The "See Ya, Asshole" Award
This award is given as a swan song to those who through assholery or just plain natural causes, have bowed out of the public eye. It is given to those whose shit stench will linger on. The nominees are...
Donald Rumsfeld
Whether the Iraq War was an endeavor doomed from the start is a question that will be debated for decades to come. What is undebatable is that in the hands of our recently resigned Secretary of Defense, Iraq has become an unwinnable clusterfuck that will stain our nation with shame for generations.
The ideas behind some of his reforms are not all bad. Changing the military from the bloated beast of the Cold War to a more rapid reaction force is a great idea in theory. However, even an armchair general such as myself who regularly gets his ass kicked playing Risk knows that you need overwhelming force to invade and pacify a country, especially one that's a cauldron of religious and social strife such as Iraq. Not to mention allowing little scandals such as Abu-Gharaib to occur, which did little to win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people.
The biggest question is why it took President Bush so long to fire the guy? Oh well, this asshole is now officially out of a position where he can cause anymore real problems. He can go on to collect his thousands of dollars worth of speaking fees on the lecture circuit, or just get a CEO position from one of his military/industrial complex cronies.
Saddam Hussein
Famous people tend to die in threes, but few come in as bizarre a triumverate as our final batch of 2006 which included Gerald Ford, James Brown, and Saddam Hussein. After a year-long trial by the Iraqi government and two short months of appeals, the Butcher of Baghdad finally went to the gallows.
Sure, his death was pretty much a foregone conclusion ever since he was dragged out of his spiderhole in December 2003 by US forces, but to Americans who are used to death penalty cases taking a decade to run their course, Saddam's execution came pretty suddenly on December 30th. President Bush--who being the former governor of Texas and a true execution enthusiast--stated after his execution that Hussein had received "the kind of justice that he denied the victims of his brutal regime." This is one of the few times I'm inclined to agree with Dub.
While its easy to look back with rose-colored glasses to a time when Saddam ran Iraq and we didn't, let's not forget that Hussein has been a grade-A fucker for a long time. His torture techniques (which included dismemberment, eye-gouging, and electric shocks) make ours look like amateur hour. He beheaded women for allegations of prostitution for breakfast, had some of his family members executed for lunch, then nerve gassed thousands of Kurds for dinner and dessert. He also spawned Uday and Qusay, who were homicidal bastards in their own right.
Saddam's execution, of course, isn't going to do much to change how insanely screwed up the situation in Iraq is. But let's ignore that for a moment and take a moment and smile that one more deserving asshole got sent to his seventy-two virgins this year.
Kenneth Lay
This past year, we also laid to rest one of the biggest corporate scumbags in recent memory. I won't recount here the ways that "Kenny Boy" and the crew at Enron bilked investors out of billions and their employees out of their life savings. Lay's death itself put him beyond the pale of justice.
See, Lay conveniently died before he'd exhausted his appeals on his conviction for fraud and conspiracy. Since he had yet to be sentenced, his conviction has been (as of October of this year) abated by the courts, thus putting what remains of his estate beyond the reach of any civil suits. Mr. Lay also gets to go to the Pearly Gates without a felony record on his jacket.
Even more embarrassing was his Aspen funeral, which was attended by no less than former President George H.W. Bush. The praise lavished on "Kenny Boy" in death was embarrassing. One went so far as to call him the victim of "a lynching". If they'd bothered to put one of Lay's former employees on the pulpit instead of his power elite cronies, they would probably have given a much more accurate eulogy than that.
The "Well Packed Asshole" Award
Let's face it; being gay doesn't raise many eyebrows any more. When Lance Bass of N'SYNC shame announced he was gay earlier this year, it was met with an almost universal "Who gives a shit?" Nobody gives a shit, unless of course you're a right-wing hypocrite nattering on about morality and sin while simultaneously getting your fudge pushed in. This year's nominees are...
