Exciting and dramatic race.

I wasn’t able to watch final qualifying for the F1 Grand Prix Japan because it was aired here at 2 am. But I scrounged what I could from the Internet, like the fact that Niki Rosberg was on the pole.

The race was scheduled to begin at 1 am last night, so I turned in at midnight and had a fine night’s sleep.

Happily, this morning I was able to confirm that my predictions for the top five finishers were absolutely correct.

1. Lewis Hamilton
2. Niki Rosberg
3. Sebastian Vettel
4. Daikon men
5. Bottarga
6. Thru 20. Everybody else.

Proof? Proof.

These two women have killed more people than Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot combined. They’re on the hook for about a half billion deaths in the twentieth century.

Margaret Sanger and Rachel Carson. Oddly enough, they were both prim and sexless. Like the feminists of today.

Memorial Hall.

Trying to decide if this Harvard building is as incredibly ugly as the Yale excrescence you posted in front of which everyone was supposed to be so good looking.

Yeah. Well, it’s Harvard. Hogwarts comes to mind. But nothing in New Haven.

10,000 Men of Harvard want Victory today.

When you’re running headlong from the news, and every media voice is biased, pretending, lying, or exploiting ballooning scandals, you wind up watching too much Netflix. I spent five years deriding Blue Bloods because of the sepulchral Tom Selleck they show in the promos. Halfway through Season 1 now. And loving it. See what I mean?

Worst thing about binge watching? The fear you’ll run out of things to watch that won’t assault your religion, your politics, or your person. Why, maybe, you start taking the things you like and imagine them coupling up with other things you like or, more deliciously, things you definitely do not like. The inspiration for this post. Ways the streaming universe could keep good things going, and even a few bad things by way of cross pollination. This is a start. Feel free to join in. (On all photos, click if you want bigger.)

M. Poirot and Miss Fisher

Two delightful period series currently running on Netflix. Cars, clothes, manners, all delightful. Problem? Miss Fisher is in 1920s Australia, and Hercule Poirot is in 1930s Britain. No problem. Before he came to London, Poirot spent a few years in Australia, where he teemed up with the free spirited Miss Fisher, rich, somewhat promiscuous, and always equipped with a golden revolver in her garter belt. If you’ve ever wondered about Poirot’s sexual orientation, which you shouldn’t, this series will lay all your doubts to rest. Miss Fisher doesn’t care what you look like. She knows as much about little gray cells as anybody. And she loves them.

Monsieur Hercule Poirot

Reid and Eppes, Private Eyes

TV loves geniuses. Numb3rs ran for six years, and Criminal Minds is coming up on a decade of gore and lame voiceover quotes and Gulfstream getaways while the devastated parents are burying their dead. Numb3rs had Charlie Eppes, who knows more math than anybody ever thought of. Criminal Minds has Spencer Reid, who has two or four Phd’s in every subject any university ever endowed a chair for. Isn’t it time to put them together?

So Charlie gets tired of being second fiddle to his FBI brother, and Spence gets tired of being bullied by Shemar Moore. They meet at a math symposium and decide to become the world’s smartest private eyes. After all, Spence knows how to use a gun — or at least wear one on his hip as convincingly as any other supermodel — and they both know how to use phones and computers, and any day now one of them will qualify for a driver’s license. Charlie (meaning David Krumholtz) is going to have to lose some weight for this part, maybe all of the eighty pounds he gained after Numbers got cancelled, but we at the Instapunk Network are confident he can do it. Show should be gangbusters. Providing they both learn the difference between tai chi and Krav Maga.

The genius.

The other genius

Star Trek Who?

Two of the greatest sci-fi franchises ever (barring the execrable Star Wars nonsense), it’s absolutely time to bring these two together, and who cares in what time in particular? So Kirk is on the bridge and Spock is practicing his eyebrow raising and then lieutenantess Sulu sounds the alarm that a large red British phone booth is dead ahead. Kirk flings the blonde yeoman from his lap and orders every crewman in a red shirt to be prepared to die in the incipient collision. Excited yet?

Cut to a moment later when the incredibly expansive interior of the Tardis is stretched to the max by a complete starship. That’s when Doctor Who and Captain Kirk exchange their first words.

“You’re telling me my starship is in a phone booth?”

“That would appear to be so.”

“I could have used you back at the academy when we were trying to put eighteen cheerleaders in a phone booth.”

“Pleased to be of assistance.”

“Who are you?”

“Yes.”

A good long season of quality TV will surely ensue.

CSI Wyoming

Picture this. An old school cowboy sheriff whose idea of forensics is holstering his gun after shooting a suspect and then hoisting a few with his Injun (excuse me, Native American) co-conspirator in breaking all three of the laws on the Wyoming books, happens upon a bespectacled monk in the desert studying bugs. His name is Grissom. He is insane. But there’s chemistry. And over the course of a season, Grissom gradually teaches Long mire that not every death in the county is either by gunfire or natural causes. Several words are spoken in each episode. Lou Diamond Phillips seems to understand Grissom, but he doesn’t speak any of the words that are spoken. We are riveted because the words that are spoken are mostly spoken by Deputy Katee Sackhoff.

The old fashioned sheriff.

The new age squatter in the desert.

Wyoming’s Finest

Read her bio here. Saint Philomena. You think you have a cross to bear? Think again. In the age of New Media you can have fame and acclaim even after you’ve lost your head.

The very estimable Debra Burlingame lived in New York for 27 years. She hates Donald Trump, which is her right. The other day she linked to a 1988 documentary about him and declared that anyone who saw it would realize that nothing more need be said. This led to the following exchange between us.

