Discovering Paul Ryan: An Odyssey in Twitter

There's something kind of wondrous about watching major world events unfold via a late-night Twitter feed. While a lot of the people hanging around are Aussies or Kiwis and thus up at totally reasonable hours, everyone else is drunk, insomniac, a crank, a news junkie or a dangerous loner. And, because there are fewer people around — and because those who are seem more forthrightly oddball — the response to these momentous events feels a little more intimate and authentic.

Watching Paul Ryan (R-WI) be introduced to the United States as the next GOP Vice Presidential candidate, and watching large portions of the still-awake, grouchy barfly part of the United States reject him like a diseased organ was a blast. There, at midnight, were thousands of people having fun with the careening, inevitable horror. It was as if all these strangers were in on some prank, giggling as it unfolded. Paul Ryan? The nerd undertaker? Really? Ahahahaha.

TubeDubber: Dental Plan, Part III

The "Dental Plan" sequence from The Simpsons possibly represents the greatest use of five words in comedy history. And if that overstates the case, at least consider that many of us have repeatedly gotten it stuck in our heads for over a decade without much complaint.

Because it appears in my imagination so much, it winds up becoming an accidental soundtrack for lots of different things. It's easy to pair it with other things for a YoutubeDoubler. Anyhow, a bad case of writer's block sent me procrastinating on Youtube, and this happened. Click Homer to load.


I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry.

I Get Letters: 'Bend over and grab your ankles,piss ant'

This site has gone dormant over the last month due to a dead computer and my inability to do much more than write basic text documents with my makeshift alternatives. I do apologize for the lack of updates here, both links to pieces elsewhere and also new writing from General Ze'evi and other contributors who want to do something fun.

That's a ways off. For now, here's some fun hate mail I got about this piece on Gawker about Mitt Romney and Treason. I've attached an artist's conception of the sender, which I found by Google Image Searching "Crazy Motherfucker."

FROM: Jim Devitt
EMAIL: devitt9@aol.com
SUBJECT: Bend over and grab your ankles,piss ant

While Chicago community socialist revolutionary usurps our constitution,rule of law and attempts to take away our individual freedom quisling "Americans" like you are enabling and helping oblameo destroy America.we Americans are fed up with the pimps and pimpetes in the leftist oblameo radical leftist propaganda mill spewing out their ofal.america is waking up to the fifth-column of euro-socialist in our mist. The description of treason fit perfectly with you quisling socialist.we will never submit to to obameo's socialism or romney's progressive-moderate- liberal agenda.GOT THE MESSAGE PISS ANT

Geraldo Rivera's Greatest Hits

by FUQUAMANUEL

As far as Fox News "personalities" go, Geraldo Rivera has always been the most palatable to me. Sean Hannity exudes a smugness unbefitting his accomplishments and intellectual abilities and bleats about "liberal double standards" and "media bias." When he furrows his brow just so and flashes that little smirk, it provokes a Pavlovian fist-through-TV response. Meanwhile, Bill O'Reilly is a bully, constitutionally incapable of recognizing the existence of arguments and perspectives that have not emerged from within his own prodigious skull.

Geraldo, on the other hand, possesses an earnestness and childlike exuberance which at least doesn't make him instantly repulsive. Of course, in his case the line between "earnestness and childlike exuberance" and "buffoonery" is rather blurry, but he seems like the FOX News personality I'd be least likely to get into a bar fight with if we were to one day sit down for drinks.

This is not to say that Geraldo's politics aren't repulsive, nor is it to excuse his desperate attempt to use the Trayvon Martin tragedy to catapult himself back to relevance when he blamed the young man's murder on something other than his murderer. "I think the hoodie is as much responsible for Trayvon Martin’s death as George Zimmerman was," he said on Fox and Friends last Friday. He continued:

GAWKER: A Salad Bar of American Dread

Sometimes you just can't think of one "big idea" essay. Thankfully, every day, the United States commits so many individual acts of social, judicial and political horror that you can effortlessly pile them all together into a grab bag of nightmares.

I had no choice but to go that route earlier this week. Topics ranged from Arizona's cultural eliminationism, the snobbery of American colleges, the totally fucking insane Allen West, and the Supreme Court's ruling that you have the right to stay still as the police (legally!) finger your creamy white asshole without probable cause or even dinner.

Click the mystery box to go to the Gawker piece:


I'm posting the mystery box here, because I don't want to give away Jim Cooke's awesome art for the piece, which is absolutely hysterical and well worth the click on its own.

Also, this grab-bag format was poached from our own Idi Amin's Briefs Rodeo. So if you enjoy the Gawker update, please come back and read some of Idi's work.

GAWKER: Why Cheney's Heart Makes a Good Case for Obamacare

While the right used Cheney's heart transplant as an excuse to again attack Obamacare, liberal commentators again missed a chance to underscore health care inequality. Going after the low-hanging fruit of Cheney-heart jokes also meant missing the far more valuable low-hanging fruit of asking why every American isn't guaranteed at least some of the health care privileges that Cheney's lavish state-funded government insurance plan provided.

Click the Dick to go to the Gawker piece:


Note, that piece links back to my GQ piece on "Obama Dumb!" that linked and excerpted many incredibly stupid comments from The American Thinker.