Mark Foley
The disgraced former Florida (where else?) Congressman-slash-Scientologist kicked off the Republicans' downward spiral last October. Transcripts of his instant messages to Congressional pages surfaced, which showed Foley cajoling the teenagers to send him pics, and offering to provide them alcohol and oral sex if they would meet with him. On two occasions, Foley showed up drunk to the pages' dormitory and had to be shooed off by the adult supervisor. Foley even engaged in cybersex with a former page in the middle of a House vote on an appropriations bill to fund the Iraq War in April 2003.
To slap on an additional coat of hypocrisy to this sorry scandal, Foley was also chairman of the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children and pushed for strict laws regarding "child models" that was so broad it would have banned even innocent pictures of children and teenagers on the Internet. He was also instrumental in passing federal legislation for a national sex offender registry.
While there is no evidence that Foley ever had sex with anyone underage, his instant messages were enough to kill his political career within a week of them surfacing. Of course Foley tried to deflect blame by first citing alcoholism, and when no one bought that, he did the other old standby and said a priest raped him. The Foley scandal might not have been the knockout blow for the Republicans in November, but it was a deadly accurate harbinger of what was to come.
Ted Haggard
This election cycle brought us not just one, but two gay scandals. Just as the Foley scandal was simmering down, a gay prostitute named Mike Jones came forward with allegations that one of his regular clients was Pastor Ted, founder of the New Life Church in Colorado Springs. Besides sexual services, Jones also scored crystal meth for the good pastor.
Prior to this scandal, Haggard was one of the most powerful evangelical leaders in the country. Besides his Colorado based mega church, he was also the president of the National Association of Evangelicals and a good friend of Focus on the Family founder James Dobson. Haggard was even seen in the documentary Jesus Camp decrying homosexuality, and was a supporter of Colorado Amendment 43, which banned same-sex marriage. Pastor Ted also had the ear of the Bush administration, speaking with either the president or his advisors on a weekly basis.
Many saw the allegations as down-and-dirty election week politicking. However, Pastor Ted began to quickly affirm Jones's allegations with the usual Clinton-esque hedges like he just went to him "for a massage" and that he bought the meth, but didn't use it.
Few believed him, and within a week Pastor Ted had resigned from his leadership of both his church and the NAE disgraced and disavowed by Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, forgiving souls that they are. His only remaining friend is James Dobson, who arranged for "spiritual counseling" for Haggard (which includes such Orwellian devices such as polygraph machines) to rid him of his homosexuality.
The "Evil Asshole" Award
Words like "good" and "evil" tend to get thrown around rather loosely by pundits looking for a cheap and easy way to spice up their rhetoric. While this Manichean worldview tends to obscure the fact that most moral choices are essentially gray, occasionally (as in the case of our first nominee) it fits like a glove. This award goes out to outstanding achievements in plumbing the bottom of mankind's moral abyss...
OJ Simpson
In an abortive stunt that set a new low in crassness, HarperCollins announced this November that it would release a book that contained Orenthal James Simpson's sort-of confession. Shrouded in semantic dodges, the autobiography If I Did It contained a chapter describing "hypothetically" how The Juice turned his ex-wife Nicole Brown and her boyfriend Ron Goldman into human Pez dispensers. Since HarperCollins is a subsidiary of News Corp, the release of the book was to be preceded by two If I Did It television specials on Fox that would include interviews with Simpson.
The lawyers, of course, worked overtime to make sure the manuscript wouldn't be legally incriminating and that OJ would get to keep all of the 3.5 million dollars he received for the pseudo-confession. Though OJ had been found not-guity in the criminal trial, he was convicted a few years later in a civil trial for the wrongful death of Ron Goldman and ordered to pay $33 million to his family (to this date, OJ hasn't paid a dime of the judgement).
