We all know that 9/11 is the best holiday ever. It’s like Christmas and the Fourth of July and Halloween combined! Dick Cheney is alive right now just because he willed himself to see another 9/11. But according to Politico, who have labeled the situation “awkward,” like a 19-year-old coed, Barack Obama has nowhere to go this year. The site in Pennsylvania where that one plane ran into the ground? Michelle and Laura Bush are going to be there, so that 9/11 place is for girls. Eww! 9/11 cooties! Obama can’t go to the Pentagon, because he went there last year, and everyone knows that that one isn’t important enough to visit twice. As for the World Trade Center site, well, umm, there will be anti-mosk protesters there.

Yes, protesters will be there to yell and froth about Muslim Americans and their rights, solemnly, joined by noted American patriot anti-Muslim Dutch MP Geert Wilders. But who can blame them for wanting to scream at Obama when he’s trying to hug widows and put that damn wreath at the pile of damn wreaths? So, omg, you guys, awkwaaaaaaaaard.

Politico says Obama’s only option is to go hang out with some troops for the day, because they’re sorta nine-eleveny. But that’s not as good. It’s like eating pheasant instead of turkey on Thanksgiving. Or, in Obama’s case, eating turkey instead of non-Muslims on Thanksgiving, because he likes to EAT white people.

But also Obama does not want to go to the World Trade Center site this year because he needs to make the big 10-year anniversary the biggest party ever, and that means the bright lights and big city and lots of hookers who look like Dick Cheney, and thus NEW YORK, BABY.

But also also, when does 9/11 become a thing our presidents don’t feel they have to commemorate every year? You think FDR went to Hawaii every year to commemorate the Pearl Harbor attacks? No, he stayed at home, gettin’ wasted and injecting himself with that sweet, sweet Polio. [Polio Politico]

Barack Obama - Dick Cheney - Laura Bush - World Trade Center - Pearl Harbor

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And what has the politics biblioburro brought us this week? Why, it’s Dirty Sexy Politics by Meghan McCain, America’s flaxen-haired princess of dirt and sex and politics. Meg is a Renaissance Woman, you see: heiress to beer treasures, daughter of ancient sea beast John McCain, Twitress, columnist for Tina Brown’s Internet bestiality mag, plus an author of a children’s book and now of this scorching campaign trail exposé. Dirty Sexy Politics chronicles the adventures of Meg and her “McCain Blogette” staff on the 2008 campaign trail, where they rode from Holiday Inn to Holiday Inn on the back of an obliging elephant (lewdly pictured on the cover and back of this book). The book contains many surprises, revelations, and memorable scenes. Best of all: YOU’RE in it. We mean this literally: Meghan writes about you, the Wonkette commentariat.

We’ll get to the Wonkette sex scene in a moment. First, let’s think about the wider literary context in which Meg is writing. The campaign trail and convention chronicle is a great and hilarious sub-genre of American literature. Mencken did it, Vidal did it, Hunter S. Thompson did it in his rambunctious classicFear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72. Even better, in your reviewer’s opinion, is a book called American Nomad, in which excellent and under-appreciated L.A. novelist Steve Erickson uses the dull 1996 election to write a stunning/funny/weird/prophetic mediation on the American subconscious. It also has an elephant on its cover! How does Meghan McCain fit into this tradition?

She begins with a mini-essay on something called “crazy-sex,” which isn’t the same thing as crazy sex. Or maybe it is:

Each day of togetherness on a campaign, stuck on a bus or airplane, listening to one more stump speech, brought you closer and closer until, very slowly over time, even the most boring campaign drones and journalists started to seem attractive. Campaign goggles can distort reality very powerfully and are the cause of almost all crazy-sex and other campaign hookups.

Meg says she didn’t engage in any of this “crazy-sex” during the campaign, but “Stories abound, and I’m sure you’ve heard some, about how wild and raucous and lusty political life can be, especially during a Presidential election.”

Well no, Meg, we haven’t heard the stories. That’s why we’re reading your sex-politics book in the first place! Why are you so maddeningly non-specific here? Come on, DISH.