RL: Sorry. Documentaries always come with a point of view. They’re all a function of EDITING to a particular point of view. You haven’t see hagiographic documentaries about Hillary? The “nothing more needs to be said” close rings kind of hollow in this context. You made up your mind long ago.

P.S. 1988? 27 years ago? 27 years before Reagan won the presidency, he was a Democrat or had been recently. He had been an FDR Supporter and president of the Screen Actors Guild, a union.

DEBRA: I lived in New York City for 27 years, when all this was happening. I remember it. There are court documents and press on this. Roy Cohn, the chief of Trump’s army of lawyers, was a brilliant but sleezy. This documentary covers stuff Trump himself cops to and insists he’s proud of. For me, it shows his character and values, beyond the bottom line of his string of business successes and failures.

If you knew more about Ronald Reagan, you’d know that his biography is the story of how his political philosophy evolved, not because of opportunity, but because of his nature to find and do the right thing. But everything he did was governed by and grounded in his principles and his political philosophy.

DEBRA: Thanks, Robert, for catching my spelling error.

Now. Here’s what’s interesting. I responded at some length to her last major comment. That response no longer exists on her post. Gone. Fortunately, I have a very good memory for what I write and the erased comment is very close to this.

RL: If I knew more about Ronald Reagan? Don’t insult me. I watched the first television broadcast of The Speech. I followed his career closely. I saw him in person during the years he was considered a has-been. I came away convinced of his greatness long before he won the nomination.

You hate Trump. Fine. (Did you mean Roy Cohen or Roy Cohn? Big difference. I’d have hired Roy Cohn too.) But what’s the point of your ire?

So what if he’s a circus ringmaster. If he’s as bad and low of character as you say, he will flame out long before the nomination. Why the paranoia? I’m not a Trump supporter. In the words of John Nolte, I’m a Trump supporter-supporter. All the a Trump haters seem disinclined to recognize that they are insulting millions of people in flyover country who have seen their elected representatives ignore them in favor of lobbyists who will give them huge jobs after they’re voted out of office. That’s Trump’s appeal. Despising the people who support him is a sign of tunnel vision, focused on proving your superiority to the poor dopes who are legitimately angry about the breakdown in the contract between the electorate and their representatives.

You hate him. You hate him. You hate him. And by inference, you despise the people who support him. This has been your whole message for months. In the meantime what has he done? He’s drawn 25 million viewers to the first two Republican debates. Without him, no one would have seen your personal favorite candidate. He’s done an enormous service to the Republican Party and the conservative cause. Why the vitriol? Who does it help? Not me. And, I suspect, not you either.

With all due respect, new media maven, Debra Burlingame. If you deliberately deleted my comment, (proof being that your thanks for my spelling correction refers to nothing in your comment thread), I can no longer call you Saint Debra. Sorry.

Here endeth the epistle.

The Steelers would be terrified of The Ten.

From a manuscript you’ll get to see later, an exegesis on a screenplay I wrote with a great friend in 1980, meaning 35 years ago.

Punk Monks

From 1978 to 1982, I lived mostly in Philadelphia. It was not a particularly prosperous time for me. This was no one’s fault but my own. I had fallen off the curve of conventional career pursuits, in large part because I wanted to preserve my concentration for writing, although I wasn’t making satisfactory progress there, either. My sense of being out of tune with the literary establishment was so extreme that I couldn’t bring myself even to submit the few stories I had finished to the “little magazines”. Instead I alternated between experimentation and self-absorbed narratives of a fantastic nature.

For the better part of a year, I worked with a collaborator on a screenplay called “Norman Rules”, which I had originally conceived as a novel. As I worked on it, the material became more and more insistent about being a movie rather than a book because its most powerful elements were visual. It employed a premise that still intrigues me, although I have never been able to solve some basic problems that emerged in the writing. I mention it here because “Norman Rules” was the vehicle that surfaced my interest in punks, which I had seen during visits to South Street but had taken little conscious note of until they muscled their way into the plotline of my story.

It was a bizarre story to begin with. Raised an Episcopalian, I knew that it was Henry VIII who, in order to consolidate his political power over the infant Church of England, had abolished the monasteries in that country. For satirical purposes, I chose to repeal this historic event, which enables me to create an alternate time present in which the sixties revolution manifested itself as “Reformation II”. The centers of protest and violence were thus not universities but monasteries, and the catalyst for upheaval was not the Vietnam War but a mysterious monastic ritual that was identified in the minds of protester with the term “Norman Rules”.

Reformation II was more visibly successful than the sixties revolution, and the major victim of its success was my stand-in for the Church of England, The Anglo-Orthodox Protestant Church. The action of the movie takes place in an Anglo-Orthodox monastery about fifteen years after Reformation II.
The protagonist is a young novice named John who, having failed to be accepted at a seminary, has been assigned to take orders at the Monastery of Saint Ralph.

It has been a dozen years [now now 25 years] since I last worked on “Norman Rules”, but the monastery that constitutes its setting seems today to have anticipated the phenomenon called Political Correctness by about ten years. At St. Ralph’s, the rotten heart of the overturned establishment, the driving principle is atonement for past oppressions. Still a male-only institution, the monastery has renounced its heritage of male power by adopting feminine titles. Thus, the monks call each other not brother, but sister, and the head monk holds the title of Mother Superior. St. Ralph, like all the saints of the reformed church, is alive and well – a fussy transvestite who moves uneasily in an ecumenical circle of jet set “saints”.

The institution that bears his name is a plastic bubble rising out of the wasteland of an inner city ghetto. For security reasons, the building has no windows, and the only access to its interior is via subway. It is here that “Sister John” arrives and after a humiliating orientation by Mother Clive, is assigned to the St. Ralph’s football team.

