Chronically Pissed

An Affair To Remember

Isn't it the book of Matthew that says "Why do you look at the speck of shit on your neighbors dick and pay no attention to the plank of extramarital jism on your own?" 

I'll get to Michael Jackson tomorrow. I'm not done with Sanford & Co. yet...

I'm hearing a lot of rational, humane voices on the right and left saying that we should all back off and let Mark Sanford deal privately with his own mistake. "This is not a partisan issue." "Infidelity has no party affiliation," they say. Bullshit. Let me explain very plainly why the Ensign and Sanford affairs, when put into context, are a very big deal (aside from the obvious fact that Republicans have never atoned for the crime of putting the country through the impeachment of a president over a blowjob - and that they still use Clinton's philandering as a catch-all retort to any argument).

The Republican Party has made sexual morality the cornerstone of its movement for the last 30 years. In doing so, they have aggressively sought to deny certain freedoms to the gay community, ostensibly in the "defense of marriage." They have exploited the issue of gay marriage to rally their base, disingenuously conflating the religious sacrament - which churches are certainly welcome to define as they see fit - with the civil institution that recognizes the joining of couples for some simple, secular, logistical, monetary, and legal matters. Pull out your marriage certificate and see if you can find the word "God." (Mine, from Pennsaylvania, makes no mention of any deity.) 

And so, while I would generally agree that such matters are the supremely private domain of the two parties involved, Messieurs Ensign, Sanford, Vitter, Craig, Gingrich, Foley, Hyde, Livingston, McCain, et al, relinquished their right to that privacy when they became sanctimonious legislative moralizers. Sure, Democrats have been complicit in continuing this civil rights debacle - many of them voted for the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996, which Bill Clinton signed into law - but I think we can safely stipulate that the Republican Party is what stands between gay couples and marriage equality. The 2008 Republican National Committee platform calls for "a constitutional amendment that fully protects marriage as a union of a man and a woman, so that judges cannot make other arrangements equivalent to it." It goes on to say:

Republicans recognize the importance of having in the home a father and a mother who are married. The two-parent family still provides the best environment of stability, discipline, responsibility, and character. Children in homes without fathers are more likely to commit a crime, drop out of school, become violent, become teen parents, use illegal drugs, become mired in poverty, or have emotional or behavioral problems.

(I'll grant you, it does not say anything about whether the father should or should not be fucking other men, women, or teenage boys on the side.)

Republicans are driving the movement to deny monogamous gays the same privileges that are afforded to adulterous heterosexuals. If they really want to defend marriage, perhaps they should start by making divorce and adultery illegal - punishable by prison time. Or castration. Or, better yet, as the Bible prescribes, death. 

But that's not what they want. They simply want to cling to this last shred of puritanism as evidence that this is still their Gods' land. They will not go down...ahem, I mean, they will not be defeated by the abortionists AND the gays! This isn't about defending marriage. This is about pride. This is about proving that provincial values are not inferior to big city, northeastern elitism. And perhaps they'd have a shred of credibility if their legislative fear of the Almighty extended to their own personal lives...but apparently it does not.

Forgive me if it sounds like I'm equating homosexuality to adultery. I'm not. I'm saying that this is not merely another isolated incident of personal failure. There is a lesson that must be learned from the parade of hypocrisy that began when Clinton's staunchest impeachment opponents (Gingrich (R), Hyde (R), Livingston (R)) turned out to be fellow cheaters, continued with the whoring adventures of Sen. David Vitter (R-LA), the gay bathroom stall antics of Sen. Larry Craig (R-ID), the gay congressional antics of Rep. Mark Foley (R-FL), and climaxed...ahem, I mean, came to a head...or rather, culminated with the revelations of infidelities by Promise Keeping Sen. John Ensign (R-NV) and Gov. Mark Sanford (R-SC) within the same week. (Please visit www.republicansexoffenders.com for a more comprehensive litany!) 

When the greatest proponents of a particular moral philosophy can not live up to the tenets of that philosophy, the philosophy itself must be called into question and we must, at the very least, limit their ability to limit the rights of others based on that philosophy. 

