The Government We Deserve

Because this is the country that made useless doorstops like the Kardashian sisters wealthy and famous, it is a virtual certainty that there's somebody out there -- hell, probably several million somebodies -- taking the idea of an Oprah Winfrey political candidacy seriously. It makes sense that the media dogs would chase their tails on this for a couple days, because as always, they have airspace to fill.

But the idea that a significant number of people would take such a thing seriously, or welcome it, is nothing more not less than a sign that those folks have given up -- on what a sane idea of a political system is and should encompass, on whether managing the world's largest economy and most powerful military force is a serious undertaking. Then again, letting Fuckface Von Clownstick run, much less win, is surely a sign of those things, but encouraging a billowy dilettante is just doubling down on all that.

That's not to say I wouldn't vote for her, if that was the choice. I would go out in my back field and dig up a river rock, and vote for that rock before I'd vote for Clownstick for any office. He'd fuck up dog-catcher. That should be abundantly clear by now.

I suppose there are many fine things about Oprah -- from all indications, she is generous and kind, and no doubt her charitable contributions and foundations hold up much better than Clownstick's little tax-evasion scams that barely make the effort of concealing their self-dealing and money-grubbing. And she is truly self-made. I find her incessant branding overweening and annoying, but there's no doubt that she came from poverty and bootstrapped herself into a position of real wealth and power, something Clownstick can claim but no one will ever believe (like every other claim he makes).

But Oprah is also responsible for inflicting on us Doctors Phil, Oz, and Jenny McCarthy. Someone who falls for this level of ongoing quackery has some issues. However, unlike Clownstick, she (and most normal human beings) at least understands what she is good at and not good at, and can delegate and let other people manage and have input over that latter category.

She's not going to run anyway, so no one out there should get too worried or get their hopes up too much. It's not going to happen. What almost certainly will happen is that Oprah will have a role in publicly vetting whatever roster of candidates eventually comes out of the Democrats' little shop of errors, and will pick on to put some money behind. Unlike these dopey vanity projects like Tom Steyer is running, Oprah understands that the money is better spent on candidates than petitions.

So if Kirsten Gillibrand is smart (and she is), she's already reaching out behind the scenes to Oprah, and getting on that train. Because the one thing Oprah has more of than money is cultural influence, one that transcends to some extent the weird class-race divide that's been stoked the last few years.

In Other News

Today is Canada's sesquicentennial, as well as Pamela Anderson's 50th birthday. In celebration of the latter event, this is a fun read.

I'm With Stupid

The exciting auditions for Celebrity Fuckface continue! Who will be crowned 'murka's reigning Fuckface?

It figures that someone just released from a mental hospital after treatment for a nervous breakdown would be good to go for playing the Clownstick inaugural bawl. They can have each other; I'm sure the Pepe the Frog acolytes are looking forward to overlong filler sets from Kanye, Kid Rock, Andrea Bocelli, and whatever goat-fucking country hacks get roped into this. Maybe they can all band together for a bro-country rendition of The Horst Wessel Song.

In the meantime, nice distraction on Drumpf's part in dodging the press conference he was supposed to have, in which he was going to clownsplain how he was going to plunder the treasury while pretending to keep his conflicts of interest under control. The motherfucker's entire existence is a conflict of interest, and he revels in knowing that everyone knows it, and there's not a goddamned thing anyone can or will do about it.

Hopefully any other do-gooder celebritards out there have learned by watching what happened to Al Gore and Leo DiCaprio, who made the pilgrimage to kiss the ring over climate change, only to have Okie oil-blower Scott Pruitt tapped to head the EPA. Keep devaluing your own currency by currying empty favor with this fucking guy, see what that gets you.

Switching Sides

I've said it before, and I'll say it again -- whether she votes for Hillary Clinton or Dumb Old Chump, if your vote or your opinion about anything is swayed one iota by what some useless celebritard dunce thinks, there is something deeply and dangerously wrong with you. Such people should be ashamed of themselves, but usually don't have the good sense or grace to conduct themselves accordingly.