GAWKER: Time to Occupy 'Occupy Wall Street'

If you're an elected official, actual democracy is messy. It's anarchic. It does things you don't want it to do, like challenge politicians ostensibly sympathetic to your cause, propose legislative agendas inconvenient to easy goals and make you have to work harder to retain your incumbency when phoning in YEA votes on gimme legislation normally does that.

Perhaps that's why MoveOn.org has become a key organizer of The 99 Percent Spring, a group that seems just like Occupy, without all the chaos of "not mobilizing people for the 2012 Democratic slate." Because if there's one thing that is sure to harness the spirit of Occupy, it's a group that's helped elect Democrats so far triangulated toward "the center" that they'd lose 1964 primaries to Rockefeller Republicans.

Click on this baller astroturf car (credit here) to continue to the Gawker piece on astroturfed Occupy:

GAWKER: GOP Death Games for Kids!

Wednesday morning, a man working for Mitt Romney's presidential campaign described the transition from the primaries to the general election as "a reset button. Everything changes. It’s almost like an Etch A Sketch." The man who said that was Eric Fehrnstrom, which would be fine if he were Professor Farnsworth's nemesis on Futurama or President of the Association of People Who Share the Same Name as Charlatans Groucho Marx Played. Unfortunately, he's Mitt's charlatan: Fehrnstrom is his Communications Director.

Click on Mitt's sudden uncontrollable urge to barf after hearing his own bullshit to continue to the Gawker piece:

GAWKER: The Sad Familiarity of Trayvon Martin

The same week that the Trayvon Martin story finally broke into the national consciousness also saw NYPD officers dislocating protesters' thumbs and smashing heads into windows in yet another scouring of Occupy groups. Automatic contempt for certain people and styles of dress, as well as assumptions of their unlawful conduct is neither restricted to the south nor any race. But that isn't why what happened to Martin is so familiar. That familiarity has its roots in Florida's Stand Your Ground laws as well as an incident that happened years ago in Texas.

Click on the gun-wielding thug to continue to the Gawker article.

GAWKER: Obama Mouthpiece to Journalists—'Stop Snitching'

The most recent article from The Nation's Jeremy Scahill profiled the imprisonment of Yemeni journalist Abdulelah Haider Shaye. For covering American cluster bomb strikes in Yemen and the radicalization of Yemeni citizens and their support for Al Qaeda, Shaye has been beaten and tortured, imprisoned for two years and, at America's request, seen a presidential pardon from Yemen's Ali Abdullah Saleh indefinitely tabled.

You'd think that more bloggers would be furious about this. Extending a blithe imperial hand across the globe to support the torture and imprisonment of journalists is exactly the sort of half-assed fascism they were rabid about back when George W. Bush was exporting America's headaches to our Dracula in Cairo, Hosni "Drown People in Barrels of Shit" Mubarak.

Click on the pic of Jay "Stop Snitching" Carney to continue reading on Gawker.

GAWKER: Dehumanize Yourself and Face to Bloodshed

You could be forgiven if, on learning of a U.S. Army Staff Sergeant executing 16 people in villages near Kandahar, you secretly wished that he was some virulent racist—a vicious dickhead who slipped through the vetting process.

Racism, at least, would have been a kind of excuse, evidence of a critically planned process. It's almost comforting: Even the most saintly among us has harbored or inspired some racial resentment. Racism is a universal form of bullshit—a lower-social-order attitude, but at least an indicator of some ordered thinking.

Click the image of Staff Sergeant Robert Bales to continue reading at Gawker.

GQ: Seven Minutes in Heaven, Six Hours with CNN

One of my handlers at GQ — a stern but humane gentleman who obeys the law — had an idea: if CNN has been this bad during the rest of the campaign (and it has), then it's going to be a spangly, exploding abortion on Super Tuesday. And ordinarily, he'd be correct. Only, this time, against all odds, something went right with CNN.

Still, there were mistakes and weirdness. Virtual conventions? Yeah. Gloria Borger. Oh, Lord, yeah. Bad riffs, telescoping simulacra and gleeful invocations of Taco Bell? GIMME A HELL YEAH.

Click on the Stone Cold Wolf Blitzer below for a liveblog of six hours of CNN Super Tuesday coverage.

GAWKER: Andrew Breitbart's Dead

Good. General Ze'evi and I take a moment to look back comprehensively on a life that the media either mistakenly, squeamishly or warily summed up as mostly benign. You know, one or two regrettable bits, but otherwise a gauzy, sunny family portrait — like what Madison Avenue thinks wheat and beaches look like when you're menstruating.

Click on the dead fraud's impression of John Lithgow from Third Rock from the Sun to be taken to the article.

GAWKER: Michigan, Home of Nothing

The predictive ability of presidential campaigns has been thrown out of kilter by a front-runner who can't win two contests in a row and challengers who can't win more than one on a weekly basis. Michigan didn't clarify anything. Reading meaning from Michigan is like trying to divine a source from the dust storm ejected by a Shop-Vac while politely pretending that nobody brought a device that farts anything.

Click on the Mitt & Rick cuddlebears to be taken to the Gawker article.


Thanks again to Jim Cooke for the excellent image you can see in whole by clicking the above.