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 the 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?