Welcome

If you're new to Chronically Pissed, welcome. I've been less than prolific lately, but i'm feeling more loquacious these days, so that may well change. I hope you'll check back regularly - or better yet, use the subscription form on the right and be notified of new posts. Thanks for stopping by.

Pissed as ever,
CP

An Open Letter from the Institution of Marriage to the Republican Party

Dear Republicans:

Listen guys...I want to thank you for your tireless efforts to "protect" me from the gays, but at this point, I'm going to have to ask you to lay off. I mean, I wouldn't want a piece of rotting shit defending me against E. coli.  Would you? I'm sure you mean well, but it's beginning to look like all of your impassioned pleas in my defense are a bit of a dog and pony show, given your inability to keep your own dicks inside the pants your wives washed and ironed for you.

 

To tell the truth, I'm not really all that offended by your shenanigans. I've been around for a very, very long time and frankly I got tired of being indignant about affairs back in the fourth century. Yes, I was originally conceived as a union between a man and a woman, but that was way back when y'all thought the earth was flat and slavery was cool. So maybe you could stop pretending to think that homosexuals are somehow going to ruin me for future generations. 

I've survived thousands of years of philandering by horny pricks. I've been entered into for reasons as dubious as money, green cards, business arrangements, and social status. My preference, truth be told, is for two people who care enough about each other to say to the world "Hey everyone...We dig each other so we're gonna live together and share stuff. Just wanted you to know." I don't really care what color, creed, class, or particular set of genitals either party has. 

What I'm trying to say, Republican Party, is that this arrangement of ours isn't really working out. At this point, it's just getting a little embarrassing. So let's do the adult thing and get a divorce, you and me.

I hope we can still be friends.

Love,

The Institution of Marriage

R-Ensign-ation

In this clip, Sean Hannity admits that "if you’re going to be a family-values candidate and a family-values politician, and you don’t live up to that, I think you should resign." He then goes on to say, essentially, that he won't officially call for Ensign's resignation because he doesn't "know where he stands." (On family values, I presume - as opposed to where he stands while fucking the wife of one of his employees.)

So do I understand correctly that Sean Hannity's position on political sex scandals demands resignation if and only if the offender is/was a "family-values candidate?" Because in the next clip, an infamous one from the August of 2008, Hannity says of John Edwards: "I'm wondering - if you can't keep the promise to your family, can't keep the promise to your wife, you're having an affair, you're lying about the affair repeatedly, why should the American people trust you when you say you're not gonna lie to them?"

Yes, Hannity and his friends attempt to make the case that Edwards ran on a moral values platform, which would make him as big a hypocrite as Ensign (and Vitter, Craig, Foley, McCain, Gingrich, Hyde, Livingston, et al), but I think a pretty thick line can be drawn between Edwards and men who join the Promisekeepers and rail against gay marriage on the grounds of protecting the institution.

Look, I've said it before, I don't care what other people do with their genitals. It's none of my business. Besides that, there are several thousands of years of recorded history that ought to have diminished the shock value of news that a man has fucked a woman who is not his wife. The issue at hand is hypocrisy. I don't think John Ensign should resign because he fucked a woman who was not his wife. I think John Ensign should resign because he fucked a woman who is not his wife while being publicly pious about the Christian definition of marriage. Like many of his friends, he's a fucking fraud who has been complicit in denying marriage to same-sex couples while desecrating the institution he was so desperate to protect.

Tiller's Wall

When I was 14 years old, I chose Thanksgiving dinner as the occasion to out my mother as a pro-choice baby killer in front of our extended family. We had never had a frank discussion about the issue, but I had long suspected her to be on the side of darkness and evil. And so I provoked an argument at the table during which I skillfully elicited the most common pro-abortion arguments, each of which I met with a scathing, well-rehearsed version of the most common Pro-Life ripostes.