Sister John soon learns that in the scheme of things at St. Ralph’s, a football player is about as low as one can get. The monastery is arranged in a hierarchy consisting of three “sections”. The elite of St. Ralphs belong to Enlightenment Section, in which capacity they have light managerial duties and plenty of free time for hobbies like shopping in the monastery mall, writing and painting, and virtually nonstop cocktail parties. The revenue-producing contingent at St. Ralph’s is the Service Section, which (for a healthy commission) dispenses federal monies to the poor and needy of the city, who enter and depart the vast Service Section offices in cattle-car-like subway trains. The bottom rung of the monastery is Atonement Section, which is the repository for all monks deemed unorthodox in their views, including a stubborn remnant of pre-Reformation monks who are known as The Ten. Having taken a vow of silence in resistance to the new order, The Ten continue to be a disturbing presence even though they meekly perform their assigned duties, which are principally janitorial. In fact, the value of Atonement Section lies in its ability to provide a resource for the work that no one else wants to do, including kitchen duty, cleaning, laundry, and maintenance. Football is the worst duty of all, because the permanent state of penance in which the Anglo-Orthodox Church resides requires that its football teams lose every game played against other denominations. Indeed, the rules of the game are continuously revised to ensure that defeat is achieved, even when St. Ralph’s plays against convents of nuns.

What Sister John does not know is that he has been brought to St. Ralph’s to change this state of affairs. The agent of change is Mother Clive’s assistant, Sister Gregory, an enigmatic monk who once played a leading role in the Reformation but then fell out of favor and disappeared. Upon his return, he speedily acquired power through his willingness and capacity to take on the more onerous duties of Mother Clive. One of Sister Gregory’s first initiatives is to recruit new football players, ostensibly to boost gate receipts and thus alleviate the mounting deficit of the monastery, but in reality because he seeks to use football as a means of forever destroying St. Ralph’s and the Anglo-Orthodox Church.

This was the premise I started with. The intention was satirical comedy – highlighted by the abundant visual irony of the monastery and its activities. Inside this opaque bubble, the building was a ludicrous parody of monasteries, featuring linoleum stonework, backlit plastic stained glass, Styrofoam pillars and buttresses, cartoonish chapel frescoes, and a monstrous mall offering Adidas sandals, designer cassocks (for Enlightenment Section only), and as many junk food and gin joints as a modern monk could want.

The plot was to center on Sister John, the gifted football player who builds a winning team and feverish romance with Saint Jenny the rock star. Due to the maneuverings of Sister Gregory, the team finally has to play its championship game under “Norman Rules”, which no one knows anything about but The Ten. And Norman Rules, it turns out, are a barbaric throwback to medieval combat, offering up the prospect of football to the death for the ultimate prize – The Holy Grail.

In the course of drafting the screenplay, however, two things happened. First, Sister Gregory refused to remain in his assigned place, somewhat behind the scenes, as a sinister but mysterious catalyst for the hero’s coming of age. Instead, he roared out of the wings as a character of formidable stature and complexity, barred from greatness only by his inability to find a repository for his frustrated faith. He dwarfed the character of Sister John and transformed the Comedy of St. Ralph’s into the Tragedy of Sister Gregory. This put far more pressure on the climactic game than the original premise seemed able to bear. The last act of a comedy could benefit from a game of football played in medieval armor, but the catastrophe of a tragedy would be spayed by it. I never did figure out how to solve this problem. [Well, I did but had moved on by then, blast it.]

The second unexpected development was that St. Ralph’s, conceived as a holding tank for post-sixties Baby Boomers, began to fill up with “punk monks”. They loitered in the great mall, they shot-up heroin on the platform of the “Monastery Station” subway stop, and they committed acts of vandalism and personal violence within the corridors and shops of St. Ralph’s. And then Sister Gregory began drafting them for the football team, a doomed gang of savages who were destined to become animal sacrifices in the concluding holocaust of Norman Rules.

The punks seemed to be dragging the real world and its consequences inside the plastic walls of St. Ralph’s. They were the next step, the next rung down in the descent of man being enacted within the monastery. Essentially without lines of dialogue, they had changed the whole flavor of the work, and then, in the final game, it was they who rallied most strongly to the aid of Sister John and The Ten, giving up their lives to win The Holy Grail.

I liked Gregory far too much to reduce his stature and force-fit him into a comedy. And I was curious about the punk monks. I liked them too. They were the ones who seemed most at home in my absurd climax, safety pins, razor blades, tattoos, and mohawks went with armor and battle axes just fine. Who more likely to fight bravely to the death than those who already had nothing left to lose? They’d lost everything before they even knew there was anything worth winning. But that’s where their hardness came from, their very ignorance of the hopelessness of the situation. They knew so little that they had no prudence, no respect, no fear – only rage and a willingness to go.

This, along with The Parade of Volumes, is the source of the Punk Writing Movement.

Part of a much larger manuscript called “Inside the Boomer Bible”. Available soon.

Good friend posted a poem about all this:

Robert, a happy one for you. Up with that Scotch in yer glass. And also for you:

Birthdays: false writs on the back of a beast
With the pen in his teeth. Misconsumptive of time–
Outrageous and cornered, spilling ink that won’t fade–
He bleeds till the years’ indivisions have fallen
To his slashes and strokes, both fine and opaque.

Doeci by scrivened apocryphal priests
Are the marks he with- drew on the world. Ready-made
Orders and feasts of the ruling sublime
Will be dying or dead at his wake.

Sometimes you inspire, however briefly.