Thin Skin Is In

Nothing more hilarious than an e-beef between two sorta-famous morons. On the one hand, this rapper I've never heard of needs to stop believing everything she reads in The Onion before going off on how someone needs to get gang-banged; on the other hand, it's almost pathetically charming to watch Sarah Palin act like she's the only public figure to have ever been maligned and treated rudely. Has she heard what some of the folks in her own party routinely say about the current president? Oh, that's right, as often as not, she's leading that pack.

Person of Influence

Pro tip for all you folks who might be thinking of making a living telling other people how to live their lives, just because your mommy is famous for being a burbling quitter:  Remember, you can walk away at any time, if you find the kitchen getting too hot for comfort. Just a thought, but maybe you can spend the free time overcoming whatever it is in your life that finds you with three broken engagements and two out-of-wedlock children (by two different men) by the time you're 25 years old.

(Not to mention that the assumption that former fiancé Dakota Meyer is the father of this child may not necessarily be true, which would be really scandalous 'mongst the fambly valyews types. This is what happens when you don't take your whore pills.)

It's bad enough that Bristol Palin makes decent money doing nothing more than being a sanctimonious, hypocritical dunce, but what's unforgivably obnoxious is the "respect our privacy" nonsense. There's no one stopping you from going away, sweet cheeks. Trust me, no one will miss you. Go get a real job, toil away in obscurity with whatever other skill you might possess. No one's stopping you, and no one will check up on your comings and goings at the burger stand. You chose to put yourself in the public eye, no gun was put to anyone's head.

Ah, but that's always the problem in our "reality" teevee addled excuse for a society -- whenever one of these morons steps on their dicks, their first impulse is to exercise their right to privacy, but they still want to keep their public platform, their show, their blog, whatever revenue source they have to monetize their meager talent. They think they should be able to have it both ways, to use said platform to influence behavior and promote their social causes, and then when they're caught being hypocrites (which, you know, tends to undermine whatever value is created by their promotions), they want a pass and privacy. No. It doesn't work that way, unless you want to do the right thing and just go away already.

But that won't happen. The only that terrifies them more than having the easy money spigot turned off is finding out that they could completely disappear and nobody would notice.

Cash Cow

Maybe it's wishful thinking to suppose that the garbage of reality teevee, particularly the more exploitative "hillbilly" schtick of Duck Dynasty and Honey Boo Boo, have finally jumped the proverbial shark -- even if, in this case, the hapless selachimorph is in a vat of mayonnaise, with some drooling inbred gibbering and tapping on the side at it.

Slathering the contrived misadventures of these random backwoods halfwits in a greasy film of "family" life doesn't make it any better, doesn't change the fact that (to insert and compare current "conservative culcha" tropes) Phil Robertson was more of a thug than crackers assume Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown were (or that he's simply a blithering idiot with way more of a platform than his nonsense deserves), that June Shannon could shame any welfare queen Those People might have.

It's passing strange that, in a 24-hour media system that scrutinizes and ruminates over the most ridiculous, peripheral ideas imaginable, that those inconvenient truths don't get brought up more often, or much at all. Not being part of the audience, I really have no idea who what the demographic for this sort of shit is in the first place, presumably shut-ins lacking any semblance of taste or critical thought. Having made the mistake of sitting through one episode of Duck Dynasty just to see what the fuss was about, and seen enough excerpts of Honey Boo Boo on The Soup to get the idea, I can at least safely posit that these things are not being watched "ironically," that the core audience is genuinely interested in the (again, contrived) comings and goings of these dullards.

Yes, ordinarily these are just the usual chacun à son gout deals, where the smart set can safely curl their collective lip, roll their eyes, mutter something uncharitable about the complete lack of sophistication of the fan base in question, and be on about their way. Might as well gripe about the success of Miley Cyrus or Justin Bieber.

But when, in the above examples, you have one "star" using his "fame" to promote his mossback religious and political agenda anywhere and everywhere he can, and the other is a disgusting idiot who has been impregnated by multiple felons, and has partnered with at least two convicted child molesters, it's a little more than just a matter of taste.