Eight years of Catholic schooling had primed me for this battle, particularly through the holy sacrament of Confirmation in seventh grade, when my classmates and I were deemed old enough to make a clear-minded, lifelong commitment to God. I accepted their flattery of my nascent adulthood, sure of my ability to make such a profound oath, and ready to pour myself into His work. For obvious reasons, I was particularly incensed over the daily murder of thousands of innocent babies. I'd learned of the early development of their brains, hearts, hands, and feet; I'd been told of their silent screams in the womb upon being surgically stabbed in their brainstems; I'd seen photos of the industrial-sized garbage bags into which they'd been suctioned and cast heartlessly into a dumpster behind some seamy clinic.

At 14, it was perfectly clear to me that a holocaust of the unborn was underway as humanity stood idly by. At 14, I could not understand how the world outside the walls of St. Such-and-Such elementary school could be so awash in apathy and evil. At 14, I had reached Christian adulthood. I had been furnished with all of the information necessary to distinguish right from wrong. Whatever "knowledge" I might later acquire, none of it would alter the essential truths I'd learned as a child of God. 

At 32, much has changed. 

In the recent hullabaloo over President Obama's commencement speech at the University of Notre Dame, while watching footage of the protestors and commentary by leaders of the pro-life movement, I was struck by something: In their words and actions, I saw myself at 14. I saw a multitude of grown men and women who, with regard to this particular issue, had never progressed beyond the moment at which, probably with the authenticating blessing of some church or another, they believed themselves to be in possession of ultimate truth. Within this realization, I saw a framework that might help me begin to understand the ever-confounding phenomenon of otherwise intelligent human beings clinging to religions and the simple-minded, black-and-white moralities that spring from them. Put simply, these people are spiritually retarded. 

Hear me out...

We accept that people have widely varying levels of intelligence, sociability, athleticism, artistic talent, etc. Sometimes extremities are exhibited within an individual. (Take autism, for example, which can render a person mathematically brilliant but socially inert.) Furthermore, recent studies have suggested a hard-wired, genetic basis for human spirituality, indicating that it may be just another component of our evolutionarily developed physiology. So, what if we add a new faculty to the mix and call it spirituality? Yes, this is a tough word for us non-believers, as it has long been proprietary to the mystical realm, but I believe that there is room for it in the secular domain. One's spirit might be described as that which is unique to an individual, that collection of atoms and experiences, the ineffable "it" that is, essentially, just the sum of one's parts. Indescribable, after all, is not necessarily (or ever) synonymous with supernatural. The active duty of the spirit, then, would be to synthesize these so-called mysteries of the human experience on an ongoing basis, enabling its corporeal counterpart to cope in a complex cosmos in which not everything can be concisely chronicled or comprehended. A spiritually retarded individual, then, would have great difficulty doing that without reliance on imaginary friends and steadfast devotion to simplistic moral formulae.

I feel sure that my own stance on abortion (pro-choice, pro-abortion...whatever you'd like to call it), for example, cannot be wholly attributed to the intellectual impact of a liberal education (though I would wager that there is a high positive correlation between advanced education and reduced opposition to abortion). As I look back at my 14-year old self, as I compare my present self to that child, I feel sure that the maturation of a specific component of my being - my spirit - has allowed me this new perspective. I did not arrive at the conclusion that abortion is permissible simply because I abandoned religion. These things occurred simultaneously, as my spirit evolved beyond the point at which most become stunted.

Think of it as a wall that exists in the minds of the spiritually retarded that is not so different from the wall that prevents an individual with Down's Syndrome from advancing beyond the mental capability of a four year old. This spiritual wall - a manifestation of the deity of their choice - does not necessarily prevent a spiritually retarded person from grasping or excelling in math, history, science, sports statistics, or any other tangible piece of information. Rather, it incapacitates them in the face of the abstract and demands their submission. The wall is the answer to all of the questions that cannot be answered. 