We do hear about some lady journalist who drank too much and engaged in all manner of embarrassing flirtation and “hookups,” but we’re given no clues as to who it might be. (Helen Thomas?)

Anyway, at some point Meghan decided to document her Pop-Pop’s campaign on a blog, with the help of her buddies Heather (unruffled, serene) and Shannon (hot, tattooed, Korean) and their trusty Republican elephant transport. Not everyone appreciated this new “McCain Blogette” experiment, however. Among the detractors was a certain sinister web pamphlet:

A Washington, DC-based gossip blog called Wonkette was the first to have a go. The screaming headline said it all: “JOHN MCCAIN’S OTHER DAUGHTER HAS A LAME BLOG!!!”

[...]

Horrified, I scrolled down to look at the reader’s comments, hoping people would have written in to defend my mom or me. But their remarks were even worse, a dark pit of meanness, mostly about me. Readers had said things like: “She makes the girls from the Baba Bing club look fresh,” referring to the strippers on The Sopranos. Yeah, real nice stuff.

I was a total mess — who wouldn’t be? — and cried for hours.

There are a lot more memorable scenes, surprises and revelations in Dirty Sexy Politics. Cataloging them all might require a list (and a ten-billion-word blog post):

• The McCain household is veritable desert-elephant compound, Meg claims: “We had them all over our house in Phoenix — elephant sculptures, paintings, picture frames, and wall hangings. We even had an elephant bathroom that had elephant wallpaper with small bronze and silver elephants on it.”
• Meghan may have aggravated the “Wonkette,” but she also aggravated her father’s campaign director Steve Schmidt. Meghan is downright unkind about Steve’s “big paunch,” giant bald head, and “drill sergeant” personality. Worst of all, he didn’t like “McCain Blogette.”
• Despite the fact that she “love[s] the idea of the Heartland,” one of the early lessons Meghan learns is that the Heartland kind of sucks. She has this revelation in an Iowa motel.
• Meghan can do pathos! This is one of the saddest things we’ve ever read: “… I saw Duncan Hunter across the street, on a corner of the intersection. He was standing with his wife and maybe two other people. He was holding a sign that said ‘Duncan Hunter for President.’”
• Meg still hasn’t forgiven George W. Bush and his “creepy” handler Karl Rove for their wacky prank calls during the 2000 South Carolina primary. Thus her vote for what’s-his-name in 2004.
• REVELATION: Meghan never wanted her father to choose Sarah Palin as a running mate. She would have preferred Joe Lieberman, whom Meg thinks is one of the “funniest” humans on earth. We agree. Joe has been known to walk around with a hilarious hand-buzzer that electrocutes Arabs upon a (seemingly) normal, friendly handshake. He also does a classic version of the “Old Man Gets Hit in the Balls” stand-by.
• SURPRISE, Republicans are philistines. Even her own father makes fun of Meg’s Columbia degree in some elitist subject called “art history,” which will never be practical for bombing goat-herders.
• She runs into someone code-named “Ana Marie Cox” on page 162, and they seem to get along well enough.

There’s a lot more: a night out in Nashville slamming whiskey with popular country feller John Rich; the realization that her father’s campaign created a monster and dragged it out of Alaska to terrorize the whole world; and an odd chapter about a White House tea party with Laura and Jenna Bush that people think is important for reasons your reviewer can’t quite decipher. The turning point of the book is when Meg’s wacky antics — her blogging, her “stripper blond” hair, her swearing, her posing with a Bud Light in GQ — get her kicked off the campaign. And then Sarah Palin and her fertile brood come along and soak up all the airtime and attention. This is when the scales fall from Meghan’s eyes and she realizes that the GOP doesn’t have room for non-pregnant blond people in New York.

Meghan ends Dirty Sexy Politics with a call for the Republican Party to reach out to gay people and the young. She prays for the ghost of Barry Goldwater to rise from the Arizona sands and restore “the party of freedom and the individual,” says something about how she’s socially liberal but still likes war/militarism, etc. Why doesn’t she just join the Democrats, then? Ha, you’re right: the Democrats aren’t THAT socially liberal.

