Shake Your Groove Thing

The debate concludes on a surprisingly congenial note as Trump and Clinton grant an audience member's request and sing a medley of Peaches & Herb.

Pontius Priebus: A Parable

[Note: The following was inspired by a conversation Mary and I had about Palm Sunday. Please don't ask me to trace the course of this chat back through the many hairpins, doglegs, and cul-de-sacs to its point of origin, because I have learned over the past twenty years that that way lies madness. Thank you.]

So I've always figured that if you go into politics, you may not get what you deserve, but you deserve what you get, whether you're a Roman Senator or a hustling ward-heeler. But I do feel a modicum of sympathy for bureaucrats. Sure, they can also be social climbing careerists who get promoted above the maximum ceiling of their competence through seniority, patronage, or graft, but you could say the same thing about the private sector, and unlike your average Banker Bro, the world financial system is not likely to be crashed by the guy who runs the Motor Vehicle Department in American Samoa. (I tried to find out who that person actually was, but while there was a link to the MVD, the American Samoan government apparently didn't pay their Go Daddy bill, because it just opens a page that says "This Account has been suspended.  Contact your hosting provider for more information." But hey, I've had my utilities turned off a time or two, so rest assured that I'm not pointing fingers, American Samoa. I just don't think you should necessarily be in charge of the World Bank.)

Anyway, my point is that I empathize with the plight of Joe Bureaucrat, who has to do the unglamorous work of making a system designed by egomaniacs and idiots actually function on a day to day basis. Which brings me to Pontius Pilate.

Pilate was basically the First Century AD version of Michael Brown, the head of FEMA during George W. Bush's administration. Like Brown, whose previous experience was running the International Arabian Horse Association, Pilate was a member of the equestrian class, had powerful connections, and went largely unnoticed until a crisis hit and his professional shortcomings were suddenly exposed. (I have to give Pilate the advantage here, however, since Hurricane Katrina claimed over 1800 lives, while Jesus' plastic hassle with the Sanhedrin claimed only one. True, Brown didn't kill God, as a lot of Christians believed Pilate did, but in Pilate's defense, a lot of those Christians have historically preferred to blame the Jews anyway; and besides, that one death didn't even stick.)

So let's put ourselves in Pilate's place. He doesn't care about Jews squabbling over the finer points of their weird religion (it's only got one god, so what's there to fight about? It can't even provide decent dorm room bull session fodder, like "Who would win in a fight, Jupiter or Mars?"). He doesn't think Jesus is a criminal, let alone that he deserves the death penalty. But it's Passover, everybody's touchy, and the last thing Pilate needs is an uprising on his watch. So he pulls out his old Monopoly game and basically stacks the deck so that Christ will pull the Get Out of Jail Free Card.

[Note: for the purposes of this playlet, Pilate will be played by Claude Rains.]

PILATE: Happy Passover! I hope everyone is enjoying their big crackers and salty parsley, or whatever. As you know, it's our custom every year at this time to release one prisoner, chosen by you, the audience, and judged by this complicated brass applause meter from Antikythera. Now...

[PILATE gently steers JESUS forward]

PILATE: You can either have this small town rabbi who's got a great healthcare plan for the lepers, but with whom one or two of you might have the teensiest bit of doctrinal differences, or...

[Disdainfully nudges forward a filthy, glowering brute with the toe of his sandal]

PILATE: You can have this MURDERER...!

CROWD:  We'll take the murderer!

PILATE: What! Why?

CROWD: We like the cut of his jib!

[Pilate gives the crowd some patented Claude Rains side-eye]

PILATE: Jib? What jib? We're in the desert.

CROWD: We were misinformed!

Tough day at the office, right? And this is how I imagine things going for Reince Priebus ever since Donald Trump got into the race. Reince doesn't want to involve himself in the hairsplitting arguments between the candidates, let alone appear to arbitrate them, but he'd clearly prefer the mob come to a certain conclusion.

[Note: for the purposes of this playlet, Priebus will be played by Arnold Stang.]

