Fall Day Afternoon

What started out as a relentlessly pleasant extended holiday weekend was dealt a devastating blow when The Home Office learned today’s football game between our beloved Pittsburgh Steelers and the Team Formerly Known as the Official Team of the Anti-Christ (now merely the Baltimore Ravens) will not be televised here.

It’s not like I was asking for some obscure and one-sided contest with no local interest, like 8–2 San Diego vs. 2–8 Oakland. I can watch that at 4:00. Nope, the Steelers play the Ravens not twenty-five miles from here, in a sold out stadium where tickets were going for over $300 apiece. Thousands of Steelers fans live in the area, as well as hundreds of thousands of otherwise honorable Ravens fans. How has this travesty been allowed to transpire?

Part of it has to do with the NFL’s doubleheader policy. This is Fox’s fair and balanced weekend to show two games. The 1:00 game, directly opposite the Baltimore Battle of the Titans, has the Washington Redskins (aka The Current Official Team of the Anti-Christ) receiving their weekly pummeling. Granted, the masochistic tendencies of Redskins fans mean that game will easily win the ratings timeslot, especially in the wilderness of Northern Virginia, where George Allen voters have been known to stop testing their nooses during close games.

Still, for WUSA to show paid programming (read: infomercials) instead of the Baltimore game is a perversion. Even worse, the second game on fair and balanced Fox is Chicago at New England, which will trounce the San Diego-Oakland game. The Steelers and Ravens would at least have done pretty well in the Maryland suburbs.

What could cause such short-sighted arrogance? Washington is the ancestral home of The Man, who recently took a pretty good election beating in Maryland. Could this be payback? I’d hate to think so, in light of the recent rhetoric promising bi-partisanship, but one has to wonder.

There’s only one solution. By the time you read this, The Home Office will be officially boycotting all programming from WUSA-TV9 in Washington, DC, with the exception of future Steelers’ games, playoff contests, and certain other key match-ups with playoff implications. We will also boycott all known sponsors of today’s invisible game, a prospect made considerably easier by our inability to see who they are. We will most certainly boycott the manufacturers of whatever Chinese-made piece of Wal-Mart reject junk is featured on the paid “programming.”

Who’s with me? Are you tired of The Man sticking it to you? Think it’s time for a new Man Law? Me, too. All together, now. Attica! Attica! Attica!

Michael Richards is an Alcoholic

Right? Isn’t that the current excuse for any unsavory act? Gives you an idea of how Shrub must have been putting them away in his drinking days. He’s been dry twenty years, and he still can’t keep things in line.

Personally, I think Michael Richards is getting a bum rap. He’s not a racist; he’s the farthest thing from it. Kramer’s performing one of history’s noblest acts, taking one for the team, so to speak.

It can’t have escaped his notice that The Man has been sticking it to O.J. pretty good since this abortive If I Did It book and television thing started to unravel. Richards couldn’t bear to see this unfortunate African-American shoveled into the maw of mainstream media yet again.

“What can I do?” Richards said. (I’m projecting Richards’ thoughts here, a technique made ethical and sexy by no less a journalist than Bob Woodward. How cool am I?) “What can a single man – whose career has been defined by an extended fifteen minutes of being the comic relief for a situation comedy, and who has done nothing noteworthy since then – what can he do to correct such a public flagellation. I know! I’ll accept the burden myself. I’ll commit an offense so foul that the vultures and parasites who make up the media – and who have ignored me in droves since Seinfeld went off the air – will have no choice but to flock to my every statement and parse every denial of my racism. Climb on my back, O.J. You ain’t heavy, you’re my brother.”

I just saw Al Sharpton interviewed by Tucker Carlson. (Not deliberately; the channel was set to MSNBC when I turned on the television.) Not once did the man who made Tawana Brawley a household name utter a single word of appreciation for Richards’ munificent self-immolation.

Farewell, Cosmo. We knew you too little, and appreciated you not enough.

Why We Fight

Two headlines from the Associated Press today:

McQueen Shades Net $70,000 at Auction.

Poor Pakistanis Donate Kidneys for Money.

Don't belabor whatever interpretations you think a liberal pussy like me would put to this. Just see if you can think of a better recruiting poster for Al Qaeda.

Keep One Hand on Your Wallet

The election is over, and politicians everywhere are making kissy faces and promising to work together for the “good of the people.” This is why you can’t trust politicians. Their standards are so low as to be non-existent.

Shrub made the following statement at a rally eight days before the election:

However they put it, the Democrat approach in Iraq comes down to this: The terrorists win and America loses.

So he’s saying the Democrats are the party of the terrorists, and that a vote for a Democrat is a vote for terrorism.

Now it’s a week later. Democrats are now the majority party. The two top House Democrats meet with Shrub to bury the hatchet. Everyone shakes hands, one big happy family.

There’s no way I’d shake Shrub’s hand. A week ago he as much as called me an enemy of America; now it never happened? Holding grudges is a bad idea, but this SOB either lied to get what he wanted last week, or he’s lying to get what he wants now. Either way, the only place I want to bury the hatchet is in this bastard’s head.