The height of the wall varies from person to person and can change over time. Some build them up, some modify them, some tear them down. And so the spectrum ranges from poor, dumb schmucks like the parents of Terry Schiavo, who simply weren't intelligent or mature enough to bring themselves to terms with the medical reality of their daughter's situation and so relied on religion and religious whackjobs to justify their position, to people like Andrew Sullivan, an intensely intelligent, conservative writer who has lowered a portion of the wall to allow for his homosexuality while retaining enough to remain anti-abortion and a devoted Catholic. There are an infinite number of variations when you account for all of the ways in which varying levels of measurable intelligence intersect with the ethereal wall.

When I started this post (a couple weeks ago), I did not intend for it to be about abortion. The events of the past week, however - the killing of late-term abortion provider, George Tiller - compel me to stay with the issue. As a person without a wall - spiritually high functioning? - I am obviously pro-choice. Also, I am not the least bit anti-abortion. An important distinction. See, I don't care if we reduce the number of abortions. Yes, I would like to see us provide high quality sex education and birth control, which would drastically cut the number of unwanted pregnancies, which would, in turn, drastically reduce the number of abortions - but with regards to the procedure itself, I wouldn't particularly care whether the number increased by a factor of one hundred. Once divorced from the notion that sperm and egg unite to create a mystical and immortal being within the clump of cells that have begun to multiply inside a woman (regardless, mind you, of whether she's just been raped, paid-for-sex, cheated on her husband, seduced a twelve-year old boy, made passionate love to the love of her life, earned her green card, or finished with #327 in her quest to participate in the biggest gang bang of all time), there is simply no good reason to oppose the procedure.

The way I see it, spiritual retardation is the only explanation for opposition to first-trimester abortions, which account for very nearly ALL abortions. It is a mundane medical procedure in which a clump of cells is removed from a woman who would rather not see those cells reach full gestation. It happens naturally to a large percentage of women who don't seek the procedure. Only spiritual retardation can convert it into something more profound than that. Progressing further into pregnancy, human squeamishness enters into the equation and makes this conversation more difficult. Fortunately for humankind, people aren't running around clamoring for second and third-trimester abortions for the sheer joy of it. Abortions in the second and third trimester are almost always sought for medical reasons - some involving the health of the mother, others involving a horribly disabled, disfigured, and or diseased fetus whose quality of life stands to be improved by the work of brave and merciful people like Dr. George Tiller. 

Here's what's interesting: Dr. Tiller was at least mildly spiritually retarded himself, having been murdered in the vestibule of his Lutheran church, where he was serving as an usher. As I said, the spectrum is vast, accommodating both Dr. Tiller and his severely spiritually retarded murderer. It seems to me that both of them would have been better off without their respective walls - Tiller wouldn't have been at church and Scott Roeder wouldn't have had any reason to kill Tiller. Still, a wall is a wall - and Dr. Tiller's wall, low as it may have been, lent credence to the prevailing notion that walls are necessary and good. His inability to tear down that last brick or two ultimately denied him the spiritual credibility to question the validity of Scott Roeder's wall. 

Jesus in the Sky with Jews

I learned something new today. Apparently Jesus' powers do not include the ability to prevent the first half of his name from drifting away before a plane has a chance to finish skywriting ":) JESUS LOVES U."

As you can see, a cloud has already begun to desecrate the cute little smiley face and is about to do some serious damage to the good lord's name. Jesus was halfway to Delray Beach before the pilot got to the adorably abbreviated "U."

Boca Raton, Florida is a pretty provocative place to be skywriting ":) Jesus Loves U," given the very large Jewish population here. One could be forgiven for thinking that the subtext of that giant message in the sky is "Don't worry, hellbound heathen semites...you still have a chance to accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior before he smites your flesh and finishes what Hitler started."

I would like to hire a skywriter to paint the following message over Colorado Springs: ":p Allah Loves U More!" just to see how the Christian community there reacts. Anyone care to contribute to a fund that would make that possible? I'll look into pricing.

I would also like to respond in kind to the proliferation of "Choose Life" license plates with one that says "Reduce Crowds, Choose Abortion." I don't see how the state could allow one and deny the other. I'll keep you posted on this effort...