A companion piece to theboomerbible.com.

Wait. We’re getting to the good stuff.

From Breitbart:

Two topless feminists have stormed the stage at a Muslim conference in France. The activists, from hard-line feminist outfit Femen jumped on stage, with “Nobody makes me submit” scrawled across their bare chests. The most prominent protester shouted, “Nobody makes me submit, me nobody owns me, I’m my own prophet!” before being dragged and kicked off the stage by angered Muslims.

Thing is, Femen protests everything, and it’s hard to resist the notion that they just want to show their tits in public. The evidence from all over the world:

I think the Tour de France is sexist.

Men are such pigs. See?

See how mad we are? Because.

Imagine. Three photographers on the wrong side of the shot.

Je suis feministe. You go, jeune fille.

Unfortunately they haven’t been to the USA yet. And we love breasts more than any nation on earth. They need to get their priorities straight. Ya know?

P.S. And then there’s girl who doesn’t write on herself. She’s in most of the pictures. I guess that’s the Femen version of going commando. She’s cute, don’t you think?

The greatest American Genius.

ALONE.

From childhood’s hour I have not been
As others were—I have not seen
As others saw—I could not bring
My passions from a common spring—
From the same source I have not taken
My sorrow—I could not awaken
My heart to joy at the same tone—
And all I lov’d—I lov’d alone—
Then—in my childhood—in the dawn
Of a most stormy life—was drawn
From ev’ry depth of good and ill
The mystery which binds me still—
From the torrent, or the fountain—
From the red cliff of the mountain—
From the sun that ’round me roll’d
In its autumn tint of gold—
From the lightning in the sky
As it pass’d me flying by—
From the thunder, and the storm—
And the cloud that took the form
(When the rest of Heaven was blue)
Of a demon in my view—

All in all, he was greater than all the rest of us.

Meet the new Temple.

So Temple beat Cincinnati and Ohio State edged Hawaii 38-0. Michigan State stomped on somebody. But Rutgers lost. And now I can’t get my wife out of bed. Life is nothing but loss and horror and defeat. Or so she says.

YOU try kicking an extra point.

Here’s the lede.

Her kick wasn’t perfect, but that hardly mattered to April Goss. When she finally got her big chance, Goss made her point – and history.

A four-year member of Kent State’s team, Goss kicked an extra point in the first half Saturday in a 45-13 win over Delaware State, becoming the second woman to score in a major college football game.

Wearing No. 91, Goss made the kick with 4:30 left in the second quarter, giving the Golden Flashes a 29-6 lead. Following the touchdown, starting kicker Shane Hynes initially went on the field, but coach Paul Haynes called a timeout and sent in Goss.

Read the whole story here.

Did any of you think you’d see this kind of crap on the Internet ten years,ago?

It’s all too ridiculous. But this is pure fun. God knows, something should be. Fun, I mean.

He does this a lot

He loves me too. But more along the lines of he can’t stand it when I don’t get up when he wants me too. That’s love, right?

The Ted Heath Orchestra.

Strange, you know. He saw all the big bands in college. At Cornell, he danced to Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, the Dorsey Brothers, Count Basie, and Duke Ellington. Played them all his life.

But when he had a wife and kids, he had business trips to Europe and he saw the final gasp of the big bands. Here’s a song he couldn’t stop playing (I’m not sure it’s the right cut because what I remember had more piano…)

I think it was the song itself, the desire to be closer to my mother while he was overseas. The Nearness of You.

Searched for it a long time since my parents died. This doesn’t mean I’ve found it. The version I remember had a Chopin captivating quality to it. This one doesn’t. We still need the piano.

And, yeah, their wedding anniversary would be on the 20th. 1946 to 2015 is a hell of a jump. But they died before they could make it..

Happy Anniversary, mother and dad.

I keep remembering our time here.

Zachary Ryan Angel. This is his FB picture.

He’s good at lecturing, sanctimony, not reading or understanding what you wrote, not taking your links while claiming you cite no precedent arguments, and other millennial talents. You can find him beating me up at The Jennifer Rubin Facebook page.

Cool. I guessed him as Georgetown ’12. You’re free to offer up your own guesses.

…I don’t have a six pack. I have a one-pack. And I meant it.

So she said, “Then what’s that in the refrigerator?”

Whatever happened to all those unused Tab cans?

No one would dare make this movie today.

Enough triggers and micro-aggressions to make the average sophomore who identifies as female to wet herself with fury.

It involves a patriarchal disease called humor which is mostly unknown to those who identify as female these days. It makes fun of college in every possible way. It laughs itself sick at the whole idea of college.

This is 1 of 9 available clips from the movie Horsefeathers. If you can still count, you can find the rest. (Note to rising leftist comedians: the Marx Brothers achieved genius because they were not allowed to use foul language, which privately they liked as much as you do.)

No, they couldn’t keep the Temple fans off the field at the Link.

The Link, home of the Philadelphia Eagles, was sold out for today’s game between the Penn State Nittany Lions and the Temple Owls. We had been to a previous Lions-Owls game at the Link, and that’s when we turned against Penn State. Their fans in jerseys and caps shouted racial epithets at Temple. And they were starting fights in the parking lots. We were disgusted. This was before the big Penn State meltdown that incinerated the reputation of Joe Paterno.

They’ve played this game for 40 years. Temple has lost every single game. So this year, I told my wife I wanted to try something different.

I’m not claiming it made a difference. It’s just a measure of how much this game meant to us. I asked her to join hands and pray with me for a Temple victory. “Dear Heavenly Father,” I said, and other stuff, which may have ended with “beat the hell out of Penn State.” For the record, I’ve never prayed for an outcome in a sporting event in my life. Until today.