Maybe it's time to start boycotting the sponsors of fucktard basic cable outlets such as A&E and TLC -- which, let's recall, used to stand for Arts & Entertainment and The Learning Channel, respectively -- until they can vet their maroons a little better. Not saying we all need to watch Mawsterpiece Theatre and practice our Downton Abbey etiquette protocols, not remotely. But this incessant promotion of idiots and assholes -- isn't that what we have politics for?

Wife of the Party

The Palins plan their dine-and-dash from The Golden Snoot.

The Wasilla Hillbillies just cain't help theirselfs, kin they? Showing up at someone else's birthday shindig in a stretch Hummer limo (because a dented Airstream would have been just too fucking spot-on), the ClampettsPalins promptly set about making it all about them, as usual:

....multiple accounts say that it started when Track confronted Willow’s former boyfriend, Conner Cleary, who was there with his father Steve and his mother Melissa. Thompson didn’t see this part, but other witnesses, who didn’t want to be named, say that Conner and Track fought on the front yard. Steve tried to break it up. Todd jumped into the mix and began to choke Steve. 

After that ended, Conner, Steve, and Melissa Cleary huddled together close to Thompson, who spotted Bristol and Willow from a distance, walking straight towards them with purpose.

“They were on a b-line, coming straight at Melissa,” Thompson said.

The owner of the house, Klingenmeyer, was trying to head them off at the pass. He approached them and told them to leave. Bristol, according to Thompson and other witnesses, planted her feet, “stood straight up, brought her arm back and cold-cocked him right in the face,” Thompson said.

And then she did it again, about six more times, before he pushed her away, and she fell, and Todd appeared.

....

Another melee. This time Sarah got involved and began to scream profanities at everyone. One source, who didn’t want to be named, said that she was “nearly crawling on top of people,” trying to get into the scrum.

As these things go, that also broke up, and the Palins were asked again to leave. They piled into the Hummer, but not until Track stood out in front of the house, inexplicably with his shirt off, his middle finger raised at those who were also leaving.

On the one hand, it's so cool that the most important woman in the universe has time to crash other people's parties and siphon cash from rube subscribers; on the other, her slugging percentage with successful parenting is sad enough that a normal person with that, um, track record would shy away from offering family and parenting advice.

A few more "doncha know who I am?" tirades from Miss Thang and her insufferably over-entitled drunken brood, and they may find themselves sent out on an ice floe by fed-up Alaskans. As always, one can hope.

Oh and, uh, fuck you, John McCain. This is all your fault.

Photo Shop

So, uh, The Fappening, right? Wild and crazy stuff. Stay hydrated, friends, and get up and walk around at least every hour or so, hyuk hyuk. Now, I get the feminist meme that "humiliation" is part of the package for downloaders and internet voyeurs. There might be some truth to that, for some folks. I'm not a psychiatrist, nor do I pretend to play one on TV.

But I'd suggest that there is something more primal and simple than the obvious "forbidden fruit" stuff. It's a double-edged sword, this thing of celebrity. A very lucrative and hyperactive industry is built around the very goal of bringing scores of attractive women to the attention of men and women alike. Men are told that they want to bang Celebrity X, and women are told that, since men want to bang Celebrity X, women would be wise to follow suit and accessorize in similar fashion.

So when grainy selfies of Celebrity X suddenly surface, yeah, there's gonna be a feeding frenzy, precisely because of the lack of pretense or contrivance in the very candor of the photos. Sex sells, who'da thunk it? Men in particular just want to (to put it as crudely as possible) break a nut, as it were, and new stuff is always welcome. Let's not overthink this. It's not just famous boobs, though there's always a frisson to that.

What qualifies as "sexual" can be interesting. Side-boob, cleavage, most of the breast, all but that magical pink or brown nozzle at the end. The nozzle makes all the difference in the world, aesthetically and legally. It's the difference between a PG and an R rating for a movie, or a magazine being moved from the floor shelf to behind the counter.

But again, that entire industry goes to great lengths to give you as much as possible, holding back that 2% of the boob that caps off said boob. I mean, the publicity machine has put Jennifer Lawrence front and center for a couple years now, in a variety of provocative poses and outfits. The only difference between today and yesterday is that now you know what color her nipples are.