Anyway. The book doesn’t quite deliver on its promise of dirt and sex, but there’s something delightful on every page!

Dirty Sexy Politics by Meghan McCain, Hyperion,194 pages, $14.39

Send tales of political dirt, sex, and elephant art to greer.mansfield@gmail.com.

Meghan McCain - John McCain - Sarah Palin - George W. Bush - United States

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So yes, you know Vanity Fair has a long Sarah Palin profile in their October issue, and it has now gone up on the internets for the blogging and such, and it reveals things. Most importantly, of course, are the things about her underwear, so we had to get that to you right away. But there is a lot more in here: “anywhere you peel back the skin of Sarah Palin’s life, a sad and moldering strangeness lies beneath.” Yes, we basically knew that. But the banality of Piper’s evil dictatorship is not always banal, as there are plenty of fun nuggets of crazy in here. Oh, we will just tell you one: Sarah Palin probably doesn’t write those crazy tweets. THE INTERNET’S INNOCENCE IS RUINED!

According to Ben Smith, this article is a portrait of “Sarah Palin as monster,” which he is implying, we suppose, that she is not. Hmm, weird position to take. “But my takeaway from the magazine piece is more that you can really write anything about Palin,” he says.

Yes, generally. It could be because she is actually a monster, and thus anything is plausible. Or it could be because she is everything, because she is basically the Alpha and the Omega, the lipsticked Jesus, as she implies in her speeches to evangelicals and Teabaggers as depicted in the article.

So what tidbits should we pull out? Well, there’s this one:

When John McCain decided to pull out of Michigan, a decision Palin disagreed with, Recher and Palin hatched a plan one day to make an early-morning drive to Michigan anyway. The Secret Service, becoming aware of the plan, asked the McCain campaign what it should do. The answer came: “Shoot out the tires.”

Also, she doesn’t tip well! Also, one of her children was failing school when she was announced as McCain’s pick. (WHICH ONE? Trig? No, he is really competent at Down syndrome.) Also, hunting habits:

“This whole hunter thing, for Sarah? That is the biggest fallacy,” says one longtime friend of the family. “That woman has never hunted. The picture of her with the caribou she says she shot? She got out of the R.V. to pose for a picture. She never helps with the fishing either. It’s all a joke.” The friend goes on to recall that when Greta Van Susteren came to the house to interview Palin “[Sarah] cooked moose chili and whatnot. Todd was calling everyone he knew the day before—‘Do you got any moose?’ Desperate.”

And then there’s an implication about Sarah Palin’s tweets and Facebook messages after she hired a Conservatives4Palin blogger as a consultant:

But her voice, or at least a voice that sounds much like hers, was about to turn up in another venue. When it was first set up, in January 2009, Palin’s Facebook page might as well have been a file cabinet for official press releases (“Palin Pushes Parental Consent Legislation”) written mostly in a stiff, third-person form. The same was true of her Twitter feed, which went live in April. After Mansour’s voice disappeared on C4P, however, Palin’s voice on Facebook and Twitter started sounding increasingly provocative and irascible… Palin’s virtual voice does sometimes have the ring of authenticity. But often it sounds less like Palin herself than someone else’s fantasy version of Palin at her most vitriolic. On one occasion Palin’s virtual voice contradicted remarks she made in a TV interview two days later.

But most importantly, there’s a small chance we may not have to wait much longer for Palin to announce her presidential bid:

When Devon calls to tell her that Glenn Beck has booked the Dena’ina Center, the largest venue in Anchorage, for a speech on September 11, 2010, she sits bolt upright and yells. Immediately, they start trying to figure out what the news might mean. “Listen, listen, listen: Why in the world do you imagine Glenn Beck would come to Anchorage on 9/11? You think he might have a special guest? With a special announcement? Oh,” she says, her whole face falling as the implications of a Palin campaign kickoff hit her, “Jesus Christ.”