While HarperCollins and Fox were certainly expecting a firestorm to come out of this, they didn't figure that in this cynical era the outrage would be so vicious. Sixteen Fox affiliate stations refused to air the interview and many independent bookstores refused to stock it. Finally, Rupert Murdoch was shamed into cancelling the project (or, more likely, saw the revolt of the advertisers and decided the project was no longer viable).
You would think that after OJ pretty much got away with murder that he would lay low for the rest of his life. But it looks like, as with most assholes, OJ just can't keep himself out of the limelight.
The Westboro Baptist Church
When George W. Bush ran for the presidency in 2000, he claimed he would be "a uniter, not a divider". Of course, with political partisanship now at an all time high, we see how that turned out. How can the rift in our divided country be healed? A spunky little church out of Kansas thinks they have the answer.
Seriously, what common ground does pretty much every person regardless of their political or religious beliefs have? They all hate the Westboro Baptist Church.
Of course Fred Phelps and his clan have been assholes for a long time. Their mandate, to picket the funerals of gay people and soldiers and just about anything that might qualify as tragic is so tangled in logical gymnastics and fallacy it makes your head spin. Some have even postulated that this is all a scam by the notoriously litigious church to get people to attack them so they can collect some lawsuit money.
So fuck you Westboro. Fuck you for being the first people I wish the First Amendment didn't apply to. Fuck you for actually making me agree with Sean Hannity for once. Fuck you for being just plain assholes.
Steven D. Green
The military career of Private First Class Steven Green is a short but incredibly sordid one. A high-school dropout from Texas, Green enlisted with the US Army on several moral waivers for the numerous drug and alcohol offenses he'd been charged with (Green's enlistment came just days after he'd been arrested for underage drinking).
After training with the 101st Airborne Division, PFC Green was sent to Iraq in September 2005. "I came over here because I wanted to kill people" PFC Green said to a reporter in February 2006 over a meal of turkey cutlets. A month later, he and four other soldiers raided a house in the town of Mahmoudiyah, which was home to one Abeer Quassim Hamza. The fourteen-year old girl caught the soldiers' attention at a checkpoint earlier. After they entered the home, PFC Green rounded up Abeer Quassim's mother, father, and five year old sister in the living room and shot them dead. Green and the other soldiers proceeded to gang rape the teenage girl. When they were finished, Green shot Abeer Quassim Hamza three times in the head and set the house on fire.
Two months later, PFC Green was honorably discharged from the Army due to an "antisocial personality disorder." This occurred before the Army had any knowledge of the murders in Mahmoudiyah. When the allegations of the murders did surface, the FBI arrested Steven Green. Since he was civilian when he was charged, Steven Green is unlikely to face the death penalty, unlike the four other soldiers involved who are subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
While the Mahmoudiyah incident is smaller than the Haditha massacre in scale, it dwarfs the latter in calculated sadism. It also raises the specter of similar incidents that occurred during the Vietnam War, an image that the Army has spent decades trying to shed. This incident, which further poisons the hearts and minds of the Iraqis to our presence in their country has put our soldiers at risk. In fact, one soldier in Green's platoon was shot and two others captured and tortured in retaliation for the Mahmoudiyah incident.
Few of us at home can understand the pressures put on our soldiers abroad, and the vast majority of them conduct themselves honorably and professionally. However, my empathy falls short of condoning psychotic war criminal scum such as Private Green.
Kim Jong-Il
Its long been suspected that North Korea has the capability to create nuclear weapons. But like his attempts to test long-range missiles, Kim Jong-Il's bid to make his squalid little dictatorship into a nuclear power fell hilariously flat.
On October 3rd, North Korea announced it was going to conduct its first weapons test, claiming to have a 4-megaton device (which is a historically low yield for an inaugural nuclear weapon). This announcement set off a frenzy in the international community, with diplomats on both sides exchanging grave warnings of retribution to each other.
