The Long Bomb

I'm all for freedom of speech. I'm practically one of those ACLU homos who believes everyone should be able to say whatever they want even if their very presence automatically offends me, like the homeless or white rappers. Just because you snuck Eminem past us doesn't mean you've made up for House of Pain, snowflake. I can't in good conscience deny your right to expression, but that doesn't mean you're not on notice.

I am free to do many things that I shouldn't actually do. There is no ordinance barring me from posting an eleven-part series of illustrated photos of my vasectomy scars here on this blog. But I don't. Why don't I? Because my iPhone doesn't have a flash.

Also: vasectomy aftermath scars would overwhelm whatever message I was trying to convey on this blog forever and ever after. Pictures of a scrotum will do that on the internet. I go from being the mildly amusing guy who writes 11 words where three will do to the place people go to find pictures of balls. OK, not THE, but certainly A. The point is it warps the bigger picture. So I self-regulate. At least until I can save up to buy a proper digital camera.

If I'm a Tea Party douchebag and part of my M.O. is to call the media anti-American Jew socialists, I'm already up against it, P.R.-wise. So I have to be doubly careful with how I conduct myself in public. It's probably not the best idea to go all frothy at the corners of the mouth and N-bomb a congressman who had his head caved in in the name of civil rights like 40 years ago. This is bad news. And then to present as defense the rock-solid never-fails logic-proof "absence of evidence = evidence of absence" defense based on a video taken at not-at-all the same time, the hole, she is dug. Please, just stop talking. You are doing yourselves no good.

But this is my favorite part of an actual defense: ""It didn't happen," said [totally impartial professional internet genius Andrew] Breitbart, who wasn't there. "This is 2010. Even a racist is media-savvy enough not to yell the N-word."

So we can dismiss the first part based on the AWESOME journalistic deadpan insert "...who wasn't there." Jesse Washington, AP, on your Pulitzer Prize 2011 ballot. But probably won't win because "Jesse Washington"? Gotta be a black guy.

The second part I love. Not "we don't have racists in the Tea Party movement!" It's "look, our racists have gotten memos about this type of thing."

And now the Tea Party people are in a pickle because "A fourth Democrat, Rep. Heath Shuler of North Carolina, who is white, backed up his colleagues, telling the Hendersonville (N.C.) Times-News that he heard the slurs."

I know, you're thinking "but he's a Democrat, why would they care?" Because this isn't any Democrat. This is Heath Shuler.

a) white as the whitest white who ever whited a white.
b) Not just Southern, but COUNTRY Southern. Not like those fags down in Raleigh.
c) Not just Christian, but so Christian he gets to live in the Jesus-only sausage-fest adultery-lovin' fantasy camp The Family.
d) Kids have fucked up names ("Navy" and "Island," I shit you not)
e) FOOTBALL!

This is a dilemma. Heath Shuler says Tea Party people did something they swear they didn't do despite a thousand eyewitnesses to the contrary. He's a Democrat. From the Democrat Party. So he's clearly a socialist who practices polygamous bestiality for the entertainment of terrorists. But... FOOTBALL! And a QUARTERBACK! In the SOUTH! And yes, OK, one of the top 5 all-time NFL draft busts ever, but still! Southeastern Conference quarterbacks have been the cornerstone of Southern society since Martin Luther King took all the fun out of watercannoning children. Forget Payton Mannnig, old-ass Archie Manning could walk a zig-zaggy line from New Orleans to Richmond and never once worry about where he was going to eat or sleep next. If Heath Shuler is out there and Heath Shuler is wrong (as he must be), then maybe football isn't an infallible touchstone separating the Truth according to Jesus and Tim Tebow from the soccer-loving long-hairs Up East. If they have to oppose him, maybe football really is just a ritual of barely sublimated homoerotic interpretive dance not unlike the naked oil wrestling of the ancient Olympians.

But are we sure we want to take that away from them? These are people who think it is a good idea to start up a militia whose sole purpose is to violently oppose encroachments by the federal government. The same federal government who has some experience dealing with idealogically-driven hill-folk, usually by sending in unmanned aerial aircraft with missiles attached. If that shit starts and they start believing they can't win, how far are we from suicide bombers?

OK, maybe the one guy being an outlier won't ruin everything. But I'm not touching NASCAR. Retarded as it is, it may be the one thing holding this country together right now.




PS: As I was typing, my dog just straight up at a crane fly. Whole. Snatched it right out of the air. And chewed it like four times. Simultaneously awesome and disgusting.