FIST PUMP! Make a batch of deviled Trig eggs, grab a beer, and sit down at your computer. HERE WE GO. [Politico/Vanity Fair]

Sarah Palin - Vanity Fair - Glenn Beck - Ben Smith - Greta Van Susteren

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Here’s how Lamestream Media magazine Vanity Fair describes the life of professional fraud and money-grubbing fame-beast Sarah Palin: “a sad and moldering strangeness lies beneath.” Gross! Also gross is Palin’s obsession with her “dirty undergarments,” which she presumably sells on Team SarahPAC to keep those checks from creepy old wingnut millionaires arriving in Wasilla. Let’s skip all the psychoanalysis — we sort of already knew she was a congenitally dishonest & delusional narcissistic paranoid creep — and get right to the part about her fouled underwear.

The greatest story of the 2008 campaign is how folksy slob Sarah Palin transformed overnight into the Mad Diva of the Presidential Suite, obsessed with designer labels and an endless supply of fancy new clothes paid for by old Republican donors. But once the Lamestream Media caught on, Palin tried to simultaneously feign ignorance of her own grifter clothes-horse obsession while desparately clinging to whatever soiled garments she could keep from being returned to Neiman Marcus:

… Palin was trying to figure out a way to hang on to some of the items: “Do they want the nylons and other things that are pretty worn, returned?” (And she asked a campaign aide, “Do they really want my dirty undergarments?” Indeed, Palin had something of a fixation on the handling of her undergarments, and insisted, when hotel maids did her laundry, that only campaign aides be allowed to touch those particular articles.) Attempting to wrest some control over the situation, she added, “I want say in the charities these will go to.”

[Vanity Fair]

Sarah Palin - Republican - Vanity Fair - Neiman Marcus - Wasilla Alaska

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Oh look who’s on teevee for the first time ever: Barack Obama, commander of all wars! Let’s liveblog his triumph or whatever it is — Orwellian something-or-other, according to Sarah Palin.

8:05 PM — He talked to George W. Bush on the phone! And yet, he did not praise George W. Bush for starting this most awesome war ever, in Iraq.
8:06 PM — Because of the middle class we don’t have, and the trillion dollars we borrowed from the Chinese, now we can’t have nice things.
8:08 PM — Education, manufacturing, all of these things we just don’t have now … just like Iraq, today!
8:09 PM — But we must challenge our failures just like the soldiers did, somewhere. Treat your mortgage like an IED, for freedom!
8:13 PM — And now there will be a new G.I. bill, etc., and everybody can buy houses! Oh wait.
8:16 PM — Here comes the “sincere part,” with the story and the war sadness and the “light of peace.” Eh, needs more terror knuckles.
8:18 PM — Listen how he says “Kandahar.” No wonder he’s so half-Muslin, just like his grandpa who fought in the World War II.
8:19 PM — And … that’s it.
8:19 PM — Except for the 50,000 American troops still in Iraq, forever.
8:20 PM — According to Anderson Cooper, counter of paragraphs, there were “roughly 30 paragraphs” in the speech.
8:21 PM — David Gergen finds this “perplexing.” For perhaps the first time, we agree completely with David Gergen’s opinion.
8:21 PM — Peter Bergen, the “opposite name” of David Gergen, says this is sort of like Obama’s West Point speech, which was also one of those “we’ll keep slogging along, because that’s what we do, but good lord does it suck.”
8:23 PM — Obama also wanted Democrats to stop questioning the patriotism/smarts of George W. Bush, who loves Truth.
8:24 PM — Wolf Blitzer thinks a very “powerful message” was sent to Iraq and Afghanistan. We must’ve slept through that part.
8:25 PM — WHAT??? The CNN correspondent standing by a palm tree in Baghdad in the middle of the night says that for the Iraqis, “tomorrow their lives will be the same.” Well they must’ve also slept through the powerful message part, when Obama granted all Iraqis three wishes.
8:30 PM — More than a million American troops served time in Iraq. Some 40,000 were injured, 5,000 were killed. Nobody has any real idea how many Iraqis died, but it was closer to “a million” than “5,000.”
8:33 PM — And MSNBC’s already on to the next subject, Joe Miller in Alaska.
8:35 PM — Fox News is sticking to the subject! They are seriously worried, about what Obama is/isn’t doing! After all, think about Iran! ALWAYS think about Iran.
8:36 PM — Oh crap, it’s the Bill O’Reilly show. Who cares. Nobody on Fox even cares about Bill O’Reilly in 2010. Hey Bill, go dress up like a Mormon Amway salesman and cry in front of a monument, maybe then the wingtards will lurve you again. (PS: They never did.)
8:37 PM — What’s his name from the Newsweek hotel-blog is talking about an “awakening” in Iraq. He is always writing bullshit about awakenings or lack thereof. Everything is a world-changing event to this guy.
8:38 PM — Anderson Cooper, dumbly, wonders if this quick dull speech will “unify people.” David Gergen, he chuckles at this, in a derisive tone! Why didn’t Bush get a medal for the SURGE???
8:40 PM — Oh lookee there’s a live webchat on whitehouse.gov, here:

