes them worthy of a mention on this list. But then Makris, true-blue, right wing assclown that he is, decided to immediately whip out the Godwin card and compare his critics to Adolph Hitler. This is what Makris actually said to NRA "News":

"[Animal activists] go, well nobody should shoot an elephant. I said, why? And they go they're so big and kind and gentle and smart and I said, okay, let me ask you a question. Should I be able to shoot birds? Well, I guess that's okay. Ducks? Yeah. Pigeons? Oh, they're flying rats, okay. ... Do you realize that if you subscribe to that philosophy you are committing a very unique form of animal racism? And now they're shocked. And they said but they're so big and special and they're smarter. And I went, you know, Hitler would have said the same thing."

     Yes, Bwana actually said elephants were shocked that we animal lovers would single out elephants for special protection and are just walking up to Equal Opportunity serial animal killers like Tony and saying, "Oh, don't listen to them. Please, shoot me in the face with a large bore weapon!"
     NBC Sports' cancellation of Under Wild Skies is said to have depressed Dick Cheney, who's developing his own reality series entitled, "What Republican Lawyer Wants to Get Shot in the Face?"

3) Ted Cruz

      Cuban/Canadian/American Joe McCarthy possession vessel/Sarah Palin fuckstick/Speaker of the House pro tem/Senator Rafael Ted Cruz made the Republican Party look, until John Boehner last night, as bad as inhumanly possible. In fact, largely thanks to him, they resembled a pack of rabid dogs going berzerk trying to find out where the whistle was coming from. In a 21 hour and 19 minute campaign speech against ObamaCare, Cruz blabbered on about every subject under the sun except how to improve the ACA or what the GOP would replace it with.
     Having used up his A material in the first 20 minutes, he was reduced  to reading from Dr. Seuss' Green Eggs and Ham, a story about a cretin who hated something new before he'd tried it and then, once he had, found he did like it. Cruz also quoted The Little Engine That Could, a story about a little train engine that overcame impossible odds to conquer that stubborn hill. You know, unlike Cruz on Capitol Hill.

2) Guido Barilla

     Looks like every day will be Prince Spaghetti Day and not just in Boston's North End. On September 26th, Guido Barilla said in an Italian radio interview that his company will never feature gay couples in their commercials. While qualifying his remarks by saying he meant no disrespect, he added, "If gays don't like it, they can always eat another brand of pasta. Everyone is free to do what they want, provided it doesn't bother anyone else."
     Well, in less time than it takes to boil angel hair, Barilla's beancounters and Guido himself got wind of how many people he'd bothered, namely those who'd immediately called for a planet-wide boycott. They went into full spin mode and saying in a wholly insincere apology that he'd be happy to meet with those "that best represent the evolution of the family, including those who have been offended by my words." In other words, all you thin-skinned Nancy boys who can't take a joke. Unfortunately for them, Bertolli's Facebook page and German ad agency had already beat them to it with some Barilla warfare when they produced this little gem of an ad, which was already validated by their history of gay-friendly marketing. Barilla's ersatz "apology" came off as sounding like, "We love money more than we hate fags so please don't threaten our bottom line."
     Sounds to me that maybe Guido's traditional, big-breasted Italian Mama he thinks still represents a "traditional" family should drain a pot of boiling Bigotoni in his lap and remind him how stupid it is to insult your own customers, especially LGBT customers.

1) The GOP

     Tony Makris shooting an elephant in the face turned out to be quite an irony, considering the circular firing squad the Republican Party became last night.

     As Google reminds us in today's doodle, today is the 123rd anniversary of the opening of Yosemite National Park. Thanks to the Republican Party, you won't be able to visit it. Or any other National Park. Or the Washington Monument. Or the Smithsonian. Or... well, you get the idea. And the closing of the National Park Service is just one of the things Republicans have denied their constituents. Among the other things denied us with their extended temper tantrum: Airport safety inspections. Food inspections. Tax collection. The list goes on. (FYI: For your edification and amusement [or bemusement], here's a handy-dandy list of 66 facts about the government shutdown, courtesy of USA Today.).
     So, bottom line, the Republican Party and its alleged lawmakers are refusing to allow the government to operate, thereby forcing us to default on our debts and downgrade the national rating for the first time in US history... so they can overturn an existing law geared to helping those needing health care, one that'd already been found constitutional by a right wing-leaning Supreme Court.
     The GOP Teabaggers cynically ran in 2010 and 2012 on a jobs platform. Since then, they've tried 42 times to repeal or defund ObamaCare, failed every time, have introduced not one jobs bill, and have just succeeded in putting 800,000 federal employees out of work without pay for an indefinite period of time. So, how's that Republican majority thingie working out fer ya, goobers?