That is, until North Korea actually conducted the test six days later. The world said, "Is that it?" like a girl whose boyfriend just suffered a case of premature ejaculation. Seismic analysis indicated the force of the explosion was under 1 kiloton, and by some estimates was only half that. By comparison, the Trinity test fifty-one years ago yielded a force of 20 kilotons. The North Korean test yielded less tonnage than many tactical nukes, and was so low it could have been simulated with conventional explosives. A small amount of trace radiation in the atmosphere around the site is the only proof that the explosion was in some way nuclear.
Of course, no one was impressed by K-Jong's weak new toy. The international community uniformly condemned the test, but no military action was seriously considered. Kim Jong-Il allegedly apologized to the Chinese ambassador for conducting the test and by the end of the month had agreed to re-enter the six-nation negotiations regarding it's pathetic nuclear arms program.
The "Loudmouth Asshole" Award
In the world punditry, no one likes a moderate. No one likes a reasoned argument if a stupid, louder, more venomous one is available. Sure, such attack dog debating tactics may be poisoning discourse in this country but you have to admit; it sure is entertaining.
While you'd think that in this polarized climate there is nothing that is off the table and nothing that goes too far, there are still those who still find a way. This award goes to outstanding achievement in sticking your foot in your mouth, cruelly and stupidly. The nominees are...
Rush Limbaugh
I could fill pages describing the metric tons of stupid shit that spills from Rimbo's mouth. But when he criticized Michael J. Fox's ad for stem cell research, he hit another low. Here was one person who got in trouble for taking drugs criticizing another person for not taking theirs. Even some of his fan base of "dittoheads" thought he crossed the line, and Rush backpedaled pretty quickly for a person who doesn't back down from anything he says.
Ann Coulter
Realistically, the radical right's pin-up girl could make this list any year. Raggedy Ann has made being a total bitch a cottage industry. There are many otherwise polite people who start yelling "fucking cunt" at their TVs every time her horse face appears. Ann is here this time around for that nasty line in her book Godless about the 9/11 widows "dancing on their husbands graves." Certainly the personal tragedies of the Jersey Girls or Cindy Sheehans of this world do not put them above all criticism when they enter the political realm. But there are certain lines that shouldn't be crossed.
Try a little humanity, Ann.
The "Racist Asshole" Award
Perhaps it's a tribute to how far we've come that racism has gone from being an institutionalized ill in our society to just being extremely tacky. Racism may never go away, but we prefer it swept under the rug. The nominees for outstanding achievement in reminding us all how much we really hate each other are...
Mel Gibson
Dear Mr. Gibson...around the time The Passion of the Christ was released, there was a whole bunch of brou-ha-ha over your portrayal of the Jews and your father's anti-Semitism. I thought your detractors were stretching; after all, historically the Jews did let the Romans kill Jesus so it wasn't like you were being inaccurate, and I didn't want to put the sins of the father on you. Besides, Mad Max was a kick ass film and I still get teary eyed when I watch Braveheart.
Well, thanks for confirming everyone's worst fears about you. After being arrested for drunk driving, you decided to let spill a deluge of anti-Semitic insults at the police arresting you. That's in bad taste in any circumstance, but is especially bad for you considering you work in an industry that is run by Jews who I don't think will be inviting you to their grandson's bris anytime soon.
Now, if only Borat had the opportunity to interview you. Great Success!
Michael Richards
While Mel at least has the defense that he was blind drunk when he started going off about the "Juden", Mr. Richards has no such defense. During a brief stand-up set at Los Angeles's Laugh Factory, "KKKramer" went ballistic on some hecklers with an unfunny tirade that tried to reclaim the N-word for white people. This being the age of camera phones and Youtube, the clip circulated quickly and became the top story during a slow news cycle. Now it's the former Seinfeld star making the gestures of contrition like he's got "a fork in his ass", prostrating himself embarrassingly in front of the likes of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton.
