Category Archives: Awful Political Things

October 19, 2010

Under no circumstances should you vote in the midterms

By Jeff Vrabel

This is among Google's top Image Search matches for "Paladino." Tragically, Carl Paladino actually looks like the guy below.

GateHouse — Two years ago Barack Obama soared to victory on an unprecedented wave of unity and a promise to bring together a nation torn by years of war, goalless partisanship and the erosion of American power, and that all went really badly, because it was a terrible idea that never had the remotest chance of working.

Good news, though: Because there are elections like every 20 days, we’re just a tantalizing few weeks from the midterms, which will solve all your problems, or at least they would if they weren’t being contested by terrible ogre-people who have made this easily the most appalling election ever. But don’t take it from me:

  • Funny story: Turns out ashen porno fiend and Tea Party-approved New York Republican gubernatorial candidate Carl Paladino, who has basically spent the last two years e-mailing pornographic and/or racist emails to his MySpace friends and who insisted that that kids shouldn’t be “brainwashed” into not making fun of gay people, rented part of his sprawling real estate empire to gay bars where gay people hang out and brainwash each other. But I’m sure that’s nothing. I mean, it’s not like militant ultra-conservative anti-gay crusaders are ever found to be hiding anything.

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4 comments   |  tags: , , , , | posted in Awful Political Things, GateHouse, Humor Columns

September 19, 2010

Christine O’Donnell: What’s a nice lady like you doing on a midnight satanic altar like this?

By Jeff Vrabel

I'm thinking Hufflepuff.

GateHouse — Say what you will about the Tea Party — that it’s a fringe, easily unhinged cluster of elderly Caucasians with an abundance of blog-commenting time and a deep need to have their personal beliefs endorsed by them by their televisions; or that it’s a bona fide, quickly growing grassroots force filled with fringe, easily unhinged elderly Caucasians with an abundance of blog-commenting time and a deep need to have their personal beliefs endorsed by them by their televisions.

Either way, here in the black, mucilaginous heart of Midterm Election/Football Season, when American voters rise up EN MASSE to voice their rage at the State Of Our Country and nearly 11% of them go out to actually vote about it, there appears to be equal reason for Democrats and Republicans to be shaking in the boots which were purchased for them by anonymous political action committees.

Democrats have reason to be concerned because the party in power, as a rule, gets its clock cleaned in midterms, but also because as usual they suck. Republicans, on the other hand, are enjoying the equivalent of realizing that the kids at the Thanksgiving table are starting to find the increasingly slurry jokes about sex and racism being produced by their increasingly PBRed-up step-uncle really pretty funny.

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4 comments   |  tags: , , , , , | posted in Awful Political Things, GateHouse, Humor Columns

September 13, 2010

Terry Jones’ Quran Quran, or, A Hilljack Nutbar In Central Florida Is Ranting Like A Crazy Person, Let’s All Pay Loads Of Attention

By Jeff Vrabel

There's an unhinged hillbilly ranting in a parking lot GET ME MORE MICROPHONES! (CNN)

GateHouse — Back when I lived in the city and took the train to work on a route that visited some reasonably shady neighborhoods, I developed a near-flawless method for dealing with any disreputable characters who might, say, visit my car to shout colorful monologues or ask for any spare all-of-the-money-in-my-wallet: I’d put on my headphones and sunglasses, which afforded me a plausible, airtight reason for ignoring them completely, because if I can’t see or hear you, how can you possibly rob me, or shout loudly at me regarding the voices in your head?

My reasoning was that if I was going to get mugged or stared down by, for instance, someone traveling with a live rooster, it would at least be by someone with some pluck and gumption; the casual criminal wouldn’t spend a lot of time trying to snare the easily fragmented attention of an iPod addict: “MAN, I TOLD YOU, TURN THAT THING DOWN, STUDIES HAVE PROVEN THEY CAUSE PERMANENT COCHLEAL DAMAGE AND ALSO I AM TRYING TO BURGLE YOU.” Luckily, I never did once find myself in such a situation, although that might also have something to do with the green lizard-eyes I had tattooed on my eyelids. (Great for riding the subway, TERRIBLE for going to the orchestra.)

It sounds ridiculous and childish to write about it — mostly because it’s ridiculous and childish. I know now, with a few years of practical, real-world life experience behind me, that I could have achieved the same effect by either shrieking like a pregnant moose who’s been poked in the nostrils with a pool stick (been there, am I right, ladies?) or, failing that, waving my lightsaber around. Oh come on, tell me that if you saw a skinny twerp on the Green Line with sunglasses and a lightsaber and shrieking like a moose, that’d be the guy you’d light up for drug money or as a prospective audience for you your unhinged conspiracy theories.

