Winky McFuggmepumps, go away already

Damn cold. Not that I totally feel like crap, but the singing voice has turned me into, using Our Gang comedy metrics, a curious combo of Alfalfa and Froggy, which means that I should not be warbling. So I’m not. Especially after a friend intoned darkly: “You need to just not sing for a few days, or else you’ll get nodes, or nodules.” Or whatever those jinky thangs are that prevent one from singing normally ever again. I’m already halfway there, having gone through drunken adolescence with a propensity to break out in loud imitation of Slade’s Noddy Holder at parties, which messed up my voice but good. Cum on feel tha noize, baby.

This past weekend I just wasn’t paying much attention to the Tea Party Convention in Nashville, not even to the appearance of failed Alaska governor turned Rupert Murdoch shill Winky McFuckmepumps, whose speech — to borrow a phrase from the late, great Molly Ivins on Pat Buchanan’s red-meat rant at the 1992 GOP Convention in Houston — probably sounded better in the original German. I mean, when I saw that the Tea Party ‘tar-, uh, persons of markedly diminished intelluctual capacity were holding court at the Opryland Hotel, I had to laugh, having endured a convention there two decades ago; at the time, we joked that the place seemed like it was designed by Liberace and Colonel Harlan Sanders while they were tripping together on some particularly potent LSD, most likely multiple doses. Jack Webb would not be amused.

How Winky could ever be considered as presidential material is a real headscratcher to me. I mean, first, she’s a quitter; she didn’t even bother finishing one full term as governor of a state whose population is less than half of Sacramento County, California. Second, she’s a walking, squawking embodiment of the Dunning-Kruger effect, which, if you’re too damn lazy to click on the link I provided, means she’s one of those willful ignoramuses who thinks she’s a gift to humanity from God, a viciously loudmouthed moron whose inflated opinion of herself is way out in front of anything she’s capable of delivering. Third, she’s mean in the way that stupid, vindictive bints can be when somebody challenges their fiefdoms at suburban PTA meetings, or tells them that, no, you can’t have willy-nilly authority to ban science or health or history textbooks that don’t correspond to your snake-handling, rolling on the floor shouting “yabba dabba doo!!” religious beliefs. And fourth, she works for Rupert Murdoch.

Nothing against Murdoch, an Australian interloper who was allowed to set up shop in this country and build the kind of propaganda outfit for the Republican Party that would have Joe Goebbels positively jizzing all over himself with admiration. Sure, Murdoch put together — or hired Republican political operative Roger Ailes to put together — the kind of “news” operation that would serve people who just wanted to flick off the switches in their enfeebled brains and not worry about anything complicated or nuanced, when a Manichaean presentation, using hammerheads from bottom-feeding gossip shows and discredited but recycled old pols from (R-Butthurtistan), would suffice in reinforcing what they already believed: “Islamist” towelheads were coming for their kids, aided and abetted by a rabid cabal of drugged-up “Democrat” Party buttfuckers. Thanks, Rupert. Thanks a fucking lot.

All said, I think the old Aussie has crossed the line by backing the rise of Winky. That any reasonable American would even contemplate the idea that Sarah Palin is qualified to hold any elective office in this country, much less president, is a mystery. Of course she isn’t qualified, in the same way that, oh, Britney Spears or Kim Kardashian probably wouldn’t be on anyone’s shortlist of prospective candidates. Why are you foisting this gum-flapping hosebag, Rupert? It’s all a big joke, innit: You Aussie bastards secretly loathe us Yanks, and you want to put one over on us as some kind of grand prank. That’s really it, no?

Well, look: I can only speak for myself, here, but we had eight long years of Jethro Mussolini and Snarly Whiplash, in the White House and Naval Observatory (or secret subterranean bat cave) respectively, and your goddamn laughingstock of a “news” network made its bones by being the number-one cheerleader for an entire raft of their stupidities: tax cuts for the rich, the invasion of Iraq, and essentially the whole-scale destruction of America as we used to know it. Republican assclowns drove this country into the ditch like a drunken bus driver behind the wheel of a Vegas-bound gambler’s special, and you were right there, waving the American flag every day.

What really ought to happen is that President Obama and the Democrats should tell you people: “You know something? You idiots spent eight years destroying this country, so why don’t you just go to the back of the room, sit down, shut the fuck up, hang your heads in shame and let us try to fix this mess you people created.” But they won’t, because they’re more inclined to be inclusive in their problem solving, and they’re too nice. Not to mention that they’re afraid they’ll get demonized 24/7 by unrelenting Foxaganda from the nimrods you and Ailes hired as mouthpieces for your “fair and balanced” pantsload: You know, asshats like Bill O’Falafelly and Sean Insanity and Mike Wallace’s mutant chimpanzee offspring and the rest of your bonehead brigade.

Gotta tell you, Rupert, as a Scotsman, I’m goddamned embarrassed that your ancestors come from the same country as mine did. And that was before your latest shenanigans, foisting this idiot beauty queen and failed governor on us, not to mention enabling this bunch of Tea Party whackaloons, some of whom I’m sure are legitimately pissed off, but the unfortunate fact is that they’re so dumbed down and hypnotized by the miasma of Tory agitprop emanating from your broadcast and newsprint properties that they’ve been stupefied into voting against their own interests. Shit like that breaks my heart, Rupert. It really does.

And I hope your serving as patron for the junior high student body president-level political aspirations of Winky, this gum-popping Tracy Flick from the hinterlands, backfires on you and bites you hard on your wrinkly old Down Under arse. Because you fucking deserve it. —Jackson Griffith