(Perhaps I should take this opportunity to point a middle finger at Gloria Allred, the attorney now suing Richards on behalf of some of the offended hecklers for monetary damages for "emotional distress". What Richards said was extremely rude, but this is just a sick attempt to score an easy settlement, as well as another example of why we need some serious tort reform. Way to lose the moral high ground fellas...)
The "Political Asshole" Award
With leaders like these, who needs enemies? By nature, all politicians are scumbags--some are just scummier than others. In the award for being a stupid, hypocritical bastard in elected office, the nominees are...
John Kerry
Back in 2004, the Democrats framed John Kerry as the more erudite, intellectual, and articulate alternative to the often-bumbling George W. Bush. I never bought the Swift Boat Vets line that he was a coward in Vietnam (though I also don't buy that the guy was Rambo either). The only time Bush was ever in Vietnam was during a diplomatic tour last month.
Still, it turns out his grades at Yale weren't that much better than Shrub's (and in some cases, they were worse). And when it came time for him to speak during this year's Congressional elections, he flubbed a joke in a very bad way, pretty much blowing the perception that he is the more articulate of the two as well. I believe Kerry when he says that his joke was actually supposed to be a swipe at George Bush (albeit, a pretty lame one) but in the political world, such things make all the difference. Now Hillary has one less candidate to worry about in '08 the primaries.
Dick Cheney
Like most of the war hawks of the neo-conservative cabal, Richard Bruce Cheney had cold feet when it came to serving in Vietnam. His reluctance to go to war has been criticized, but in retrospect perhaps it's a good thing that he never got his paws on an M-16. Assholes and guns don't mix.
Last February, Cheney went on a drunken trophy-hunting trip in Texas with his lawyer buddy Harry Whittington. Despite the fact that the owners of the ranch the hunt took place on practically throw the quail in front of their customers' shotguns, Dead-Eye Dick managed to miss the bird and instead "peppered" his hunting partner, which sent him into coronary arrest when on of the pellets punctured his heart. Though the shooting happened on the 11th, it was not reported until afternoon the next day, giving Cheney plenty of time to sober up and the Secret Service's "Dead Hooker Removal Crew" time to clean up any evidence that might incriminate the vice-president.
Luckily Mr. Whittington survived the shooting. So powerful is the Force with Darth Cheney that when Whittington was released from the hospital a week later, he actually *apologized* to Dick for having been shot by him and for "the pain it must have caused his family."
Tom Delay
This year has not been good for Republicans, but it's been even worse for Tom Delay. The former House Majority Leader has long been a divisive figure because of his hardball tactics. Known inside the party as "The Hammer", Delay was ruthless in enforcing party discipline within the House. In the 90's, he was responsible for setting up K-Street, which encouraged lobbying firms to hire Republicans to top positions and cozy the party up to large corporate donors. He was instrumental in getting Bill Clinton impeached for the Monica Lewinsky scandal. After the 2000 census, Delay was a large part of the redistricting that made Texas into one of the most effectively gerrymandered states in the country. During the Terri Schiavo debacle, Delay was one of the most vocal, calling the removal of the feeding tube "an act of barbarism", despite the fact that he'd taken his own father off of life support in 1988. Yes, Delay is a hypocritical jerk-off of the highest order (he regularly smokes illegal Cuban cigars, despite being ferverently against the Castro regime).
Delay may have rose to power through a simple formula of venom and shamelessness, but things quickly unraveled when his friend, the black-trenchcoated lobbyist Jack Abramoff pled guilty to three felony accounts of corrupting public officials. Abramoff had regular dealings with Delay, giving him gifts of golf trips to Scotland and the use of his private skybox for fundraisers. He wrote letters to then-Attorney General John Ashcroft calling for the closure of several Indian casinos that Abramoff and his partners were busy defrauding.