A Letter To The Minority Party

Here’s what's up, douchebags…

Between 1994 and 2008 – the last 14 years – you controlled the U.S. House of Representatives for 12 years, the U.S. Senate for 10 years, and the White House for eight years.

As affirmed by the elections of 2006 and 2008, Americans have reached the conclusion that your reign of power was a failure, that you are very good at marketing and miserable at governing, that a continuation of your incumbency would further deteriorate the badly mangled condition we find ourselves in at the denouement of your tenure.

Americans seem to be aware that incompetence was not the only problem. They understand that your ideology, your vision for this country, is just plain wrong. All the highfalutin’ talk about free markets and spreading democracy has not worked out well for most of us – and your obsession with sexual morality just seems anachronistically silly at this point.

So…it’s time to sit down, shut the fuck up, and let the grown-ups try to clean up your mess – your stinking, shitty fucking mess. Now maybe you misunderstood President Obama’s call for bi-partisanship. What President Obama meant is that the Democrats, under the leadership of President Obama, won’t mouth fuck you with their large majorities IF you’ll accept your electoral punishment – like the little bitches you are – with an ounce of dignity. You don’t get to keep your toys. You don’t get to keep humping America’s ass with your failed ideas. You get to sit politely in the corner and try not to piss all the goddamned rug.

You don’t like President Obama’s stimulus package? President Obama’s package is too big for you? Too fucking bad, assholes. You will take it and you will like it. Your economic policies created the need for these drastic measures, so no one really gives a flying fuck what you like and what you don’t like. You know what we like? We like not being in this fucking recession you assholes created by deregulating everything in sight so that a bunch of rich fucking assholes could get richer. (Maybe if you’d tried regulating the number of cocks Larry Craig was allowed to suck, or the number of hookers David Vitter was allowed to fuck, you’d have learned the joy and value of regulation.)

So when non-President McCain says he won’t vote for the stimulus bill as it stands, I just remind myself that John McCain and his little sidecunt lost the election. When Minority Leader McConnell and Minority Whip Cantor walk their frighteningly immobile faces up to the microphone to bitch and moan about the Republicans’ concerns, I think to myself…fuck you, fuck you, fuck you! Shut the fuck up. Lick my sweaty taint. You are UGLY. Ugly and stupid and wrong. You are losers. Do your wives make you wear President Obama masks when you’re fucking them?

Sorry, but I really can’t stand to watch you attempt to derail the first serious-minded attempt to save this country from the disaster you created. It’s like when there’s a horribly untalented person on American Idol, but they don’t know how horribly incompetent they are, so they just keep singing and/or talking and begging the judges to listen and insisting that they are destined to be the next American Idol. Except they’re not. They’re just horribly incompetent, untalented people who should never have been put on TV in the first place so that we wouldn’t have to sit there, feeling uncomfortable as we watch them plead for validation and relevance. They’re losers before they even walk in the room – and it’s sad.

The Twenty-Fourfeiture of Torture

Right-wingers, beside themselves over the imminent end of America’s torture program, think they have found vindication in Jack Bauer’s testimony before a Senate committee in the season premier of 24. With his trademark somber straightforwardness, Jack schools the caricatured liberals who dare to grill him about his personal use of advanced interrogation methods. Those pussies. Who the hell do they think they are, dragging Jack Fucking Bauer in to defend the tactics he has used to protect the United goddamned States of America? Nearly everyone Jack encounters in the first four hours of the season expresses their outrage that Jack is being subjected to such a fiasco. It doesn’t take long before FBI agents, skeptical of Jack and his techniques, realize that only torture can save the world.

And there you have it. Torture is good. Liberal pussies are bad. America will perish at the hands of terrorists if we don’t torture someone. Anyone. Soon!