After the first quarter, me of little faith was ready to throw in the towel, but the Missus kept tabs on the game, which seemed frankly endless, and after the early 10-3 lead, Penn State simply could not move the ball against Temple.

We watched the last quarter, prepared to bail if my well known jinx effect kicked in. No need. The Owls were dominant, triumphant, in charge. The final score was 27-10, but it wasn’t that close. The Penn State quarterback was sacked 10 times. Temple, as requested, beat the hell out of Penn State.

Hackenburg is supposed to be some kind of a Heisman candidate. Not today. Looked like all of his plans had been hacked by a higher power. Just saying.

This was the 9th sack. The 10th occurred on the next play, which ended the game.

Hail Temple.

He haunts. Like he’s in some old time castle in Scotland. How else does he understand conversational English? [calm down dear! says the wife. He’s never written a poem.]

So what we do is de-engineer the emotions. I see Raebert in the doorway. I love him and fear him. What you do with forces of nature. But he’s also seeing a doorway. Where his mommy is. And she is, as I can confirm, a goddess.

God save us all.

Shhhh, everybody. If we’re all very quiet, Jennifer Rubin’s lackey may come back and accept the challenge.

Challenged some guy earlier today to take a 10 minute quiz and show why he’s smart enough to call all conservatives morons. It took me about ten minutes to compile the quiz, so I think it’s fair. But I’m going to open it up to everybody.

Conservatives AND Liberals. We’ll keep score. Timing is critical. There are enough questions that you can’t beat it with Google. So here’s what we’ll do. Text me at 609-405-1119 and I’ll text you the quiz. Identify yourself up front as right or left. From the moment my device says “sent,” you have ten minutes to return the answers.

I will faithfully report on the results.

Do leopards change their spots? Not often. We just forget what their spots mean.

This is a no frills series of excerpts from my old “Year 2000 Who’s Who in Ameria.” But it’s still a solid introduction to the leopards who have or have not changed their spots. To save you time wondering, the organization is alphabetical.

*************************************************

Joe Biting. The most sanctimonious member of the U.S. Senate°, Biting represents the most insignificant state in the union, Dullaware, but achieved national prominence via his tour de force performances as a character° assassin in the Senate trials of Supreme Court° nominees Robert Boink and Clarence Remus. Colleagues marvel at the dizzying level of condescension Biting consistently attains in his political° and personal° discourse, despite being afflicted with the first and worst hair transplant in the U.S. Senate. It is reported by female senate staffers that he can sneer even in his sleep, which is still filled with dreams of a Biting Presdency, though that opportunity disappeared in reality some years ago during a brief campaign which foundered on the disclosure that he had been a devout plagiarist during his academic career. Rumor has it that Bill Broadley’s decision to resign from the Senate was prompted by his inability to wrest the championship from Biting in the chamber’s annual Delusions of Grandeur Tournament.

Paul Boogaloo. The smilingest liar° in the Presdent’s public relations defense team during the Lewiski Scandal°, Boogaloo became justifiably renowned for his uncanny—almost inhuman—ability to beam like a happy child while uttering the most despicable untruths, slanders, misrepresentations, and cheap shots against any and every Republian° who dared to question the Presdent’s integrity° and fitness for office. After the scandal had been overcome, Boogaloo resigned to become a champion for the liberal° cause on the cable TV show Equality Time, where he rebuts the evil° positions of his co-host Oliver Nuke with meticulously reasoned untruths, slanders, misrepresentations, cheap shots, and—of course—his legendary fixed smile.

Al Bore. Candidate for Presdent of the United States in the 2000 election. Born in Tennessucky as the heir of a famous political° family° made rich by tobacco°, Bore delivered his first speech against the evils of tobacco while still in the womb°, wrote his first opera at the age of three, cleaned up the Love Story Canal when he was seven, invented the UnderNet° on his tenth birthday, and campaigned vigorously in support of Row V. Wade° ten years before the Supreme Court° made its famous decision. His career as a multi-faceted child prodigy culminated at Harvurd University, where he served as the model for the character of Mark Anthony in one of William Shakespear’s plays about history° (“I come not to bury Ceasar but to praise him…”). After graduation he became an army photographer and won the war in Veetnam, for which he was honored with the Nobel Peace Prize. Upon returning to Ameria, he visited the family home in Tennessucky for the first time and—determined never to return—decided on a career in Wishington, DC, where he served as a Congressman and Senator from Tennessucky, and then as Vice Presdent of the United States under Bill Clitton. As famous for his character° and honesty° as for his fantastic accomplishments, Bore felt a deep revulsion and horror about the personal° misdeeds of the Presdent, and it was only through the exercise of extraordinary professional discipline that he was able to publicly profess his loyalty° to the “greatest Presdent in U.S. history” on the day of the empeachment°. Fortunately, his subsequent campaign for the Democratic° presdential nomination has afforded him the opportunity to resolve any doubts about his own integrity°—for example, he was able to resist the temptation to use Clittonesque tactics (i.e., lies, misrepresentations, and racially provocative innuendoes°) against his opponent Bill Broadley right up to the very moment polls° demonstrated that he was behind in New Hamshire. While critics carp about his wooden personality° and unprincipled° political° conduct, the overwhelming majority of the watchdogs of the press have tacitly approved him as a praiseworthy and appropriate heir to the mantle of Bill Clitton. He is married to a woman named Flipper (the model for Shakespear’s Kleopatra) who used to be upset about gangster rap° lyrics until her husband° taught her about the Afrian-Amerian° vote. (See “Loving Ameria,” Moon Books, Shuteye Town 1999.)