I bring this up because — and I don’t know if you’ve heard about this guy Terry Jones or not, you might not have, because the teevee has been thoughtfully subtle if not overly scholastic on the subject — but there’s this mumblemouthed nimrod in some tin-roof town in oh hey this is weird the middle of Florida, and he and his 1856 prospector mustache convinced his 16 followers that they needed to burn the Quran on 9/11 to make a point about Jesus’ tolerance and everybody on television lost their minds.

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4 comments   |  tags: , , , | posted in Awful Political Things, Culture And / Or News, GateHouse, Humor Columns

June 21, 2010

Tony Hayward’s Yacht Rock, or, Everybody Look At Me ‘Cause I’m Sailing On A Boat

By Jeff Vrabel

It may be hard to believe, but this charismatic firecracker is actually pretty lousy at public relations.

GateHouse— Reader(s) may be shocked to learn this, but I have never been CEO of a major company, at least as far as the federal government is concerned (and if any of those vultures are reading, let me reiterate my assertion that VrabelCorp LLC is strictly a Bangladeshi music-teaching non-profit with absolutely zero ties to the pirated-DVD market, and I don’t even know why you’re looking at me like that).

While we’re on the subject I’ve never been the CEO of a small company, or a mid-sized company; frankly, whenever I end up accidentally in charge of something, that thing basically has about 25 minutes left before it becomes a smoldering crater in the dirt.

And yet even if I were, say, dealing in bootlegs of “Marmaduke” that originated in the Eastern markets I’d still remain Jean-Luc Picard compared to Tony Hayward, the quote-fingers CEO of BP, which has poured what appears to be Magic Shell all over America’s birds in the past few months via a plucky little exploded well that just WILL NOT STOP GURSHING OIL INTO THE GULF OF MEXICO, no matter how not-hard they sort-of try things that will probably not work because they’ve never been tried because no one evidently planned for a well that WOULD NOT STOP GURSHING OIL INTO THE GULF OF MEXICO. On the one hand, they’ve sort of ingeniously created a Mobius Strip of convoluted and deeply deserved blame; on the other, they’ve made it so that shrimp in 2016 will cost about $42,000 a pound.

Luckily for those of us who write humor because it’s less time-intensive than hand-scrubbing pelicans with toothbrushes — which is less fun than it sounds like, even if the pelicans are wearing funny costumes — most of the people involved on the BP side of things here are … well, what’s the word for self-aware gaffe machines whose seeming every utterance is so forehead-slappingly disengaged that you cannot help but think wonder if they are perhaps from some division of the multinational oil conglomerate that also runs the carnival?

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10 comments   |  tags: , , , , | posted in Awful Political Things, Culture And / Or News, GateHouse, Humor Columns

June 6, 2010

Fat sweating Sen. Jake Knotts: Reinforcing the world’s hilarious drunken jokes about South Carolina since ’02

By Jeff Vrabel

State senator and fitness aficionado Jake Knotts, The Pride Of South Carolina

GateHouse — Months ago, during an uncharacteristically unpleasant period in what has been an over-erudite political environment too heavy on facts and pie charts, I wrote a long and extremely mean-spirited piece about the state of South Carolina, which had broken off and floated into a magical space fairy-land in the sky, where there was no NPR or reuseable grocery bags or desegregation and everything was well-preserved in amber in 1951.

Ha! I’m kidding, of course — what South Carolina was actually doing was requiring terrorists to register with the state of South Carolina before, ostensibly, attempting to reduce to a smoking crater the state of South Carolina. (It’s called record-keeping, people!) For people who write about the focal points of human idiocy for a living, and by that I mean a laughably meager figure that necessitates a third-shift side job at the wastewater plant, it was a little like walking into a castle made of key lime pie where margaritas were served to you daily by thousands of chambermaids who all looked like Megan Fox.

As a rule, I try to avoid revisiting topics, unless of course the topic is pierogies, but we return this week to South Carolina, where, against the well-chiseled laws of human decency and basically physics at this point, politics IS EVEN MORE AWESOME THAN BEFORE, and by “awesome” I mean “there’s more fat sweaty racists than there used to be.” And there used to be quite a bit. Obviously.

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10 comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , | posted in Awful Political Things, GateHouse, Humor Columns

June 3, 2010

One man’s quest to free the town from junky-looking campaign signs

By Jeff Vrabel

Multiple campaign signs make this average lawn shine with class and charm.

Island Packet — Just throwing this out there, just spitballing, just doing a little brainstorming — because that’s what I do when it gets humid and heavy enough to make the birds literally bang on my window with their beaks and plead for death — but if we here in Beaufort County have rules, guidelines, codes, covenants, unspoken laws, unbreakable vows and sternly worded press releases regarding things that can and cannot besmirch our greenosphere, is there some reason we allow official-sounding political types to acne up our landscape with cheap-looking red-and-white-block-lettering campaigny signs?