But the deathblow came when his political action committee Texans for a Republican Majority was accused of receiving illegal donations from corporations, laundering the money through the Republican National Committee, and then distributing it to Republican candidates running for office in Texas. Delay was indicted, and due to party rules he had to step down from his position as House Majority Leader. Despite winning his district's primary, Delay decided to not run for re-election, since the avalanche of scandals piling up at his doorstep was compromising his candidacy. This November, a Democrat won in Texas's 22nd District, a seat that Delay had held for twenty-two years.
Tom Delay is now mercifully away from Congress where he can do less harm. Now, he does what all shrill weasels eventually do: blog.
The "Pathetic Asshole" Award
They aren't murderers. They aren't dictators. They have little power. Still, they need to fuck off and die. The nominees are...
John Mark Karr
This Christmas marks the ten-year anniversary of the murder of Jonbenet Ramsey. The six-year old girl, who was regularly dressed as pedo-bait for creepy child beauty pageants, was found strangled to death in her home the day after Christmas, though there were no signs of forced entry. Her parents, John and Patsy, quickly became objects of suspicion due to the unusual circumstances surrounding her death. But due to the botched murder investigation by the Boulder Police Department, there was not enough evidence to convict them or anyone else of the murder. To overdramatic writers, it was "the loss of innocence for a small mountain town." At the very least, the crime was one of the great whodunits of the 90's.
Besides the death of Patsy Ramsey, who succumbed to ovarian cancer in June of this year, the Jonbenet case had been far from the headlines for quite some time. That is until a few months later when out of the blue, it was announced that a pedophile in Thailand confessed to the murder.
John Mark Karr, the 41 year-old, eyeliner-wearing poster child of the Michael Jackson School of Arrested Adulthood had been exchanging e-mails with Michael Tracey, a CU journalism professor, describing how he "made love" to Jonbenet and had killed her "accidentally" during sex. Thai police arrested Karr, since they were worried that he was preparing to rape a little girl in their country. John Mark Karr was arrested and extradited back to Colorado. He flew first class, sipping wine and munching on coconut shrimp all the way home.
Details of how Karr was connected to the Jonbenet murder were scarce, but even to people with only a casual knowledge of the case, things didn't seem to add up. After all, in the ten years since the murder, John Mark Karr had never been mentioned even once and his ex-wife claimed that Karr wasn't even in the state of Colorado during Christmas of 2006.
A DNA test was done on Karr against samples found at the crime scene and came back negative. John Mark Karr's confession had been a hoax, timed to get him extradited before he was charged with child molestation by the more draconian Thai courts. His trip home and the cost of DNA test came out to $30,000, which came out of the pockets of the city of the frequently humiliated city of Boulder.
After the charges of Jonbenet's death were dropped, Karr was extradited to California on child pornography charges, but those too were dismissed since the evidence had already been destroyed. Currently, John Mark Karr is a free man. He may occasionally pop in on TV to submit himself to the hardball questions of Larry King, but for the most part, Karr is now nothing more than a gross footnote to the little girl's death.
Kevin Federline
The sorry tale of K-Fed is probably the only tabloid celebrity story I followed like a fiend this year. He vaulted to fame two years ago as the wife of Britney Spears (dumping his baby's momma Shar Jackson and his two kids in the process), and is generally believed responsible for remaking the dim-bulb pop sensation into "trailer-trash-that-won-the-lottery" paparazzi fodder.
Of course K-Fed had to do more to fill his time besides spend his wife's money on VIP rooms and bottle service at ritzy Los Angeles clubs, so he decided to launch a music career. Being a talentless douchebag with delusions of street credibility, he was naturally attracted to rap music and dropped his debut album Playing With Fire at the end of October. Filled with witless lyrics about smoking weed and whining about his alleged superstardom, Playing With Fire sold a mere six-thousand copies in it's first week (presumably purchased by music critics looking for an easy evisceration) before dropping off the Billboard charts entirely. His concert tour was similarly disastrous, with half of the dates being cancelled despite tickets being literally given away by the promoters. The only success his rap debut incurred was swiping the crown of "Worst White Rapper Ever" away from Vanilla Ice.