PRIEBUS: Heyyyyy, Republican voters! Hope everyone's having a good primary season. Say, just a quick show of hands, no pressure, but would you fine folks prefer a tested conservative with executive experience...?

(REINCE jerks his head toward Jeb Bush and Scott Walker so hard he appears to be suffering from St. Vitus Dance)

PRIEBUS: Or a man whose spray tan is the color of an Orange Julius after a bum peed in it?

GOP PRIMARY VOTERS: We'll take the urine-infused beverage from a food court!

[REINCE hangs his head, goes off to check the trades to see if anyone is thinking of rebooting Top Cat.]

I know, times are hard, and frankly, I could use a job, but I don't think I could take this one. At least not with a straight face.

Woman O' The Year!

Big news, everyone! Even though there's still five months to go, 2014's Woman of the Year has already been named, and according to reporter  citizen journalist blogger "Townhall Media's Marketing Coordinator" Rachel Williams, the winner is 26-year old Townhall monitor Katie Pavlich!

After being named "Blogger of the Year" by CPAC in 2013, and derailing Obama's re-election effort the year before that...

...this has to be considered quite the feather in her cap, even if the honor is bestowed by the Clare Booth Luce Policy Institute, and is pretty much a naked attempt to juice sales of their annual Conservative Ladies cheesecake calendar.

Yesterday, the Clare Booth Luce Policy Institute honored Townhall.com News Editor Katie Pavlich as the 2014 Woman of the Year. 

Despite the encomia listed above, some of you may have stubbornly refused to hear of this Year's Woman, but I can assure you that she does exist, and isn't a made up person like Donald Sutherland. (Not that Donald Sutherland isn't real, or is pretending to be a woman so far as I'm aware, but he does keep showing up in YouTube videos wearing Tom Wolfe's white suit and insisting he's the President of some bullshit country.)

The award ceremony also celebrated the release of Pavlich’s second book, Assault & Flattery: The Truth About the Left and Their War on Women , which is yet another example of her efforts to communicate a conservative perspective to those who rarely get the chance to hear an unaltered narrative. 

Katie's previous unaltered narrative was Fast and Furious: Barack Obama’s Bloodiest Scandal and Its Shameless Cover-Up (2012), which argued "Operation Fast and Furious wasn’t a 'botched' program. It was a calculated and lethal decision to purposely place thousands of guns into the hands of ruthless criminals. The guns weren’t accidentally misplaced or lost. They didn’t just somehow 'fall into the wrong hands' by mistake. The operation was a coordinated and planned effort not to track guns but to arm thugs south of the border for political gain."

Rumor has it that Katie's next book will unalter the narrative that Obama's foreign birth makes him Kenyan, when in fact it actually makes him a space alien, since Africa is overrun by chitinous E.T.s, as seen in the Dinesh D'Souza documentary, District 9.

After accepting the award, Pavlich took to the podium to address the crowd of ladies gathered at the Capitol Hill Club in Washington, D.C. 

You could hear a pin drop as the ladies listened in rapt attention to the untold stories left purposely out of history textbooks but brought to light in Assault and Flattery. 

This is clearly an important critique of modern politics, and as of press time has already received 18 reviews on Amazon, only two less than our book. So I predict that Assault and Flattery will dominate the national discussion the way Better Living Through Bad Movies did in the summer of 2006.

For instance, did you know the first Congresswoman ever elected was actually a Republican? 

I wonder if falling pins were still audible when Katie went on to tell the ladies that pioneering Congressman Jeanette Rankin was a Progressive Republican, putting her in the same boat as proto-Fascists Teddy Roosevelt and William Howard Taft? Or that she attended the non-Randian-sounding New York School of Philanthropy, served the underprivileged as a social worker, and labored on behalf of voting rights. She was also -- and the truth can be hard, ladies, but the unexamined life is not worth unaltering -- a devout pacifist who voted against U.S. entry into both World War I and World War II.  I imagine by this point the previously pristine audio conditions for pin plummeting were getting a trifle muddy.