Doesn't make it right, and it certainly doesn't make the image of millions of cybergoons spanking their monkeys any less repulsive. But it's no surprise, either. Part of democratizing all this wondrous technology is that it removes any notion of a centralized controlling authority for this stuff. It's a free-for-all out there, and when fans no longer have to wait for the next carefully crafted press release, things can get kinda weird.

Mommie Dearest

It's easy (and accurate) to pick on the spate of  "celebrity" (or used to be) mothers who write books chock-full o' "parenting" and "lifestyle" advice, usually nonsense about vaccines and toilet training. Mostly these things are just the artifacts of a desiccated cultural landscape, where wealthy, pampered dingbats can preach to the peons about lives of "simplicity" and such.

But what we really should be curious about is, what sort of moron purchases and reads these things? Who are these simpletons out there that think Jenny McCarthy has better ideas about how to raise their children than, hell, just about anyone else on the planet? How does the chick from Clueless show up on the short lists of mothers and mothers-to-be (not to be overly sexist, but I promise you, right here, right now, that no man on the planet is buying any of these books) as a repository of sound advice?

Seriously, now. The problem is not solely that this "advice" comes from people who have, for the most part, lived cosseted lives away from the working-two-jobs-to-survive, one-paycheck-from-the-street reality that most people live. It's that "living well," contra received dingbat wisdom, really does cost more. Good food and good health care, the immediate vitals, cost more. All the ancillary things that add to a quality of life -- roads, schools, jobs, activities, etc. -- those things cost more, because you get what you pay for.

This is what happens when you have a population that is willfully illiterate and innumerate. There are too many people who can no longer parse statistical data, tell it apart from mere anecdata. There are a preponderance of folks out there who cannot critically think, who are simply too lazy to read up on how many different ways the "anti-vax" legends have been debunked.

Worst of all, this is what happens when you have a swath of people out there who can barely find their intemellectual asses in a dark room with both hands and a flashlight, but will hang their hopes and opinions on someone they've heard of, some D-lister who was on that show a million years ago, or who used to be famous for showing her tits. (Five years ago, my response to Surgeon General McCarthy would simply have been, "shut up and take your top off," but she's been so heavily sculpted and botoxed at this point, it would be like looking at a plastic fuck doll.)

Really, much to the chagrin of this bullshit "parenting and lifestyle" industry, you do not need a parenting book at all. Maybe good old Dr. Spock if you really must, but so much of it is just common sense. Apparently Voltaire was an optimist on that count.

Having children is one of the things humans do better and more than just about anything else they do; rearing children is simply a matter of considering their interests at the same or higher level than your own. Looking to some useta-be-famous name for help is just a failure of attention and thought.

Capitalism Y'all

I think most of us can agree one at least one thing -- when you attempt to underpin an essential economic principle with observations from the staged talk show of a woman who actively pimps her children for a living, you've lost, and hard. It's hard to imagine the sort of soulless fuck who attempts to intellectually square the nonsense of a creature like Kris Jenner with the philosophy of Adam Smith, but here you have it -- people who will reach for literally anything to justify their biases.

I have no wish, good or bad, regarding Kris Jenner or her skeevy, starfucking progeny, save that they get actual jobs producing something useful.

How Can We Miss You If You Won't Go Away?

It's an odd-numbered year, and Saint Sarah has yet another unreadable, ghost-written doorstop in the works, so we have to pretend that she might run for Mark Begich's Senate seat next year.

At this point, Palin is basically the Black Eyed Peas of politics -- so far beyond suck that the light from suck takes years to reach, yet refuses to face or believe the truth, because there's just enough maroons to shield them from it for some reason.

Into the Void

Whether your a Belieber, or even just a Biebnostic, you have to appreciate the symbolic heft of launching the little turd into outer space. If they can load Kim and Kanye and the rest of the Kardoushian klan on the one-way rocket ship into the sun, it would be a start.

At the very least, Harvey Levin would have to find other, hairier legs to hump.