All politicians do this, and always have. Shrub and his minions just raised (lowered?) it to such a degree that to consider it anything other than offensive is to have no standards at all.

This Just In

Fox News (Fair and Balanced) announced at 8:23 AM Eastern Time that their exit polls are projecting not only that the Democrats will lose every election today, but that angry mobs with torches will spontaneously gather outside the candidates' homes after the polls close.

On CNN, Lou Dobbs, behind the curve as usual, blamed everything on immigrants. "This country was heaven on earth before the Indians and immigrants screwed it up," Dobbs said.

Geraldo Rivera is in North Korea, interviewing one of Kim Jong Il's concubines, and was unavailable for comment.

Another Precinct Heard From

Lest anyone think I'm too hard on Republicans and the Shrub Administration because I'm a liberal pussy, read this article from The American Conservative.

The Man of Steele

The scariest thing about elections, even more than whether your vote will get counted, or if you’ll even be allowed to vote, is the people voting. Recent election results, and current polls, leave little choice but to conclude the American voting public consists of a large number of mouth-breathing drunks and/or drug addicts, unable to hold more than one idea in their minds at a time.

Remember the movie Fifty First Dates? Drew Barrymore has a brain injury that prevents her from remembering anything that happened before today. It’s cute, but not one of Adam Sandler’s best. (Drew Barrymore has no bests.) That’s how Americans vote. Like nothing happened before right now.

Take Maryland senatorial candidate Michael Steele. Steele has been a lifelong Republican, one of three black Republicans in Maryland. This appears to have been his unique party qualification, as he has virtually no accomplishments other than being Maryland party chairman and the current lieutenant governor. If his middle initial is T, it must stand for “Token.”

Steele has run his entire campaign without any reference to being a member of the Republican party. I encountered him at my Metro station a few weeks ago, and asked several of his supporters why that was. “Party shouldn’t matter,” they said. “He’s his own man”

I asked them about the hundreds of thousands of dollars he’d accepted from the Republican Party, and about his recent, well-publicized request for more. That’s when they got a little snippy.

So here we have a do-nothing hack who is a recent party chairman and lieutenant governor to one of the most partisan governors in the country, with hundreds of thousands of dollars of indebtedness to the Republican, running as – what can I call it? – something other than a Republican. Not a Democrat, and he’s certainly not an independent.

And he’s kept the election close. Maryland is essentially a one-party state. Republicans aren’t even running in most of our local races. Yet Steele runs TV ads that show him as a nice guy, as his opponent as a career politician. Like Steele’s not. Cardin actually has forty years of accomplishments to run on. All anyone remembers is that Steele would be someone nice to sit next to at a ball game.

We have another local candidate, who lost the Democratic primary decisively, probably at least in part because he’s a self-aggrandizing egotist. (Saying a politician is such a self-aggrandizing egotist that it distinguishes him from his peers is going a ways.) He immediately switched parties, welcomed with open arms by the Republicans. I guess the Shameless Whore Party didn’t have time to get their ballot petitions together.

These guys get votes, They lie and cheat and (some of them) steal for anywhere from two to six years, then tell you how things are going to change as soon as you vote for them again. “Are you going to believe me, or your lying eyes?” they say. And they get away with it! Your vote can only be construed to mean what they’ve done during their term is okay with you. So why should they change?

This may be a good election for protest votes. My congressman is running opposed by only the Green Party candidate. He’s the Number Three Dem, and will have quite a bit of pull if they take over. I’m voting for the Green, and sending my guy a letter if the Dems win. “Be careful what you ask for,” I’ll say. “Now you’re in charge, and accountable. If things don’t get better, we’re coming for your ass next.”

Anyone with me?

Fly the Friendly Skies

In case you have to fly any time soon, rest assured our domestic airlines are safe as Fort Knox. Last night the Sole Heir was pulled out of line while waiting for her flight and subjected to the full “there better not be a bomb stuffed down your jeans” search.

I’m not complaining about the search so much as much as what it represents. Ethnic profiling can be offensive. There’s no reason to pull every swarthy-looking individual out of line, just because the insidious enemy du jour is Arab. Current policy bends over so far in the other direction, they’re frisking middle-class teenagers and retired Norwegian-American schoolteachers. Aside from being stupid, it’s a waste of time.

Someday someone’s going to get a bomb or a gun or a utility knife on a plane, because some TSA employee is going to figure he’s over his quota of swarth searches for the day, or has done so many random searches the line is backing up and the natives are getting restless. Meanwhile, certain designated individuals (read: not you) can buy their way out of passing through checkpoints altogether if they’re frequent flyers. I guess the Powers That Be assume a busy and wealthy businessman willing to pay for the privilege of jumping the line must be a Republican and not a terrorist.

The logic is dubious. Catching Osama bin Boogeyman has been the GOP’s Job One for 1,881 days, and they aren’t any closer to finding him than they are to finding Amelia Earhart, Judge Crater, or Ashlee Simpson’s talent. They have to be “in” something. I just can’t make up my mind whether it’s incompetent or in cahoots.