Sid Bummenthal. One of the Presdent’s jackals. Or is he a hyena instead? Let the historians° decide.

James Carvall. A longtime political consultant and member of the Presdent’s public relations defense team during the Clitton Lewiski scandal°, Carvall represents one of the great rags to riches stories in Amerian politics°. He was born in one of the third-wurld southern states (Bama? Missippi? Lousiana?) as the product of a mixed marriage—his father a collateral descendant of the renowned Snopes clan and his mother a six-foot Eastern Diamondback. Having inherited his father’s eternal thirst for vengeance and his mother’s venom, Carvall naturally aspired to a career in politics but discovered early—thanks to his genius for interpreting polls°—that southern voters still retained a prejudice against subhuman candidates. He therefore determined to become the premier political campaign consultant in the nation by electing to the Presdency the most miserable excuse for a human being he could find. His dream was achieved in 1992, and again in 1996, but was threatened with repeal by a vast right wing conspiracy° in 1998. In defending his life’s greatest work, Carvall achieved new heights in Amerian politics, innovating on the fly a strategy of attack defense that brilliantly combined repellent rhetoric, lies, smears, threats, leaks, and monomaniacally focused ad-hominem tirades into a formula for political triumph. Future generations will no doubt look back with awe and gratitude to the man who pioneered a new age in Amerian political discourse.

Lanny Divots. The most earnest and polished member of the Presdent’s Public Relations Defense Team, Divots was also the most alarming because no matter how inane his talking points° were, he always managed to sound so darn reasonable and sincere. If she has a brain in her head, his wife° should divorce him now, before he gets involved in any funny business, because when it comes to telling lies about sex°, Lanny Divots is the best of the best.

Jane Doe. The slut° who made all the nasty allegations about Clitton. Actually, that should be sluts (plural) because there seem to be four or five or twenty of them, but they might as well be the same one because you know how that kind are. They wish they could get hit on by a famous politician° and get groped or raped or treated like dirt somehow so they can peddle their story to the mass media°, get their reputations ruined forever icn about eighteen hours, have mysterious men show up to kill their dog and slash their tires, then flee the country or have a nervous breakdown or something, and maybe cap it all off with a tearful TV interview on MinuteLine, plastic surgery, or a great big bottle of sleeping pills. But why couldn’t they have tried the surgery or the sleeping pills before they went nuts and made up all those damaging lies about the presdent? Yes, it’s okay to lie about sex° but if they knew anything about Clitton (which they obviously don‘t), they’d know that it’s only okay to lie about sex you really have had, not about sex you didn’t have, even if the kind of sex you didn’t have isn’t what everybody, or even the Presdent, would call sex. Even assuming the act you’re referring to is sexual only in the loosest (i.e., right wing) sense of the term, it’s still not permissible (i.e., okay, or right under the circumstances, or heroic in the context of Republian° hypocrisy°, etc) to lie unless you really did engage in the sexual-type act being described. In other words, the rule is confined very strictly to flat denials of acts that occurred and it specifically excludes making things up. It’s all quite simple—why can’t these bimbos° understand it? Why?

Howard Findmore. See Michael Iznotizhe.

Linseed Graham.One of the Presdent’s persecutors in the House° of Representatives, Graham is a congressman from South Carelina and one of the leading hypocrites° in the Republian° Party°. It’s also possible that he has sex°, if you want to interrogate him about it, because he’s been romantically linked to Laurel Ingraham, who’s as loud and abrasive as Linseed is soft-spoken and smarmy.

Matt Grudge. A prime mover in the right wing conspiracy° to empeach Clitton, Grudge broke the news on his website that Newsprint, a major weekly news magazine, was researching a story about Clitton’s affair with a White House intern. Publications and television networks belonging to the legitimate news establishment expressed outrage that some little creep on the UnderNet° would leak such a slimy story to the whole country, then raced to get out their own versions of the Lewiski scandal° with as many lurid details as possible. Grudge briefly joined a legitimate network news organization himself but left hurriedly when one of the network’s executives found out he was there. If Hillery ever discovers where he’s hiding in the UnderNet, she’ll kill him. Or have one of her campaign slaves do it. Either way, he’s not what the intellectuals° have in mind when they profess to be in favor of free speech.

Orange Hatch. The Republian° Senator who wears the tab collars and hails from Utall or some other weird state out west. He’s a Mormot, too, whatever that is. For a week or so, he was also a candidate for Presdent of the United States in the 2000 election. But he kept getting a zero in the polls°, which is amazing because nobody gets a zero in the polls—there are always a few people who confuse you with someone they know or like the sound of your name or something. Unless your name is Orange Hatch. Of course, Hatch didn’t help himself much in the debates, because since when do Republians want a candidate who keeps telling them that he’s an ordinary, average Amerian just like them and knows what it’s like to be one of the little people, just like them. They don’t want that. It’s the Democratics° who want that—the more average and ordinary the better. Maybe Hatch should change parties and lose the tab collar.

