Well, that does it! If Camille Paglia says it's so, it must be so. Obama is done.

            It's too fucking bad, too. I mean, tens of millions of us voted for the guy; really, we should just have asked Camille. Camille knows some shit, you know? She knows how charismatic Sarah Palin is, just e.g., and last year around this time was talking about how "It's heavy weather for Obama fans, as momentum has suddenly shifted to John McCain." Whoa. How'd that election wind up, Camille? I was down in the basement with my hands over my eyes, a hooker, and a big bottle of Bacardi 151. (Truth to tell, though, I'm rarely not.) It was that close, you know? Is President McCain doing an awesome job?

            "Why did it take so long for Democrats to realize that this year's tea party and town hall uprisings were a genuine barometer of widespread public discontent and not simply a staged scenario by kooks and conspirators?"

            Because the rest of us Democrats don't have the kind of awesome drugs you do, Camille? Because in fact those town hall uprisings were in fact staged by kooks, conspirators--and let's not forget the retard contingent. Because they had a lot to do with everything that's gone on this year. Like the woman on the newsclip yesterday morning--looking like KKK Barbie in her Press-On Nails and kicky! hairstyle, in tears because of "what [her] kids had to see on TV in school." Um...you mean our President? Telling them to stay in school instead of fucking their cousins and dropping out of school to work at the dump? I can see why you might hate that, lady. Your kids, I feel quite certain, belong at the dump.

            (Actually, I suspect she was afraid that the President might...whip out his healthcare plan on national television. You know those black men and their huge legislative agendas.) (And my thanks to Mel Brooks for writing the first part of that joke and Cleavon Little for delivering it so unforgettably in Blazing Saddles.) (The latter part is entirely my fault.)

            Seriously, I've got to ask: is everybody fucknuts? Or is it just me? Because I'm okay with the latter, but the former does not bode well for, like, anything. I don't drive the bus to work in the morning, which is a good thing, but if the person who does starts trying to do wheelies, it's not going to work out for anyone.

            Where was I? Oh, right, the retard contingent. The ones who objected to Obama's making a speech to the spawn of our nation--as every President since, I don't know, Reagan? has--and the ones who think our President shouldn't be President because of how he was born in Kenya (funny how the McCain campaign missed that detail) (lucky they won anyway, huh?) and the ones who are going to vote against their own self interest (seriously, caring for that little deformed baby you had with your sister ain't going to be cheap) because Rush and Glenn and the rest of Satan's Smegma on Fox (The Devil's Dick Network) tell them to. Those are the people dominating the national debate. (Ehhhh...debate? Lincoln-Douglas? Yeah, that was a debate. This is a national fart-lighting.) We as a nation, and journalists in particular, who report this shit as if it were news, should be just as proud as if we'd just had a perfect little deformed retard baby with our sister.

            When Obama won the election--if he did, which, pace Camille, I know he didn't--for a brief shining moment I thought, wow, maybe there is some hope for this doomed empire. Maybe I wasted my time reading Jared Diamond's brilliant Collapse. Maybe all that shit, all that stupidity, all the cupidity and ignorance and attention to the finest details of failure, maybe all that was in the past.

            Naaaaahhhhhhhhhh.

            Listen, if the U.S. can't even get behind a guy like Obama, it's doomed. I've got, oh, another four years until Number Two Daughter is out of college, a year or two after that to make sure she's established, and then I'm out of here. I think London for a few years, Paris for a few, maybe China (they'll own the U.S. by then, plus they have awesome Chinese food--which they, of course, refer to simply as "food"), then Australia, perhaps back to Canada for the last part of my life and for the healthcare. Dude, if you think we've sunk as far as we can go, you are a crazy pie-eyed optimist. I don't want to see what happens when the crazy fucking right wing realizes that human flesh tastes pretty damn good.