Tell Me Why I Don't Like Mondays

We all know how I loves me some Kanye, so I just wanted to shout out that, while I think paprazzi are detestable and should get real jobs and some goddamned self-respect, this really did make my day. As gaping assholes go, this seemed rather karmic. Maybe his Auto-Tune will make the boo-boo go down faster.

The Ballad of Frito Pendejo

Looks like 'murka's ongoing love affair with watching nobodies sort their sock drawers is safe for the time being, praise Jebus:

“I don't see anything mind-blowing this year,” says Karoline Spodsberg of Banijay International. “The trend, if you can call it a trend – is that people are reworking already existing genres and existing shows. Almost everything “new” is set in something we already know and already is successful.”

Sooo....the laziest conceivable form of popular entertainment is going to continue down that discount path, saving tons of money on talent (writers, actors, directors, etc.) while charging the same ad rates for all those boner pills and pick'em up trucks? Color this hombre shocked.

 

It's not like anyone expected anything else, but I suppose the characterization of anything being potentially "mind-blowing" is, well, a bit weird, even by the depressingly low standards of the industry. Was anyone's mind really "blown" by the Candid-Camera-meets-Lord-of-the-Flies aesthetic of Survivor when it mutated the prime-time landscape, then metastasizing into the myriad indistinguishable karaoke-dancing-bachelor contest shows that now proliferate?

 

Perhaps they were blown away by the realization that people would actually tune in to what appears to be roughly ten minutes of actual content stretched into an hour with pregnant pauses and an overabundance of commercials. Surely the money they're raking in hand over fist, peddling total dreck, is pretty mind-blowing, I'll grant them that.

 

A charitable way to observe the phenomenon might be to note that the extreme abundance of satellite channels basically provides something for just about anyone at almost any time. (This is not exactly true, at least in my case -- I'm willing to watch a variety of stuff if I'm in the house, working on the laptop, whatever. But there is never going to be a situation where I would leave, say, Baby Geniuses 2 -- yes, sadly, it is a real movie -- going, even as background noise, yet I'm paying HBO $15/month to lard their extra channels such crap, presumably so that they can then afford Game of Thrones and Bill Maher. But I digress.)

 

Rather than endlessly kvetching about the nonstop ludicrousness of the whole operation, or engaging in pointless chacun à son gout diversions, the meta aspects are more interesting to observe. I am old enough to remember watching (for example) Hee Haw on the teevee on Sundays when it wasn't football season, but there were no computers or video games, and we had literally only three channels in Northern California. (Even in Los Angeles, in the early '70s, I think we only had maybe 8-10 channels.) So we didn't have much else to choose from.

 

I am unable to just sit and passively watch the teevee; even if it's something I genuinely enjoy and look forward to -- Daily Show, GoT, Justified -- I have the laptop or a book handy, or a pad and paper to take notes on whatever project I have going. (I know, I must be a really fun date, right?) I honestly can't conceive of just sitting and watching a dancing show or an infomercial, unless they bring in weapons for the participants to use on each other. But they're on, so even with all the other cool choices, someone's got that kind of time on their hands. I can't disparage it, because it's just incomprehensible to me. But society and the workplace have a way of burning people out to where they just sit and accept, I suppose.

 

It's not all dreck; technology has enabled so much high-quality content, from video games to books to music, it's impossible to get to it all. And it's actually a bit strange that so many people continue to bother with old-format teevee and movies. Length of format is one thing that is ripe for change -- why does a show have to be an hour or half-hour, or a movie 90-120 min.? -- especially as mainstream content becomes more and more repetitive, recursive, ripped from comic books or board games or what have you.

 

That's the blessing and curse of having infinity channels:  something for everyone, but also the overall dilution of the importance of creativity, originality, quality. I have probably 400 channels at my disposal; I don't think I use more than nine or ten of them, like ever. I suspect we're all in that boat, of paying a thousand dollars a year for content we might value at a tenth of that. And hell, it may the sole remaining choice of employment before too much longer.

 

You can catch my upcoming reality-fest, Sortin' Sock Drawers with the Kardashians, on the E! Channel next summer.