Except that 24 is a fictional world in which nuclear, chemical, and/or biological annihilation is always less than 24 hours away. And when Jack manages to get himself into a locked room with the one person who possesses earth-shatteringly important information – as he does in every single critical situation – we, the television audience, have the benefit of knowing that the villain possesses such information as we watch Jack drill holes through various body parts. Also, Jack has always been crystal clear about his willingness to be held accountable for his actions, being fully aware that his actions, when examined in the context of an actual ticking bomb scenario, would undoubtedly be vindicated – unless the writers wanted to make a point.

Ticking bomb scenarios are the chimerical wet dreams of neo-cons. No rational human being would condemn Jack Bauer for the actions depicted on 24. If someone took my son – and if I were a freakishly brilliant super agent – I would perform unspeakably violent acts on any person who possessed information that might get him back. Admirably, Jack loves his country that much. I hope that there are agents like Jack Bauer out there, ready to take a terrorist to the mat when lives are literally hanging in the balance.

But our use of torture these last seven years has not resembled what you see on TV. We’ve simply been rounding up Arabs, refusing to charge or try them, and pretending to drown them in the hopes that they might know something. Some of them have been very bad guys, for sure. Others, it appears, were in the wrong place at the wrong time – a situation our soldiers could easily find themselves in during future conflicts. And that’s the point of the Geneva Convention. It’s a gentleman’s agreement, designed to prevent indiscriminate torture. Jack breaks the rules when it's the ONLY option - not when it's AN option, as it always is.

 

Happy 2009

I’m back.

It’s been almost three months since my last post. I was rendered temporarily speechless by the combined effects of Barack Obama’s victory, the end of the Bush presidency, and the financial meltdown. So, I took some time to process things…to sort through the psychological and emotional baggage I’ve been lugging around for the last eight years…to figure out what comes next. Let me see if I can summarize some of my conclusions…

I believe that medical textbooks will, in the not-too-distant future, describe a condition called Bush Administration-induced Severe Torpor with Agitation and Rage Disease (B.A.S.T.A.R.D.). I suffer from this crippling syndrome. I’ve spent these last eight years hating George W. Bush with a passion that I’m not proud of. I’ve been unable to reconcile the America I grew up reading about with the reality of his presidency. That cognitive dissonance has, for reasons I cannot fully comprehend or justify, been a debilitating force in my life. I have not lived up to my own potential, in part because I’ve been distracted, in a clinically obsessive way, by the systematic dismantling of my country – and, if I may wax grandiose, my species – by this man. Perhaps I should say this directly to him…

Dear President Bush,

Your biggest flaw – the character trait that mutated a harmless, bumbling idiot into a walking weapon of mass destruction – is your devastatingly simplistic view of the world. This, combined with your epic incuriousness, is what has kept me awake nights for the last eight years.

What has disturbed me the most – more than the wars, the floods, the torture, the economy – is the way you attempted to pit American against American by suggesting a biblical divide between those who were with you and those who were against you. You created, not in seven days, but in seven years, Sarah Palin’s conception of a “real America.” You turned blind nationalism and ignorance into virtues and then encouraged the virtuous to hold the rest of us in contempt.

My thoughts and feelings about my homeland are more complicated than the ones you have postulated as minimum requirements of true patriots over these last eight years. Fortunately, I don’t really give two of Laura’s nasty, graying cunt hairs what you think of my thoughts and feelings about my homeland. My frustrations, my skepticism, my disagreements with your policies, my utter loathing of you and your cohorts, my shame over the actions of my country—these all derive from a deep and abiding concern for this place called the United States of America. If that doesn't jive with your definition of Patriotism, if that isn't good enough for you, then you can go fuck yourself with a jagged piece of shrapnel pulled from a dead soldier’s chest.

The litany of your crimes and blunders—the ones we already know about—needs no repetition here. You are the most unpopular president in modern American history. The world despises you. The decline of America as the world’s great superpower may well have been set in motion on your watch. Osama bid Laden’s got nothing on you, Mr. President. Congratulations.