8:41 PM — Sure is weird to have this running live on Wonkette and streaming off the White House site, too. Meaning, ECHO ECHO ECHO.
8:42 PM — What we really want is some embeddable video of the actual speech, so you can “see for yourself” or whatever. It zipped by so quickly — and with so little distinction — that we would rather watch it again, too, rather than talk about people talking about it.

George W Bush - Barack Obama - Iraq - Sarah Palin - United States

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It is time for our final installment, in which Ayn must pay for her foul deeds … and economic justice is most certainly served.

If you wish to be tortured again, head back to the beginning. Your artist has a twitter, and an art blog, too … Galt4EVER, fuckaz!

Social justice - Art blog - Ayn Rand - People - United States

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GlennBeckPalooza is finally over, as you can probably tell from the smoking ruins of America left in the wake of the Martians’ attack. “Okay we have HAD IT with you idiots,” the Martians said, before bombing every last Taco Bell and WalMart from coast to coast. Now there’s nothing left. But did Glenn Beck’s followers at least have fun at the Historical better-than-MLK gathering of the diabetic? Not so much. Not so goddamned much at all. Let’s have a last glance at the “Restoring Horror” meetup, courtesy of Wonkette contributing war photographer Dana Ryan, and never speak of this wretched event again.

We doubt this guy even had fun, and it was his Jesus-Hitler party! What a fuckin’ letdown, right Glenn? Even you were probably surprised to see this slow-moving decrepit old crowd of toothless whiteys playing unintentional bumper cars on their Cooler Cruizers.

But how many fools actually showed up for this thing? As usual, estimates were lower when Jesus-hating math experts were involved: CBS News hired AirPhotosLive.com to do aerial counting and came up with 87,000. “With a 9,000-person margin of error,” Newser reported, “the real number could be anywhere between 78,000 and 96,000.”

Actual insane person Michele Bachmann asked her friend God how many people were there and He told her “totally more than a million,” which is why she then said, “We’re not going to let anyone get away with saying there were less than a million here today — because we were witnesses.”

It was cool that Courtney Love’s grandma showed up, though. Or was it?

Does anyone have any idea what’s happening here? Is this some kind of translation service to an even lower form of language than whatever word-blender nonsense spews from Palin’s awful fishmouth?

Glenn Beck - CBS News - Courtney Love - Michele Bachmann - Jesus

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While there’s really no important differences between the famous hippie-rock sexytime known as Woodstock and the fat old slobfest known as “A few thousand Glenn Beck viewers wheeled out on the lawn for a spell,” historians say the two events are not exactly alike. For example, while millions of ’60s People spun false memories of attending the rural New York music festival, absolutely no-one will ever claim, in years to come, to have attended GlennBeckPalooza.

But what about this Rebel Leader’s sign? (He/She is a rebel because Glenn Beck commanded his followers to leave the misspelled racist signs at home.) What does this sign mean? As always when dealing with the illiterate, what it actually says often has little or no correlation to what it was intended to mean. “In memory,” as English speakers know, is a translation of the Latin in memoriam, and is used respectfully to mention the dead.

According to this atheist child-hater’s sign, God is dead. So is the American Jesus religion (hooray!). So is freedom, “peace” (?), and “our wives” and “our children.” Everything these people claim to like is 100% dead … except Frito Lay products, which were never technically “alive.” These callous clumps of cellulite have come to our Nation’s Capitol to piss through their Depends on the grave of Jesus Christ, our lord & savior. Monsters.