Hillery. (Formerly known as Hillery Clitton, Hillery Roddem Clitton, First Lady, and Co-Presdent) Candidate for the U.S. Senate° in the State of Newyork. Just plain Hillery, as she is now known, has spent her entire life getting ready for her current campaign. Born in 1947, Hillery arrived just too late to witness the Wurld Series in which the Newyork Yankeys defeated the Brookling Doggers four games to three. But despite a surprise pennant win by Clevelin when she was one, Hillery went on to enjoy a blissful youth as the Yankeys won the pennant fourteen out of seventeen years, a period capped by her own victory as a National Merit finalist in 1965. This amazing run by the team so close to her heart unquestionably accounts for her conservative leanings as a young adult, particularly in light of her rapid drift leftward at Whalesey College, which were the dark years in which the Yankeys faded toward the cellar and the Amerian League pennant fell into the hands of pretenders like Minnesoda, Ballmore, Bostun, and Destroit. Matters grew worse during her time at the Yail Law School, when it began to seem that the Ballmore Oreos had supplanted the Yankeys as an Amerian League dynasty. So depressed had she become as a result of the Yankey drought that the move to Newyork she’d been planning from earliest childhood was postponed in favor of a stint in Wishington, DC, where she played a role in dethroning Richard Nixxon, who had been a fan of the hated Doggers since their move to Los Analos, Californica. After Watergape°, Hillery decided to flee the close proximity of Ballmore for Arklahoma and thus agreed to marry an old classmate from Yail. Both her energy and ambition returned in the mid-1970s, however, because a rebuilt Yankey organization succeeded in winning the eastern division pennant in 1976 and repeating the feat for four of the next five years. Although the Wurld Series championship remained stubbornly elusive, Hillery was buoyed enough to get her husband° elected to the state attorney-general’s office in 1976 and to the governor’s office in 1980. But another cruel Yankey dry spell disheartened her in the early 1980s, resulting in her spouse’s defeat in 1984. [More to come](See, “It Takes Me,” Moon Books, Shuteye Town 1999.)

Michael Iznotizhe. The hotshot political° journalist° in spectacles who dug through every White House trashcan looking for salacious details of the Lewiski Scandal° while soberly reporting the Hillery charge of a right wing conspiracy°, the Carvall charge of a runaway independent counsel° indulging his private° sexual fantasies at public expense, and the Divots/Boogaloo charge of a partisan° Republian° “coup” designed to repeal the vote of the Amerian people. And acting faintly superior to the whole circus at the same time. Cool°.

John Kerree. Is this maybe the Veetnam war hero senator with the short attention span? Or is it the tall craggy senator with the memory good enough to hold one talking point°? One of them is from Machusetts. Nobody knows where the other one is from. Or if you do, please let us know.

Chris Mathuse. The blond-haired jack o’ lantern who hosts the cable TV show Hardhead, Mathuse is an intellectual° pundit° and former Jimmy Carper speechwriter whose giant head contains so much knowledge about everything that he can’t stop himself from answering his own questions to his guests, thus explaining why they can never get a word in edgewise. The answer is usually that the only right opinion is the opinion of Chris Mathuse or his wife°, who also knows everything and talks as fast and nonstop as he does, which suggests the possibility that neither of them has ever heard a word the other has said. Even so, Mathuse is a devout feminist° and goes out of his way to tell all his female° guests that they have accomplished more than Hillery and that he would listen to every word they had to say if he could only stop himself from talking over the answers to the questions he asks them. But he can’t.

John McKane. Candidate for Presdent of the United States in the 2000 election. McKane started out as the son of an admiral, which probably explains why he graduated at the bottom of his class from the U.S. Navel Academy and then got shot down in his fighter plane over Veetnam. The North Veetnamese (i.e., the gooks) held him prisoner for five-and-a-half years, during which time he was beaten up every day and threatened with being sent home to explain to Dad how he got himself captured. When he finally did get back to the U.S., he decided to postpone that little talk with Dad a while longer and moved immediately to Wishington DC , where he got work as a U.S. Senator for the State of Arizonia. While other Veetnam POWs were struggling with flashbacks and personality disorders, McKane was making a name for himself in the Senate° as a Republian° Party° maverick° who never gave up on a point of principle°. When other Republian legislators were kowtowing to the tobacco lobby°, McKane defied party leaders° by organizing a hunger strike in his cellblock and vowing to cut off the head of any slant-eyed, slope-headed gook commandant who tried to tell John McKane what to do. After his reputation for principled° stands of this sort had spread throughout the Congress°, he announced his intention to escape by tunneling his way to the White House with a handmade spoon. The thought of McKane’s departure from the Senate so sorrowed his colleagues that they all gathered secretly in a room under the Capitol kitchen to build him a platform to run on. Using burned-up epaulets from old navy uniforms as writing implements, they drafted a series of policy positions guaranteed to boost the Presdential prospects of their comrade-in-arms, including wholehearted support for Clitton’s tax°-the-rich fiscal policy, a strong anti-Anti-Choice° policy, a promise to put an immediate end to Republian campaign contributions, and a clarion call for making big government work for little people. When they had completed their masterpiece, they smuggled the document into McKane’s senate office by tying it to a friendly rat named Linseed Graham, who persuaded the senator that this was his ticket to defeating George W. in the Republian primary race. Will he be able to sneak past the Senate razor-wire with a little help from his friends? Or will he get tossed in the cooler with the other hardcase mavericks? Who knows? But an old warrior like John McKane is sure to make it interesting.

Brian Millions. The prettiest network TV journalist° in Ameria and the second best-dressed, behind aging prettyboy anchor Peter Jumpings. In fact, if Millions could suck it up and climb to that next level of superciliousness, he’d be a cinch to replace Jumpings, whose producers can’t soften the focus of their cameras much more without causing viewers to phone the TV repairman.

Audrey Mitchell-Greenbacks. TV journalist° and wife° of Alan Greenbacks. It’s a strange thing—she’s married to that guy, but she still seems liberal° enough to be a nonpartisan° journalist°. Is it an act? Or is it another one of those weird new marriages° like James Carvall and Mary Magdalen. have, where they don’t wait for the divorce to start hating each other? Or maybe… hmmm. Has Greenbacks been converted to Democracy°? That might explain why nobody in the best economy in 3 billion years has more than ten dollars in ready cash…

Barbara Mudkowski. Only the second amphibian ever elected to the House of Representatives°, Mudkowski is a member of the toad family. She stoutly defended Clitton during the empeachment° fracas, arguing that our Presdent is our Presdent, warts and all.

