Category: Humour

So, sure, Barack Obama might be every bit as much a slick piece of imageering as Sarah Palin. The difference is in what the image represents. The Obama image represents tolerance, intelligence, education, patience with the notion of compromise and negotiation, and a willingness to stare ugly facts right in the face, all qualities we’re actually going to need in government if we’re going to get out of this huge mess we’re in.

Here’s what Sarah Palin represents: being a fat fucking pig who pins “Country First” buttons on his man titties and chants “U-S-A! U-S-A!” at the top of his lungs while his kids live off credit cards and Saudis buy up all the mortgages in Kansas.

The truly disgusting thing about Sarah Palin isn’t that she’s totally unqualified, or a religious zealot, or married to a secessionist, or unable to educate her own daughter about sex, or a fake conservative who raised taxes and horked up earmark millions every chance she got. No, the most disgusting thing about her is what she says about us: that you can ram us in the ass for eight solid years, and we’ll not only thank you for your trouble, we’ll sign you up for eight more years, if only you promise to stroke us in the right spot for a few hours around election time.

The U.S. was to have built such a supercollider in Texas, but congress cancelled funding for it back in 1993. Science is one of the stupider things I can think of to get jingoistic about—it’s up there with art as one of the great collaborative intergenerational human undertakings–but it still disappoints me that my own country, which split the atom and landed a man on the moon, decided it didn’t have the money to resolve some of the profoundest questions about the nature of reality but did manage to come up with funds for the destruction of Iraq. This seems to me kind of like not being able to afford music lessons for your daughter but somehow always having enough cash on hand to buy cocaine every weekend.