By the way, when I searched "first u.s. congresswoman" (because both Sheri and Doghouse Riley taught me to take any assertion of fact by a wingnut as a Pavlovian signal to hit the Google), this was the top result:

I have all the respect in the world for Congresswoman Rankin; I guess I just expected that a tough pioneer woman raised in the rugged wilds of Montana would look a bit more butch.

Unsurprisingly, the young ladies in the crowd were quite taken with Katie. “I love Katie Pavlich and am a big fan,” one of them said to me.

"But don't use my name, because I'm not supposed to come within five hundred feet of her. Say, would you mind giving Katie this shoebox?  It's got a glittery, heart-shaped card inside, some of my very best pubic hairs, and a dead lobster, but my Fed-Ex guy keeps 'forgetting' to take it."

When asking one young female attendee if she believed there was actually a war on women, she promptly replied saying, “I believe in the war on women – but it is actually coming from [the Left].”

I don't mean to teach Townhall to suck eggs, but when you're fingering someone for a heinous crime, it kind of undercuts your big reveal when the accused is in brackets.  This is exactly why I hate those old William Powell detective movies, where he'd announce the name of the murderer while making elaborate "air quotes."

Pavlich details this phenomenon in her book as she explores the sordid past of Hillary Clinton. In fact, the book features stories of Clinton defending child predators and rapists (and, no, we are not talking about Bill Clinton)

See, some comedians can pull off edgy rape jokes. Daniel Tosh could take a tip or two from the sexual abuse stylings of Rachel Williams, "Townhall Media's Marketing Coordinator."

...and not standing up for women throughout her quest to gain power.

Okay, this is blatant sexism, and speaking as a man, I am deeply offended. How come when a woman seeks office it's a "quest to gain power," but when a man does it, it's just "running for election"? Why do only women get their most ordinary professional activities described in terms usually reserved for supervillainry? Does it never occur to the media that maybe we'd like a little drama in our lives, too? How come we're always Daddy Day Care and never Doctor Doom? If the MSM wasn't so biased against men, my trip to Ralph's to buy Tapatio Sauce would be reported as "Clevenger's grim crusade to secure an incendiary weapon that will allow him to enhance the interrogation of his own taste buds!"

Katie responded to the honor saying, "I'm extremely humbled and honored to have been chosen by Clare Booth Luce as their 2014 Woman of the Year. As liberals continue to push their blind agenda and harm our country with poor policy choices, scandals, and outright lies, I’m urging conservatives to take a stand and speak the truth."

--adding, "Do as I say, not as I do" while performing a difficult double finger-cross behind her back.

"The American people, and young women in particular, can no longer afford to let the deceptive rhetoric of the left dominate the national dialogue," she continued. 

Wait -- I thought the Left was safely contained, now that we had it bracketed.

"It’s truly a privilege to continue to work with my conservative colleagues in creating a more powerful voice for our cause.”

Increased calendar sales.

The Day the Clown Cried Wolf

Why is it that whenever I see the name Larry Klayman I always hear it pronounced in the voice of Jerry Lewis ("Laaaady, there's a Klaaaaaaaaayman on the stairs in the house with the thing...")?  Is it just me?  It's probably just me.  Anyway, I hope so, otherwise there's going to be a lot of barely suppressed snickering during the revolution, because Larry has sent out birther announcements for our date with destiny!  The Day of Rage, the Day of Blood, the Day of the Klaaayman is nigh:

Last Wednesday, the great usurper, Barack Hussein Obama, after having been indicted by an Ocala, Florida citizens' grand jury, was convicted by a people's court of defrauding the American people and Floridians by proffering them with a fake birth certificate.

Well, with everything from the military to prisons being turned into for-profit enterprises, I guess it was only a matter of time before the court system was privatized as well.  Thus, even though the corrupt government-run courts have thrown out all of Klaaayman's lawsuits, Obama stands convicted by the people's court, and his only hope now is to throw himself upon the mercy of Judge Wapner.