I realize that the balance of this column will result in my sounding the very oldest I have in my life, except for that one time I handwrote a complaint letter to Andy Rooney because he made fun of Gene Krupa, but to that I say: “Hey, you kids, get off my lawn!” Because it stands to reason that if I cannot successfully locate a grocery mart after nightfall without knowing my precise longitude — which, thanks to my iPhone is no longer a problem but I’m still sniffly about this — if I can’t enjoy the calming glow of the average American streetlight, if I can’t go for a lousy evening run around my stately, verdant neighborhood without wearing a coal miner-style headlamp because of the constant threat of stepping on, around, or into an alligator in the pitch-blackness, I should not have to be reminded, upon venturing out for coffee, who is running for governor. (Incidentally, it’s blogger-affair lady and some other people.)

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3 comments   |  tags: , , , , | posted in Awful Political Things, Humor Columns, McClatchy-Tribune

June 1, 2010

So there are BP employees not trying to stop the MASSIVE OIL LEAK RIGHT NOW? Curious

By Jeff Vrabel

Pictured: BP CEO Tony Hayward

GateHouse — The best line I’ve heard about the horrific oil leak that continues to gursh right away into the Gulf of Mexico and may or may not have something to do with the full moon and may or may not be 11 million gallons or 50 million or eleventybillion gallons depending on which wafer-thin BP-issued Lie Producing Machine was activated this week, comes from Jimmy Fallon, who said, “BP wants Twitter to shut down a fake BP account that is mocking the oil company. In response, Twitter wants BP to shut down the oil leak that’s ruining the ocean.” (This is, in fact, a Jimmy Fallon joke, despite my initial crediting of it online to somebody else, which I did because somebody else took credit for it. The music industry was right: This “Internet” is AWFUL.)

At press time, the best information I can get about the oil leak is that no one has the remotest idea what to do about the oil leak; it’s like the “Lost” island of Gulf-fouling holes in the ground, except this will almost certainly have a much less satisfying resolution. At least the characters in “Lost” had the good fortune to end up in a heavenly anteroom or whatever, it is much difficult to open the door to such places when you’re a cormorant who’s dripping with a full-body coating of black goo.

This much is clear, though: The “top kill” method, the 490th oil-plugging maneuver attempted by BP and one with easily the best name of the bunch (seriously, nothing good has ever happened with a “top hat,” just ask President Lincoln), didn’t work. Or might never have had a chance at working. We just can’t know until the BP scientists have videoconferenced with the PR department and international marketing.

But speaking of marketing, BP fans will note that there’s now a group tweeting at twitter.com/BPglobalPR, which is one of those ideas that you CANNOT BELIEVE YOU DIDN’T THINK OF WHEN YOU DRINKING LAST WEEKEND but whatever, this isn’t about me, this is about corporate evil, and my retirement dream of occasionally eating fish.

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6 comments   |  tags: , , , , , | posted in Awful Political Things, Culture And / Or News, GateHouse, Humor Columns

May 3, 2010

Oilpacalypse ’10: Sorry, guys, I guess I should direct my concerns to whoever OWNS THE EXPLODING RIG

By Jeff Vrabel

You know who would have never let a massive, apocalyptic Gulf oil spill happen? This guy.

GateHouse — When my brother was very young, he would frequently pee directly into a garbage can in our basement playroom rather than risk the long and perilous journey to the bathroom, which was all the way upstairs, like nine steps or something (in his defense, it’s not like you could pause the E.T. game on the Atari).

My parents, being sharp people (though aided by an Anonymous Tipster who may or may not have been trying to score more Pitfall time), would usually address the issue by asking Dave directly what he knew about the objectionable fragrance radiating from the garbage can. And every single time he was subjected to these intense investigations, each time he gazed into the face of parental wrath and irrefutable and dribbling evidence, he would provide the same singular, unvarying response: “No, Mom,” and then he’d conclude his presentation by casting suspicion upon the dog.

The massive oil spill currently begloppening (or threatening to begloppen) up the entire Gulf Coast, at least to my untrained eyes, seemed at first awful but not apocalyptic, mostly because that is what I was being told by some combination of BP, which owned the exploded rig, and the federal government, each of whom spent the first few days post-disaster gradually poking around online for each other’s phone numbers. The government passed the first days of the mess — which began with the explosion of a massive BP rig — by largely deferring to BP, asking for updates from BP, and deciding that they pretty much were OK with whatever BP said, which, surprisingly, was that BP had everything under control. It is as if my parents went upstairs, poured some coffee, looked at each other and sighed, “Maybe there’s something to this dog thing?” (Note: there wasn’t, as to successfully hit the garbage can Cutty would’ve had to basically get out a ladder, travel three steps up and then whizz diagonally).