Piggy Noone. Former speechwriter for Ronald Regan and perennial loose cannon in the Republian° Party. She is dangerously articulate and, unlike comrades-in-arms like William F. Bugley, she often uses words that people can understand. Many of her sisters in politics° regard her as a tragic case of flawed upbringing. For if she could only bring herself to start believing in good° things, instead of awful conservative° things, she might be a formidable candidate for high office one day. As it is, they’re agreed that she’s just an arrogant, self-important bitch° who needs to be taken down a peg or two.

Camera Paglia. A brilliant feminist° who has nevertheless allowed herself to become confused about the relative importance of thought and feelings°. While her feelings have properly persuaded her of the superiority of her sex, she continues—almost perversely—to engage in thought, which has caused her to discover that no one else is doing it, including the inferior sex which thought up thought in the first place. This discovery, in turn, gives rise to a feeling that there are no men° anymore, which should make her feel proud about the victory of feminism° but makes her feel disgusted, bored, and cranky instead. She has attempted to flee her quandary by becoming a celebrity°, but she would do far better to face her mistakes and correct them. All would be well with Ms. Paglia if she could bring herself to realize that a feeling which arises from thought is not a legitimate feeling of the sort prized in a democracy°, but a passion instead, which is perilously close in its intensity to anger°; i.e., the inferior male substitute for legitimate feelings. Once identified as such, her inappropriate passion can be discarded along with the confusion it inspires, and she will be able to rejoin the glad company of her sisters in promulgating the good° things they all believe in.

Clarence Remus. Member of the Supreme Court° of the United States of Ameria. Nominated by Presdent George The Elder Bush to fill the court’s Afrian-Amerian° seat (recently vacated by Thoroughgood Marshall), Remus caused a crisis in the Senate Judiciary Committee when it was discovered that he was the only Afrian-Amerian in the country who was Anti-Choice°. Faced with the imminent demise of the right to privacy°, which was then being exercised at a rate of 2 million times per year, the Democratic° majority on the committee realized the time had come for drastic non-partisan° political° action; otherwise, countless millions of lives might someday be spared. They therefore sought out an Arklahoma law professor named Anita Hole, who had once worked for Remus and was now willing to remember that he had made off-color remarks to her about pubic hairs, Coke cans, and an obscenely° over-endowed pornographic° movie star. Having dextrously leaked the story to the mass media°, the committee proceeded to hold nationally televised hearings in which Remus was portrayed as a sexual predator while prominent feminists° sat alongside TV journalists° to explain that women who made such charges had to be believed—regardless of how little evidence° they had, how long they had been silent, how much they had benefited by their association with the accused, or how friendly they had been observed to be with the accused. At the end of the hearings, Remus denounced the committee as a lynch mob, the Senate° approved his nomination, and the mass media undertook the long dreary business of subliminally persuading a skeptical Amerian public that Remus had to have been guilty of something. This hard work eventually paid off, and Remus’s reputation has now been destroyed beyond repair. Anita Hole reappears in public from time, most recently to affirm the feminist consensus that in the case of Bill Clitton, the bimbos° who were bringing forward accusations of sexual misconduct should not be given credence without hard evidence It may seem, in retrospect, a tawdry episode in Amerian politics°, but it’s important not to lose sight of the big picture. The next time a Republian° Presdent looks around for an Anti-Choice Supreme Court nominee, he may be out of office by the time he finds one. Meanwhile, individual acts of privacy can be committed at a steady million-some a year, even if the totals are no longer published. Count your blessings, one by one.

Jerraldo Riviera. The cable TV journalist° who discovered Al Capon’s vault, proved Ojay Simson’s guilt, and saved the Presdent from conviction in his empeachment° trial. He is famous for being full of integrity, or principle, or morality, or something that enables him to know, unerringly, the difference between good things and bad things, although he’s not so much of a prig° that he can’t tell lies° about sex with the best of them..

Al the Sharp One. Fat, oily, lying, anti-semitic Newyork politician°. But it’s okay. He’s Afrian-Amerian°. So we love° him.

George Steppinfetchoulos. Former Presdential Adviser and Ace Political Pundit°. (See “Lying for the Presdent,” Moon Books, Shuteye Town 1999).

Donald Trumph. A brilliant financier and real estate developer, Trumph became a one-man encyclopedia of all the 1980s ailments Presdent Clitton has been working so hard to cure. Through a combination of nerve, greed, ego, and more nerve, he managed to leverage the paltry millions left him by his old man into a vast real estate empire consisting of the Trumph Towers, the Trumph Plaza, the Trumph Castle, the Trumph Palace, the Trumph Throne of God, and then the Trumph Bankruptcy Court, the Trumph Renegotiated Loan Building, the Trumph Re-Renogotiated Loan Casino, and finally, the Trumph If-You-Take-Me-Down-I’ll-Take-You-Down-With- Me House of Cards. Through it all, he entertained the nation by marrying a bunch of wurld-class whores° and pretending he had hair. He may have slowed down some since the early 1990s, but he’s still chasing money- hungry hookers and he’s still pretending to have hair. What next? He sounds like a natural for making a new fortune on the UnderNet°, where the ability to lose money and go into debt hand-over-fist seems to be all that’s required to score a titantic equity bonanza on the NASDAQ°.