You don’t really deserve all of this bombast. You’re not bright enough or competent enough to accomplish all of the horrible things that you have, nevertheless, accomplished. No…you are a puppet, wrapped inside a symbol. You are the essence of anti-intellectualism—the spirit of poor, dumb Americans all across this great land. Thus, you were the perfect tool for the malevolent forces whose grand schemes required a harmless-looking front man. You charmed America with your impotent promise of “Compassionate Conservatism,” your frightening and specious devotion to Jesus Christ, and your remarkable likeness to any number of guys we’ve all met in a bar somewhere.

Still, it is your presidency that has led us here, and so it is you that I will now bid adieu. As much as I’ve enjoyed having you as a punching bag, I would gladly trade every rhetorical thrill ride I’ve ever taken at your expense for a world in which you did not exist. You represent the worst of my country – indeed, the worst of humanity.

I have one kind thing to say, Mr. President: Thank you for being such a magnificent disgrace, such a cataclysmic failure, that bold, sweeping change was the only option. You were such a horrific disaster, such an unmitigated calamity, that America elected not just a Democrat, but a black man to fill your position! One day, historians may look back and decide that you were, in fact, the “uniter” you promised to be, At the very least, you’ve permanently unified us against the dangerous, failed ideas of neo-conservatism. In the short-term, you’ve handed all three branches of the government over to Democrats. For these blessings, I thank you.

I hope that one day, perhaps as we watch live coverage of your funeral, I can tell my son that the man in the coffin is the guy who almost broke the United States of America – and that the grand spectacle of your state funeral is merely testament to our fundamental honor and decency as a nation…not to yours.

Sincerely,

CP

And now it is time to move on. The end of George W. Bush’s presidency will not usher in an era of enlightened thinking in America—and so there will remain much to be pissed about. For the moment, however, I am hopeful and content. Relatively speaking. The last three months have put a few cracks in my armor of cynicism. I feel more connected to my fellow citizens. I am proud of us.

How Tina Fey Saved The Universe

Sorry it's been so long. To tell the truth, I just haven't been pissed enough to write anything these past couple of weeks. Well...okay, I've been pissed about plenty, but it's all been overwhelmed by the sheer delight of watching McCain and Palin implode like a couple of maverick sticks of dynamite. ("Thanks but no thanks on the whole EX-ploding thing. We're going to IM-plode...'cause we're a team that is a team of mavericks.") My faith in a portion of my fellow citizens has been restored with every uptick in Obama's numbers. This has allowed me to sleep just a little easier. I think all of this is largely due to the efforts of one person...

I've long believed in the power of satire. The Daily Show has re-popularized the art form in recent years, but mostly by preaching to the choir. Stephen Colbert took it to the next level, confusing Republicans enough that they invited him to speak at the White House Correspondents Dinner, where he excoriated the President - who was sitting about three feet from him at the time - for about 20 minutes. For this, he earned the top spot on CP's list of Top Ten Men I'd Go Gay For.

Tina Fey is poised to trump those accomplishments. If Barack Obama wins this election, which is looking increasingly likely, history will look back and realize that Tina Fey SAVED THE UNIVERSE with her impression of Sarah Palin. She rendered the woman indistinguishable from the joke - and vice versa. She accomplished this by refusing to turn the impression into a caricature, by sticking close to the source material, and by transposing the essence of Sarah Palin into a context that revealed the absurdity of her presence on the national stage.

Saturday Night Live sucks these days, but it still holds a crucial timeslot in the American psyche and can still have tremendous power, particularly when Americans are collectively focused on a single event or issue. When done well, a sketch can reframe problems and personalities in a way that influences national sentiment. I believe Tina Fey's trio of Sarah Palin sketches are just such an instance. Tina Fey made people feel ashamed of their initially warm reaction to Sarah Palin. When they watched Sarah Palin speak, they were influenced by their own emotional and political prejudices. When they watch Tina Fey imitating Sarah Palin, they were able to more clearly see what a joke and a fraud she really is.

Thank you Tina Fey. I hope you'll accept the newly created CP Award for The Woman I'd Most Like To Sleep With If Only To Act Out A Really Dirty Anger Fuck Fantasy Involving Sarah Palin.