Pee on Me

January 23, 2017 by Adam Cherry Leave a Comment

So it’s official. The forty-fifth President of the United States is Donald J. …well, I just can’t bring myself to say it. For the next four years – or until his Nixonian deposition – I will steadfastly refer to the nominal leader of the free world as President PeePee Head. Vladimir Putin, whose deft puppeteering skills make Karl Rove look like Serge Kovaleski, has predictably disavowed any video evidence of the Donald lapping up the acrid micturition of Russian hookers: “I find it hard to imagine he ran to a hotel to meet our girls of ‘low social responsibility’… though they are, of course, also the best in the world.”

Notwithstanding that the FBI, CIA, National Security Agency and the Treasury Department’s financial crimes unit continue to sift through evidence of links between Mr. PeePee’s operatives and the Russian security apparatus, Director Comey refuses to lend any credence to the investigation. He unabashedly told the Senate intelligence committee, “I would never comment on investigations – whether we have one or not – in an open forum like this, so I really can’t answer one way or another,” to which Sen. Angus King, (I-ME) chortled, “The irony of your making that statement here – I cannot avoid.”

Look, that Comey was in on the whole thing is patently obvious. Maybe the Reds have the goods on his coprophagia (think: Dirty Sanchez), or pesky gambling habit, but some conclusions are simply unavoidable. To wit: When Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Teori Zavascki, who was orchestrating a massive corruption investigation that fingered, among many others, sitting president Michael Temer, perished last week in a small plane crash, we instantly recognized the tragedy as anything but accidental.

Though it achieved virtually nothing, the women’s march on Washington was anything if not deliberate. In fact the 500,000 participants purposefully banned the anti-choice Texas group, New Wave Feminists. Ironically, Fox News and the alt-right movement — who prefer the label “pro-life” — became indignant and demanded the Intersectional Feminist Movement be wholesale gynically inclusive. In other words, the very people who anointed Mr. PeePee Head as the anti-PC torchbearer, have become just that. Whiney bitches.

Relying upon an alternate set of facts, The New York Times wrote an exposé about the 53% of white women that cast their ballot for Trump. There was no journalistic reason to include black women because compared to the last two elections, millions of African Americans went uncounted. This is not, as liberals would lament, because of recently enacted voter suppression laws, but rather due to the mysterious appearance of hundreds of thousands of cases of malt liquor found on the doorsteps of the most abundantly melasmic members of our polity.

During the height of the campaign, former Secretary of State Madeline Albright was swinged for asserting “there’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women.” But since I’m unwilling to wait that long for retribution, I hope that before 2017 runs its course, the 53% — and their daughters — become inseminated by gangs of Mexican rapists hired to construct a wall on our southern border and to collect a litany of ill conceived import taxes. With the overturn of Roe v Wade, the sight of brown babies suckling their Caucasian mothers at the mall would impel Steve Bannon and his Nazi faithful to exterminate these women as race traitors. But, hey, that’s just me.

Brexit 2.0

November 11, 2016 by Adam Cherry Leave a Comment

If James Comey is the Steve Bartman of the 2016 election, then Colin Kaepernick is the Alex Gonzalez. When the 49ers quarterback refused to stand for our national anthem, he forged the chaotic edges of Ferguson and Charlotte into something America could measurably distain, as if he lowered the Stars and Stripes and hoisted in its stead the modern day Jolly Roger – a “Black Lives Matter” T-shirt. Doing so, Kap stirred out from trailer parks and back woods cabins the disenfranchised white man, so disgusted by eight years of being lorded over by a Negro he left his chained abductees and headed to the polls, unreservedly determined not to be subsequently bossed around by some, well, as Texas Ag commissioner Sid Miller put it, CUNT. Far from inflicting any political wounds, then, each episode of Mr. Trump grabbing pussy or calling women menstruating pigs, did nothing but stoke the misogynistic frenzy – Make America Grope Again! – already bubbling over after its quixotic, if not expedient, conflation with racism and xenophobia.

Though my cohorts call me alarmist when I fortell the next quadrennial, Tuesday night’s shocking result has already shown them to be wholly inept at reading the tealeaves. Yet it is in these very times that I am reminded of the words of one Shmuel Beller: “You know, that Hitler guy doesn’t seem so bad… by the way, has anyone seen Uncle Jakob? He was right over there only a minute ago.

CERTAIN

Trump will be a one-term president, but will nonetheless get far more snatch than Clinton and JFK combined.

Obamacare will be dismantled.

Tax rates will be slashed, resulting in a sovereign interest coverage ratio resembling that of the Taj Mahal casino.

Roe v Wade will be overturned.

EASILY CONCEIVABLE

Marriage equality will be annulled.

Deportation Squads, aided by the Minuteman Militia, will round up illegal immigrants and send them to Mexico where they will be refused entry.

Another pointless, unwinnable war – think: Iran. (The typal Republican epigene.)

THOROUGHLY IMPROBABLE

A wall sealing the Mexican border.

A single job returning from China.

Trump supporters quit sodomizing their offspring.