Star Bores

Why don't more people call Beyonce a "genius"? Um, because she isn't, at least not a musical genius. A genius at self-promotion and self-regard, sure. Consider just the past several weeks -- the inauguration, the Super Bowl, and now a 90-minute promotional ad for HBO. (To add insult to injury, the HBOZ channel, usually a repository of action flicks and midnight Skinemax cold-shot titty movies, just finished showing the "documentary" on a continuous loop for 24 hours straight. I wish I was making that up.)

It's always peculiar when an adult gushes over any pop star to this extent. That's really all Beyonce is, and as such, she's very competent at it -- great voice, energetic performance, standard material. From what I hear, most of the final rounds of American Idle and Teh Voice have quite a few examples along that line. Again, though, there's a difference between true genius and mere competence.

I think part of this "phenomenon", this general cultural effort to maximize the merely mediocre or even marginal, is at once a vestige of the recording industry and the result of reality-teevee marketing. Record companies always (and seemingly only) thrived on having tentpole products around which to position the rest of their catalogs. And it's hardly worth mentioning that with the proliferation of the bizarre, the mediocre, and the borderline retarded, in terms of what they will now make a "show" "about", and around whom, anyone can become a star.

And when anyone can become famous, whether or not they're talented, talent tends to marginalize as a salient factor. In other words, even if Beyonce was half as incredible a singer as she seems to think she is -- and she is a very good singer -- it wouldn't matter. Her appeal prevails among the sorts of folks who find, say, celebrity pregnancies interesting or even compelling, the sort of moron who will find the most mundane and commonplace activities enthralling, so long as someone they've heard of is doing them.

But that is the hallmark of the fairweather fan; eventually the famous person du jour gets played out, either leg-humping their latest project until everyone's sick of hearing the name (which, between the pedophilia scandals, is part of what happened to Michael Jackson), or whoring their personal life out until no one but the most ADD morlock can stand it anymore. Seriously, is there still anyone out there with an IQ over 50 who cares what any of the Kardashians are keeping up with?

This will happen with Beyonce and Jay-Z as well, as it happens to almost everyone sooner or later. Fans move on; attention spans are short; the types of "music" thetwo of them do is interchangeable and disposable, more a product of songwriting, arranging, and producing than any innate ability either of them might possess beyond brand-building.

Wealthy people who not only have the balls to complain about how rough it is at the top, but then strap on an extra pair to tell the world what photos they are allowed to publish, and who always have to be the center of attention in everything they do, wear thin more quickly than they might realize. An asshole is one thing; an asshole who has no conceivable reason to be an asshole is quite another. In the meantime, I don't spend sixteen bucks a month on HBO so some spoiled princess can commandeer time to tell us all how awesome she is. At least not willingly.

Royal Flush

Okay, this is another one of those things you can just go ahead and file under "I don't get the outrage". A person taking their own life is always tragic, don't get me wrong. Permanent solution to a temporary problem, as they say.

But does anyone seriously believe that anyone would hurt or kill themselves over being pranked by a morning zoo radio show, or even that the DJs should have taken such an outcome into consideration before making the call? Really? Because honestly, it's barely conceivable to me that Jacintha Saldanhas would have even been fired from her job, unless she had willfully committed a huge violation of well-known hospital policy. Something else was clearly going on with her; this was at most a last-straw kind of thing.

Maybe this affords the media an opportunity to step back for a second, take a deep breath, and ponder the logical outcomes -- none of them possibly good, at best merely neutral and inert -- to spending the next six months swamping morons with meaningless "preggers" nonsense, acting like one of the most routine human activities is somehow special and unique this time around.

Seriously, from of the weirdos the mediots have whipped up on this, you'd think no one had ever fucking gotten pregnant before, like evar.

In Other News....

I find the apparent mediot fascination with "the royals", well, fascinating. Can someone explain this to me? How is it that, assuming that the free market does indeed respond to proletarian interests, so many people care about the comings and goings of pedigreed inbreds? How does it become an international incident when fuzzy photos emerge of the B-cups of one of the inbreds' wives, or of one of the inbreds partying in Vegas? How does anyone find the energy to give half a shit?

Seriously. I get why people are fans of actors, musicians, teevee shows, even sports teams. These are all people with specialized skills, actual talents. They do things that most people cannot do, and at a high level. But how is it that so many people are so enraptured by people who do nothing at all?