 See www.citizensgrandjury.com. 

If you do choose to click on that link, you might want to turn down your speakers first, because you'll be greeted with a lengthy blast of "Do You Hear the People Sing?" from Les Miserables.  I wonder if Larry licensed the use of the song, or if perhaps we should convene a citizens' grand jury in the comment section and convict him of copyright infringement.

As readers of this column and www.wnd.com know too well, Obama is not a natural born citizen eligible to be president of the United States, as he was not born in this country to two American citizen parents.

Of course, Obama was born in this country, and his mother was a native of Kansas -- while John McCain was born in Panama, and Mitt Romney was produced in the same Tijuana maquiladora which also manufactured Hymie from Get Smart, and nobody seemed to care -- and six previous presidents had at least one foreign-born parent, so that's obviously not a disqualification.  But while Obama was born in Hawaii, Klaaayman has discovered that it wasn't our Hawaii (you know, the one we stole for Dole), but the Hawaii of the 8th Dimension, which means that Barack (whose real first name is John) is actually a Black Lectroid from Planet 10!

 However, to justify his fraud and his elections to the highest office in the land, and after years of inquiry, in 2011 the Obama White House posted on its website a birth certificate purporting to show him having been born in Hawaii. The problem is however, according to forensic experts, the birth certificate is altered and forged.

I can see altering a real birth certificate to insert false information, or forging one completely, but if you alter a forgery, don't you just make it real again?

The day of reckoning has come.

Already?  Crap!  Why do I always wait until the last minute to do my Day of Reckoning shopping?  And why do store clerks continue to insult birthers' deeply held values by saying "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Day of the Rope"?

 Obama, having failed to plead in response to the indictment that was served upon him, waived his right to a jury trial. 

And just how did you serve your subpoena on the President of the United States, Larry?  Lob it over the White House fence with a tennis racket?  What's to stop the President's counsel was filing a motion to declare the subpoena invalid because your process server committed a foot fault?

Thumbing his nose at We the People, as the citizens' prosecutor, I appeared before a citizens' court judge and presented evidence from Cold Case Posse investigator Michael Zullo showing that Obama tricked voters into electing him in 2008 and 2012.

Thanks to a faint watermark on each ballot that vaguely resembled Ed McMahon, Obama fooled voters into thinking they were actually entering the Publishers Clearinghouse Sweepstakes.

 As a result, the citizens' judge found him guilty on two counts of falsifying information to federal and state election officials.

They also found the Cold Case Posse guilty of one count of Unintentionally Hilarious Tough Guy Name.

 He was thus sentenced to the maximum prison term for these offenses of 10 years, and ordered to immediately surrender himself into the custody of the citizens of the United States and Florida.

So acting as prosecutor, Klaaayman won his case, then turned around and -- acting as judge -- threw the book at the defendant.  I suspect the things Larry sees when he's awake are the same things Hamilton Burger imagined when he was dreaming.

Of course, Obama will not willingly obey the law of the people. He will attempt to hide behind the iron fences of the White House, perhaps cowering under his desk for fear that the people will rise up and demand his ouster.

We'll know he's succumbed to his fear of the people if we hear a faint voice cry out from the Oval Office, "Hey, look at all the gum!"

On November 19, 2013, a day that will hopefully live on in the history of our once great republic, I call upon millions of Americans who have been appalled and disgusted by Obama's criminality – his Muslim, socialist, anti-Semitic, anti-Christian, anti-white, pro-illegal immigrant, pro-radical gay and lesbian agenda – among other outrages, to descend on Washington, D.C., en masse, and demand that he leave town and resign from office if he does not want to face prison time.

Larry, I don't know how many RSVPs you've gotten for the coup yet, but I'm going to suggest you err on the side of caution and not book the big table at Olive Garden.

The millions who are being summoned to our nation's capital...

Larry, seriously, just reserve a booth.  If it turns out your message does resonate with more people then expected, we can always ask the hostess to bring over some extra chairs.