Further tragedy befell Federline when less than a week after his album debuted, Britney decided to divorce Federline and informed him via text message while a Canadian camera crew looked on. Since his windfall from the divorce limited by an airtight pre-nuptial agreement, Fed-Ex now trolls for work on cable reality shows specializing in D-grade celebrities before the last whiff of his celebrity evaporates for good.
But the damage done by Federline is beyond measure. Once upon a time, people could have made careers having gotten a picture of Britney Spear's snatch. But after being distended by K-Fed's back-to-back crotch droppings, the sight of it brought merely the existential emptiness of an anti-climax.
9/11 Conspiracy Theorists
I don't trust the government and honestly, I don't see why anyone does. Whether its weapons of mass destruction, Watergate or "I did not have sex with that woman", its pretty much an accepted fact that our leaders lie to us on a regular basis. I can't blame people for having some skepticism over the 9/11 attacks. After all, the Warren Commission had more support from the executive branch than the 9-11 Commission. Skepticism is healthy; paranoia is not.
Paranoia is also significantly more annoying. If you haven't already, you will likely run into the 9/11 Conspiracy Theorist at some time in your life. They will quickly bowl you over with litany of "facts" regarding how the World Trade Centers were brought down with controlled demolitions and how the Pentagon was actually hit by a cruise missile because the passengers on American Airlines Flight 77 were secretly unloaded at an Air Force Base and are now being held prisoner in Guantanamo Bay. Point out that their reasoning has holes you could fly a 757 through and they will immediately label you another brainwashed minion of Fox News and a vapid American culture that questions nothing as long as they can still log into Myspace.
And strangely enough, they are the more sane members of the 9/11 Conspiracy Club. Your typical Joe Blow on the "Arab street" is likely to believe that the myth that there were no Jews in the World Trade Center is an established fact (then again, everything is a Zionist conspiracy with those folk). They are as stupid as the rednecks in this country that STILL think that Iraq had something to do with 9/11.
While I don't dismiss all conspiracy theories out of hand (after all, I still believe that Lee Harvey Oswald was a CIA agent) the mountains of evidence refuting the majority of the claims of 9/11 conspiracies is undeniable, and most people that still cling to them do nothing but wallow in the torpor of their pathetic little Cassandra Complexes.
Video Bloggers
As if reading blog after boring blog of people going on about how depressed they are or how so-and-so snubbed them in the lunchroom wasn't bad enough, the sudden rise in popularity of sites like Youtube have now given rise to a new era; that of the video blog.
At least with blogging, the barrier for entry was a rudimentary knowledge of the English language. Now, all that's required is a webcam and a willingness to completely embarrass yourself in front of strangers. This fad has crossed over all socio-economic levels, from the teenage emo chick going off about how My Chemical Romance's new album makes her want to cut herself, to the fortysomething office clerk ranting for five minutes over something Bill O'Reilly said the other night for merely two minutes.
Get it straight. The only reason to use Youtube is browse illegal clips of The Colbert Report and old music videos. I'm not emoting with you, I'm laughing at you.
People who believe there's a "War on Christmas"
This supposed "war" first surfaced last winter, with people supposedly being attacked for saying "Merry Christmas" instead of "Happy Holidays" or something like that. After Christmas, after the presents were unwrapped, a subset of Christians felt sufficiently victimized and we were graciously relieved of their bleating. But like a freezer-burned fruitcake, this tired meme has surfaced again this past holiday season, promising to be a holiday tradition like A Charlie Brown Christmas or It's a Wonderful Life.
Get it straight...besides a few fringe loonies, no one wants Christmas to go away. Everybody likes elves and eggnog and long return lines and maxed out credit cards. We love hanging out with our bitter relatives and listening to children throw temper tantrums when they get a PSP instead of the Wii they wanted.
Everybody loves Christmas and really, the only thing all of us want to go to "war" on is your manufactured outrage.
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