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12 comments   |  tags: , , , , | posted in Awful Political Things, Culture And / Or News, GateHouse, Humor Columns

April 26, 2010

Evo Morales: Eating chicken makes you gay and bald, probably in that order

By Jeff Vrabel

Do not even get Evo Morales started on this guy.

GateHouse — The legitimacy of global warming is still being debated in some quarters, mostly quarters containing people currently hand-painting signs with the words “Obama” and “Maoist” on them, at least two of which are misspelled, but if there’s anything we can all agree on from last week’s World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth (yes that is its actual title, because organizers ran out of time before they could think of something more wankery), it’s that processed chicken is making everybody bald and gay, in that order. Or maybe the opposite order. Either way, hopefully it’s a gradual process, because that’s a lot to deal with in one day.

Regular readers — and hello again to some cousins, whoever the new Facebook is giving all my personal information to and the 325 pornbots now following me on Twitter — will note that this is in flagrant defiance of the point I made here last week, which was that “Glee” was the thing gayening everybody up, as a major component of the leftapaganda globasocialist conspirawashing and basically a gateway into whatever school you attend in order to become a mullah (I think it’s Fairleigh Dickinson).

But in my defense, I wrote that both after the Madonna-song episode and before reading a speech by Bolivian president Evo Morales, the leftist leader and aspiring comedian who is currently pictured wearing a hat that resembles a Scrabble board and luxurious lei-type accoutrements which appear to be missing only their JIMMY BUFFETT VIP lanyard. (I would make continued hilarious comedy about his Scrabble hat if I could stop trying to think of a 5-letter word that ends in B and involves the Triple Word Score on the left back corner sorry I get a little OCD with the Scrabble it’s hard to stop how many points do you think you could get for “lanyard?”)

Last week Morales, as part of his last-ever invitation to speak at a climate change conference, took the opportunity to make a couple of slightly off-topic points:

  1. Capitalism is dumb.
  2. Chicken and Coke are responsible for all of the baldness and homosexuality in the West. (They are also responsible for Zaxby’s value meals, but that’s for another conference.)

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5 comments   |  tags: , , , | posted in Awful Political Things, GateHouse, Humor Columns

April 19, 2010

“Glee”: Why Fox’s leftist fascistpaganda machine cannot be stopped

By Jeff Vrabel

Sue Sylvester: Another of the Fox network's flamingly Maoist Freedom-sucking children-getting-in-between-the-parents-of-ers

GateHouse — At the risk of alienating the entire Internet, I confess to having never watched “Glee,” mostly because I can save ridiculous amounts of coffee-absorption time by either briefly glancing at the Internet sometime during the 24 hours after a new episode airs or eavesdropping on the cubicle two rows over, whose members boast a shocking brainfold-capacity for retaining and reanimating verbatim TV quotes. By completing these two activities last week, here is basically the sum of what I know about “Glee”:

  1. There is someone named Sue Sylvester, who is the Internet’s most active quote-production appliance since the Insane Clown Posse’s “Miracles,” which, if you haven’t seen it, will reduce to you a blubbering weep-machine on the floor of your apartment, or, more accurately if you are an Insane Clown Posse fan, your Mom’s 1989 Ford minivan which does not start.
  2. There’s a Mr. Chu, or maybe a Mr. Wong? Or something? I don’t remember, and I’d look it up but my Twitter window is all the way over there.
  3. After airing, fans of “Glee” retire immediately to their portable computing devices and begin transcribing as many quotes as possible before falling asleep sitting up with one hand stuck in a bottle of energy-rich chocolate-covered coffee beans.

“Glee” is, by most accounts, a high-school comedy/drama about nerd-leaning outcasts with propensities to burst out into regular production numbers, mostly to songs you would most often encounter at a dentist’s office, and by that logic I’d think I’d be all over it, since that’s basically what my friends and I did in high school, except we did it exclusively to Firehouse and C&C Music Factory songs (these were truly performances that made you go hmm). I’ve not seen the show, as I say, but it seems to be fantastically popular, and serves as even more proof that watering songs down to club-soda flavorlessness and having them lip-synced by unspoilt-looking teenagers is and will continue to be the most reliably successful music marketing plan in the history of the universe, which reminds me does anyone need two tickets to the Green Day “American Idiot” musical?

But if I was going to watch it before, I’m absolutely not now, because as much as I love a cappella music, I love America probably like three times as much.

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7 comments   |  tags: , , , , | posted in Awful Political Things, GateHouse, Humor Columns, Music Writing

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