Pop Star

So Kathleen Parker, perhaps aspiring to be the WaPo MoDo, not realizing that the one is quite enough, vaingloriously and tediously attempts to cast performance artist Sarah Palin as some sort of postmodern feminist icon. Ahahahaha. Oh wait, she's (somewhat) serious.

This is, I believe, the selfsame Kathleen Parker who, not so long ago, ired thousands of knuckle-dragging cyber-troglodytes with her heretical analysis of Saint Sarah as being slightly out of her depth.

Apparently that was then, and this is now, and Parker's sage analysis has -- well, what's the opposite of deepened? Shallowed?

For what it's worth, I get a kick out of Sarah. May I call her Sarah?

She and I apparently share a certain genetic predisposition to annoy all the right people. These would be the folks who take themselves and their ideologies a tad too seriously. Thus when I was promoting my book, "Save the Males," I wore an aggressively feminine suit -- pink with a bow in back -- just to irritate hard-line feminists, who, without bothering to read the book, would hate it on sight.

I happen to hate bows, but it was worth it.

Likewise, Sarah knows just what drives us all nuts and, instead of changing her tune, she turns up the volume -- and triples down. Don't like her little red shoes? She'll add a red leather jacket. Got gloss?

Oh, sisters really are doing it tofor themselves, aren't they? Here's the thing, and even Parker should be able to grok this simple observation -- there is a substantial difference between a columnist peddling a book under the guise of comfortably suburban pseudo-contrarian claptrap, and a former vice-presidential candidate hitting the rubber-chicken circuit and angering rubes with a St. Vitus' dance of choregraphed winks and glances at her scrawled palm, lying every step of the way. Parker and Palin are both trying to sell easily-replicated compendia of smartassery, true, but Palin is also catering -- no, deliberately antagonizing -- the addled assumptions of fairly large swaths of aggrieved morons, with the clear purpose of disrupting what's left of our political process.

This would be one thing if the country weren't on the verge of implosion, but this breathy sister-bonding with a noisome dingbat while serious people are trying to figure out serious solutions to serious problems, it's just bullshit. Palin appears to be not a whit more informed or astute about the world around her or the mechanics of US government than she was when Parker rightly called her out. Yet now Parker feels some lame kinship with Palin's increasingly tiresome narcissism.

This woman is not to be feared or loathed. She is to be taken with a grain of humor and a dash of admiration. A different version of Madonna, she's a public relations machine who manipulates public perception with well-timed and, recently, sophisticated messaging.

Again, Parker writes as if she should be talking about Lady Gaga or Lindsay Lohan, rather than someone who actively aspires to have an impact on the political process. Frankly, I'd rather have Madonna in high political office than Sarah Palin, and I can't fucking stand Madonna. The "grain of humor and a dash of admiration" was done with about 18 months ago; Palin is little more than a reality-teevee stunt-cast at this point.

So why the fuck are we hearing all goddamned week about her hypocrite daughter's impending crossbow wedding, like we should care that she put her legs behind her ears for a drunken hockey oaf and let him knock her up again? Happens every day around the world, the only difference here is that Levi is slightly smarter than we gave him credit for, insofar as he reads the papers enough to know that his future maw-in-law made $12 mil last year.

The genius of Sarah's message, whatever it is, is that it doesn't matter what it is. Of course Americans want their country back. We'd prefer that China not own us. Most don't like unfunded federal mandates, takeovers or bailouts. Except when it benefits us directly.

Reread that, because those five sentences are, inadvertenly one fears, the truest part of the entire column. The moment it doesn't matter what someone says, just so long as they say something, that person is just a parody of themselves with a brain-dead fan club -- in other words, Lady Gaga once again. So break the rest of it down -- "Americans want their country back" from whom? We had an election, you fucktards, it was in the papers and everything. And why does China own us, exactly, can our new pop goddess enlighten us? Does she know fuck-all about how the working class has been bled dry for 35 years, and now since the top 10% own 70% of the assets, they can pretty much trade with each other and write the rest of us off? Seriously, I've asked this many times, and I'll do it once again -- if anyone knows of any specific instance where Palin has proposed even one (1) actual serious policy, foreign or domestic, financial, job-creating, energy, whatever -- please do speak up. I think we'd all be very surprised.