I propose bringing the victims of his reign of terror to a podium across from the White House in Lafayette Park to give their testimony on how he has singularly severely harmed and in some instances even killed their loved ones through his actions.

Frankly, it doesn't sound like a great night out, but it's gotta be funnier than the Blue Collar Comedy Tour.

The nation under Obama and even his inert and castrated political opponents, the Republican Party, have driven our country into the bowels of impending doom. The moral and ethical fabric, our economic underpinnings, and our national confidence and prestige are in the tank. 

Well, I gotta admit, with our castrati in our bowels and our underpinnings in the septic tank, things are looking pretty shitty.  And I'm no Martha Stewart, but shouldn't the ethical fabric be in the linen closet?

Now, 237 years after they signed the Declaration of Independence in my native city of Philadelphia, the nation has come full circle to the tyranny that has been imposed by a new despot, one far more evil than King George III. King George III may have been a greedy "control freak," but at least he was a Christian. 

Even better, he was insane, which makes him an American-style Christian.

Benjamin Franklin walked the walk along with the likes of George Washington, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson. Let us now walk in their footsteps and march into to Washington, D.C., this November 19th, and rid the nation of the criminal who lurks in our White House.

I'm blocking my tricorn hat as we speak. Just one question -- who's bringing the slaves to the after party?  Franklin, Washington, and Jefferson didn't roll without their bondage bitches, and we want to keep our insurrection real.

Just a reminder:  We're having a fundraiser this week, to pay off Mary's current medical bills (and the few bills lingering from the last time she was sick), as well as get Riley to the vet and hopefully discover the cause of her sudden weight loss and other maladies.  We realize (oh do we realize) that things are tough, so if you're in no position to help, please don't worry about it.  But if do have a little cash you could throw our way, it would be deeply appreciated.  You can click on the button on the top left (or just use our our PP i.d. (scott.clevenger - at - gmail.com).  Or if you are not Pals with Pay, drop me an email and I'll send you our snail mail address.  Thanks.

Get Bushed!

I'm a bit of a homebody and rarely attend Events, so I'm not quite sure how I ended up on Eventful's mailing list.  I will, if the occasion demands and I'm feeling dressy, attend an Affair; and I have been known, if rarely, to glad-hand my way around the odd Happening (although I have stopped hosting my own Happenings, as painful experience has shown that they freak me out), but I'm not easily seduced by Events, especially Mega-Events.

Nevertheless, I opened my email this morning and the first thing I saw was Eventful.com screaming at me: "Don't Miss Laura Bush at the Staples Center!"  This led to a moment of pre-coffee confusion, because a lot of Eventful's events (at least the ones I hear about) are concert performances by lesser known troubadours and troubadesses, fringe comics, or theatrical productions of the off- and off-off Broadway type.  So naturally, I assumed Laura was getting away from George and his obsessive herbicidal tendencies (it's one thing to incessantly clear brush on the ranch as a means of avoiding intimacy, but it's a different matter in the tony Dallas suburb in which they now live, because the trees and shrubs are stately and mature, and when his Weedwhacker proves impotent he'll often get sullen and pouty), taking her act on the road, and performing her One Woman Show, "I Ran Over a Man in Midland, Just to Watch Him Die."

Sadly, she's just part of an itinerant Business Seminar, but it's an impressive line-up, sort of the Cream or Traveling Wilburys of motivational speaker tours.

Bill Cosby!  Colin Powell!  Joe Montana!  General Stanley McChrystle!  Rudy Giuliani!  The woman who invented the All-Meat Breakfast Buffet!

At this workshop you will learn:

• Cutting-Edge Business Skills
• Relationship & Personal Development
• Goal Achievement
• Wealth-Building Strategies
• And Much, More More!

Naturally, I couldn't resist a sales pitch like this, so I clicked through and discovered this sales pitch was designed to sell a seminar teaching you how to craft and deliver a sales pitch, presumably so you could then pitch people on taking your seminar which offers to sell them pitches they can use in making sales.  Frankly, Get Motivated ought to replace their current logo (a stylized masochist leaping for joy as he's whipped with a Red Vine) with Ouroboros, because after reading their sales pitch pitching sales pitches, I couldn't get the taste of snake-ass out of my mouth.