Well, aren’t we a Proud Nation, with our giant sloganized smock-shirts and Chinese “American” flags and jumbo coolers full of corn syrup and cancer. “Restoring Honor?” More like “Confirming every stereotype about a ruined nation stuffed full of dumb white trash.”

And here is their Idol, a hunchbacked fishmouthed monstrosity who will burst out of the hell-depths whenever anybody baits a hook with $100,000.

Glenn Beck - United States - Sarah Palin - Colonial Williamsburg - New York

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The Lincoln Memorial is truly a beautiful and inspiring setting for any rally at Our Nation’s Soviet Capitol, which is on the other side of the National Mall. Is there anything that could improve the dramatic visuals of the majestic Greek Revival temple with its Doric columns and solemn Colossus seated within?

How about putting up some shitty posters with childish caricatures of Lincoln, to block the actual Memorial from the wilting gaze of the wilted attendees? It’s an idea so stupid, it just might work! (If by “work” you mean, “hide the Lincoln Memorial, lest it distract from the radiant beauty of Glenn Beck.)

Oh hell, why not just put up a giant banner with a crappy picture of the Lincoln Memorial on it, and put that in front of the actual Lincoln Memorial? Insane? Well perhaps it is, perhaps it is … and perhaps the Muppets were insane, too. Or, as John Hodgman wrote in The Areas Of My Expertise:

This was a movie about puppets who go to Hollywood to become stars. As they travel, they frequently consult the script of the movie in order to know what to do next. When they reach Hollywood, they begin making a movie about the movie the viewer has just been watching. The puppets build plywood simulacra of props that, earlier in the film, were represented as real. Then the roof of the soundstage smashes in and a powerful rainbow shines down and obliterates everything, including a plywood imitation of the fake rainbow that had appeared in the first scene. The frog and bear and pig simulations panic as the fake/real and real/fake worlds nearly destroy each other. The puppets then look directly into the camera and instruct the viewer that “life’s like a movie: write your own ending.”

Are we reliving the counter-culture classic Easy Rider right now, as freedumb’s just another word for nothing left to lose? All they wanted, was to be free. And that’s the way, it turned out to be.

Lincoln Memorial - Glenn Beck - United States - National Mall - John Hodgman

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As more people lose their jobs and homes, pets are being abandoned in record numbers, leaving local shelters overflowing with animals as adoption lags.

That’s the cheery opening to another grim “families are taking their beloved pets to be executed” story, this from the once-wealthy resort town of Palm Springs, California. What next, dropping babies off to be “put to sleep” because mommy doesn’t have a job and daddy hasn’t been heard from for a long, long time?

Almost! In the meantime, Americans have simply stopped having babies. While idiot white trash like Bristol Palin may continue to poop out unwanted children, most poor Americans (and by that we mean, “most Americans”) have figured out that Jeebus turned off the Penney’s card and Paychex Advance storefronts are less welcoming when you have no paychex. The U.S. birthrate has suddenly and violently collapsed:

The U.S. birth rate has dropped for the second year in a row, and experts think the wrenching recession led many people to put off having children. The 2009 birth rate also set a record: lowest in a century.

Births fell 2.7% last year even as the population grew, numbers released Friday by the National Center for Health Statistics show.

Granted, at least some Americans are still managing to find each others’ diseased genitalia under those flaps of fat and get busy makin’ babies, because the 2009 U.S. birthrate was 13.5 per 1,000 people. But that’s down from 14.3 in 2007, before the economic collapse became inescapable.(European countries such as France and Germany and the UK are seeing birth rate increases.)

Along with the 14% of mortgage holders currently in default or foreclosure and the latest collapse of both new and existing home sales and the continued decline in consumer spending and the total crackdown on any kind of small-business or consumer credit, you may be forgiven for completely forgetting about the Robust Recovery that our nation supposedly enjoyed earlier this year.

United States - Birth rate - Bristol Palin - New York - National Center for Health Statistics

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