In the meantime, Parker cuts to the heart of the teabaggers' deal, whether she knows it or not. Everyone gets bent over the idea of handouts, until some of the pelf lands in their hands. This is the core of the "get the gubmint out of my Medicare" morons' deal, which is why they need to die off all the sooner, since no one should expend energy trying to explain this shit to them.

Well, who's to argue with a lotta women comin' together? It's the sisterhood, baby. Wear pink and put a bow on it.

Sarah's long-term plans are anybody's guess. Anyone who thinks she won't run for president because she's making too much money on the celebrity circuit is missing a big point. You make money as a presidential candidate, too. If you win, you're president. If you lose, you're rich.

And don't tell her she can't. If you do, she's just gonna get feistier and cuter. Next thing you know she'll be a dadgum lioness givin' heck to those media hyenas, just the way they can't stand it.

Yes, she's showed us all, hasn't she? She really has, you know; where else can you lie through your fucking teeth, make millions, have thousands of morons adoring you at every stop, and even have formerly cogent media commentators fawning over your wardrobe and your bullshit attitude? But it's just good fun watching supposedly professional journamalists write these wretched screeds, like they're auditioning for a job at Entertainment Weekly.

It's not a coincidence that Bristol and Levi announced their immaculate engagement to some cheesy gossip rag, you know. Considering the "legitimate" media we've got, I'd guess we're about 10-20 years out from electing a Kardashian to national office, since neither the people nor the media can tell the difference any longer. Idiocracy will turn out to have been an eerily prescient documentary.

I'm so goddamned sick of all these people, the assholes yanking the world's chain with their prima-donna bullshit, and the highly-paid media monkeys writing brainless odes to them, instead of something useful. How do we get rid of them? They are ruining what's left of the country, but maybe we really want it that way.

Mayer of Simpleton

Although his claim to be the possessor of a "hood pass" and his gratuitous dropping of the n-word is ridiculous, and his music seems to be written with the sole mission of getting sorority girls wet (not that that's a bad thing, mind you, just not terribly interesting musically), I have to give grudging props to pr0n addict John Mayer's confession, even if I'm not sure if I really believe it. He's trying just a little too hard, maybe.

Is anyone still reading Playboy these days? They have always had very good interviews, but these days, the Onion AV Club has great interviews as well, even if they don't have airbrushed lap-dancers on the next page, dammit. It just seems like the sweet spot Playboy once had between upwardly mobile dickheads and pseudo-intellectual puds has been rendered extinct by the easy availability of good writing and high-quality spank material, and for free at that.

Mayer also took the opportunity to confess his love of porn, telling the publication, "Pornography? It's a new synaptic pathway. You wake up in the morning, open a thumbnail page, and it leads to a Pandora's box of visuals. There have probably been days when I saw 300 vaginas before I got out of bed. When I watch porn, if it's not hot enough, I'll make up backstories in my mind. My biggest dream is to write pornography."

Well, this adds a dimension to Your Body is a Wonderland, I suppose, but "new synaptic pathway"? Visual stimulation is one of the oldest synaptic pathways, obviously. It's just that technology has made it easier by an order of magnitude every few years for the past decade or so. And again, this has pushed all stroke mags -- but especially high-end ones like Playboy -- to the brink of irrelevance, not to mention bankruptcy. They're pushing buggy whips in an era of hover-cars, there's just no getting around it.

I feel for the new generation, I really do. If I were 18 years old right now, one of two things would happen -- either I'd take advantage of the amazing production and distribution capabilities and get some music going, or I'd hole up with a month's supply of beef jerky, Mountain Dew, and paper towels, and they'd have to send in a search party after a while. (TMI, I know, but we were all that age once.) It's strangely comforting to know that, despite all the high-profile tail he gets, Mayer still has to rub one out with surprising frequency. If he gets married, he could be the Tiger Woods of cheesy music.