Notional Displeasure

Nice review. BRAINIAC.

Rapture Now!

Great:

Mike Huckabee is somehow surging in the polls (at least, the relevant ones at this early stage of the game--you know, that super-important state's polls: Iowa. It's the heartland.) and may even be elected someday.

But, he's also a believer in the Rapture (which is not a Biblical doctrine, but hey, it's not like Huckabee is an expert on scripture or anything, right?) and has picked up an endorsement from that jizz-swilling queen who wrote the "Left Behind" book series.

Which begs the question: what if Mike Huckabee were our president and the Rapture did happen? Poof! All the white lambs are safely tucked away and the rest of us are left to fend for ourselves (that sounds sort of like our current social welfare policies, actually). But, the disappeared includes our president. What to do?

It's clear that, just to be on the safe side, Mike Huckabee needs to choose an extremely ethical atheist for his running mate. Or, I guess, a Jew, but he may first want to ask Al Gore how that worked out for him. Buddhists, Muslims, and Vegans need not apply.

The ethical atheist plan ensures the United States will be in capable hands after President Huckabee links up with the Jesus Tractorbeam. Or, when he goes completely nuts and takes a big group of like-minded fucktards out into the desert to wait for the magic bus to Heaven.

Also, as the Germans say...

I'm no fancy, big city lawyer, but I wish I was. Because then I could represent the Maris family while it sues MLB and Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire for millions of dollars. The case is straightforward: in turning a blind eye to steroid abuse in 1998, MLB participated in a conspiracy to commit fraud and engage in illegal activity and all parties owe the Maris family for revenue they could have received over the past 9 years from selling Maris memorabilia, etc. That money was taken from them when MLB, Sosa, and McGwire all conspired to break the law and perpetrate a fraud upon the public by staging a Great Homerun Chase.

Let's see...if I start law school now, I might just be finished by the time Hank Aaron dies, and then I could get his family to sue MLB, Barry Bonds, and the San Francisco Giants. And that fuckwad, Mike Bacsik, who served up the historic HR ball. Fag.

Steroids, steroids, pumped into your butt, so fancy-free

I'm sure you all (all one of you) can "surf" the "net" and find all you ever wanted to know about the Mitchell Report and doping in baseball (try FJM and cnnsi.com, for starters)--oh, by the way: happy Mitch-mas. Baseball is in the toilet.

But, the response from the players' union to the revelation (more of a confirmation of something we all more or less knew) that more than a few bad apples were running around for the last 20 years, injecting everything that could be liquefied into their asses to be stronger, longer, is really puzzling.

I mean, I knew the union's first response would be the same as ever: fuck you, none of your business, players rule! and fuck you. But then, there came a contradiction that I can't seem to work out--maybe you can help. The union declared the Mitchell Report out-of-bounds because it named names, and in the union's view doing so served only to humiliate those people named. Thus, and follow the logic, the whole report is morally bankrupt and the players are the real victims here. And then, a bunch of former players flooded the airwaves to make the claim that the whole steroids question is irrelevant to baseball as a business, because the fans have been showing up in record numbers for the last several years.

The contradiction is glaringly obvious. The fans don't care about steroids, which is why they keep coming to games. But, you shouldn't talk about steroids, because the players will be mortified. Why would the players care? Who would be judging them, if the almighty fans don't give a shit? What harm could knowing the names of steroid users do?

Bottom line: the MLB Players Union is run by a couple of morons. At least we know they reflect their members' views.

What Hath Comm Wrought?

You all read Fire Joe Morgan like you mainline snark, right? So no doubt you've seen this piece on Stephen A. Smith, the "commentator" for ESPN whose "comments" are overlong lessons in tortured logic and grammar. Please read the entry from FJM and, if you can stand it, the whole piece by Smith himself. And then, contemplate for a moment that this man has a college degree and makes a lot of money simply speaking on television and writing a twice-weekly column for the Philadelphia Inquirer. He receives a (large) check for speaking and, occasionally, writing his thoughts, apropos of little, about any facet of sports. And he really, really sucks at both of those things. Based on the FJM excerpts, it isn't clear that English is Smith's first language (or that he ever learned it). If you've seen him on TV, you could be forgiven for thinking that he wandered over from a revival meeting and is using that age-old suckering device, machine-gun patter spiked with drawn-out, multi-syllabic words, to hide the fact that he doesn't have the first clue about sports, conversation, punditry, the color of the sky, or how to lace his own shoes. The man, in short, is an idiot.

And yet, there he is. What possible excuse does anyone have to not finish college, after seeing Smith and his stunningly profitable ineptitude? Look, teenagers everywhere: the only difference between you and Stephen A. Smith is a B.A. from Winston-Salem State University. That sentence should tell you all you need to know about "higher education" in this country and the futility of trying.

Take a Bow. Clap. Clap.

This is good stuff.

"Saying something is a rumor is not saying it's true...to me, a rumor is not true."

Well, case fucking closed then, yeah? I'm all for respecting the public's intelligence, but an editor at the Washington Post says that "to (him), a rumor is not true," and that's supposed to be the last word on the fact that his paper, the second-most respected print daily in America, published a front-page story that rehashed in full the Republicans' whisper campaign that Barack Obama is a secret Muslim traitor? The smear, as we all know, carries the implication that Obama has already suicide-bombed like nine elementary schools and one black church on fish-fry Sunday, and it isn't some harmless chicanery along the lines of "my opponent is soft on crime" or most other gambits of dubious veracity. In this case, too, every person who has done even a lick of research on this allegation has found it to be categorically false.

In other words, the Washington Post not only reprinted a pernicious rumor as though it were news, it gave the appearance that the rumor is true. But the icing on the cake is that the editor (who thinks he did a bang-up job, by the way), in his own defense, is claiming that because he, personally, understands the word "rumor" to connote a false idea, he assumes that all the Post's readers do, too. Maybe it's me, but that seems like a very slim reed to rest your case upon, indeed. But what do I know? Perhaps the Washington Post's readers really ARE all a bunch of linguistically rigid editors, who obsessively ultra-parse every sentence in the damn rag.

But probably not. Just in case, though, maybe somebody could tell Bill Hamilton, the editor in question, that "giant fucking retarded asshole," to me, is a huge compliment. And I think my readers share that understanding. Case closed.

This is why I haven't bought a newspaper in almost ten years.