Let's see how each speaker uses his own unique experience and expertise to motivate people who are trying to overcome the depressing thought that they are now $225 poorer.

Bill Cosby is one of the most popular entertainers of our time. "The Cos" has been making America laugh for decades. In his side-splitting session, you'll discover the master keys to using humor to create agreement, close the deal and advance in your career.

In Cosby's trademark style, he will explain how the seemingly nonsensical lyrics to "Hikky Burr," the theme song of his 1969-71 sitcom, were actually a secret message to the reptoid Illuminati, volunteering his services (literary translated, "Hikky Burr" means "I’d like to remind you that as a trusted TV personality, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in your underground sugar caves").  The Global Elite ultimately accepted The Cos's offer, and from the mid-80s to the early 90s, he would appear on television each week in a different sweater, whose hideous and incomprehensible patterns were designed to convey coded data to the Queen Mother.

Lou Holtz RENOWNED NOTRE DAME HEAD COACH. He will show you:

• How to Turn Workplace Stress into Gridiron Success

[Note:  The Management will not provide refunds to customers who may later discover they don't work on a gridiron, or whose bosses may object to them spiking their optical mouse after completing a particularly complex spreadsheet.]

General Colin Powell
World-Famous Soldier Statesman

Colin Powell is one of the most distinguished and admired men in America.

Hm.  That seems like less of a sales pitch, and more of a beanball thrown directly at the head.

As a four-star General, chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Secretary of State Gen. Powell has experienced leadership at the highest levels. 

Not that anybody actually told him anything.  At least, nothing that might make him an accessory.

Gen. Powell shows you precisely what it takes to be a leader, providing strategies for "taking charge" during times of great change.

This sounds familiar.  I believe I already sat through this seminar when it was given by another general -- Al Haig, I think, or Augusto Pinochet.

He will show you:

• How to Improve Processes, Organizations and People
• How to Remain Focused in Crisis
• How to Forge Winning Alliances [Don't forget Poland!]
• Keys to Creating Diplomatic Solutions

 So if you've ever wondered how far a crack vial full of Arm & Hammer and a PowerPoint presentation featuring blurry images of weaponized Good Humor trucks can take you, the answer is:  the Los Angeles Staples Center, and the Citizens Business Bank Arena in Ontario, California (For One Night Only!).

Krish Dhanam
Top Sales Expert

Krish Dhanam acclaimed sales trainer, will give you income-producing gems to improve your sales and negotiation skills.
He will show you:

• 8 Specific Phrases that Eliminate Objections

Among them are:  #4:  "Overruled!" and #7:  "If my demands aren't met, I'm gonna start tossing out bodies every fifteen minutes!"

• How to Master the Art of Prospecting

Grow a big bushy beard, leverage existing contacts to increase your network, and sprinkle your speech with action words like "consarnit!" and "dadgummit!"

General McChrystal
Celebrated Four Star General

Stanley McChrystal is one of the most decorated and distinguished Generals of our time.

Later in the program, he and General Powell will strip down to their jockstraps and wrestle in corn oil to determine who's more distinguished.

Rudy Giuliani
America's Mayor

Rudy Giuliani provided strength at a defining time in American history as he helped lead New York - and the U.S. - out of the devastation that followed the attacks on 9-11.

And just when we think we're out -- he pulls us back in.

Sadly, there is no biography for Laura on the site, and no hint about what she will show us, so I'm just going to assume it's:

• 8 Drug Cocktail recipes that relieve the need to blink and will finally allow you to win that staring contest with your cat.

If you haven't had a chance, please check out Annti's piece below on Billy the Kid vs. Dracula, and leave a comment letting us know which movies you'd most like to see us tackle in the sequel to Better Living Through Bad Movies (currently under construction).

Congratulations to All My Gay Friends in NY

Please don't register somewhere expensive.