Prince is Dead

August 30, 2016 by Adam Cherry Leave a Comment

In the wake of last December’s jihadi attack in San Bernardino, Republicans strained to frame the incident solely as a matter of terrorism and not one of gun control. Though the vast majority of mass shootings in the U.S. are unrelated to religious ideology, the two issues are far from mutually exclusive. To wit: an ISIS defector recently described the organization’s global network of Syrian-trained sleeper cells and local handlers, stressing that the laxity of firearm restrictions in the United States obviates the need for any “clean” facilitators to obtain weapons. My belief, alluded to during the convention by Ms. Clinton, is that the odds of me getting capped by someone else so far outweigh the likelihood of successfully defending myself by shooting my assailant means I am indisputably better off without public access to guns.

Moreover, it is pure fallacy that firearms are necessary to protect our way of life. As of this writing, only once have I seen black CIA helicopters ferry children from our neighborhood playground into the Far East sex trade. On the streets, cops have unequivocally proven they can kill unarmed black men just as deftly with paddy wagons and choke holds as they can with bullets. Why even the criminals are weaning their dependence on firearms as evinced by the alarming rise of identity theft and ransomware.

The shooting spree at the Inland Regional Center sparked another debate as well: Does our Constitutional right to privacy supersede the efforts of law enforcement? Though a federal appeals court ruled that Microsoft needn’t relinquish emails stored on servers located outside the United States, the Fourth Amendment was sure to be tested when the FBI sued Apple in an attempt to force the technology giant into programming a backdoor into Syed Farook’s iPhone. While the authorities swore on a stack of Bibles this would be a singular request, it wasn’t a matter of weeks before federal prosecutors in Brooklyn made a similar entreaty regarding a drug bust. In the end, the Farook case was rendered moot when third party hackers cracked the encryption code; gallingly, Apple’s lawyers countersued, demanding that the FBI divulge the vulnerability in the company’s own software.

(Unwittingly, Israel’s NSO Group revealed itself as the cyber intruder when it left digital fingerprints in an unrelated surveillance case. Working backwards, researchers subsequently identified multiple iOS vulnerabilities that Apple has since patched. The same, sadly, cannot be said of Madden 17.)

Another round of Congressional hearings aside, the Clinton email scandal has simply run out of gas. It is well established by now that the networks she was supposed to have used — those at the State Department, Pentagon and White House– were all, impressively, hacked by the Russian government and, therefore, posed a far greater security risk than the server maintained in a bathroom closet in a nondescript Denver neighborhood. (The silver medal went to China for pilfering 22 million employee files from the Office of Personnel Management, while the bronze was secured by a group of Albanian credit card thieves.) Why hacking has become so ubiquitous that even Hollywood has gotten into the act (see: CSI: Cyber, Mr. Robot). Nonetheless, despite multiple breaches at the IRS, the most egregious episode remains the hacking of a U.S. embassy worker in Bangladesh by members of Ansar al-Islam. In that case, perpetrators eschewed the standard toolkit of malware and remote code execution and instead used a fucking machete.

Meanwhile, the Russians are making no bones about the fact they prefer just about anyone to Hillary; while their ham fisted hack of the DNC failed to elevate comrade Sanders, they were able to defenestrate Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz-Goldfarb-Mandelbaum-Finkelstein-Kleinberg. According to the FBI, the Ruskies remain undaunted and have since burrowed into election systems in at least two states (Arizona and Illinois) in an attempt to seat Donald Trump by orchestrating voter fraud on a scale that will make the Bushes and Kennedys look like Aristides. Maybe, then, a loaded AR15 wouldn’t be such a bad idea after all…

Baño Occupado

May 25, 2016 by Adam Cherry Leave a Comment

Presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump lashed out after a series of pro-Hillary ads depicted him as a really bigly misogynist. He accused Clinton of engendering her husband’s affairs, adding, “She would go after these women and destroy their lives. She was an unbelievably nasty, mean enabler, and what she did to a lot of those women is disgraceful.” Yet the timing of his commentary only serves to remind us, as we lurch towards the conventions, that Republicans (and, by extension, Christians) are total fucking hypocrites.

Ken Starr, who as Special Prosecutor transmogrified the acarpous Whitewater Land Investigation into the cum-stained impeachment of President Bill Clinton, has, in his current position as chancellor of Baylor University, covered up multiple cases of sexual abuse, at least eight of which were perpetrated by members of the Bears’ highly ranked football team. Two of the players exonerated by Starr, Sam Ukwuachu and Tevin Elliot, were easily convicted by the state, clearly undermining his claim that “acts of sexual violence contradict every value Baylor University upholds as a caring Christian community.” When confronted by the Dallas media, Starr preened, “As a Baptist institution, we are proud to report that at no time during the countless rapes which occurred on our campus was there even a single episode of dancing.”

Meanwhile, Conservatives remain utterly fixated on our genitals and our toilet habits. North Carolina’s controversial HB2 bans cross-gender use of restrooms, though it was enacted as a reflexive counter to a pro-LGBT ordinance passed in Charlotte. But right-wingers seeking bolster their case unwittingly shot themselves in the foot. To wit: Media reports were circulated exposing Chad Severance, an outspoken proponent of the “nondiscrimination ordinance,” as a convicted child molester. Because Severance was, at the time of the assault, an Evangelical minister preying on young boys, the obvious takeaway is not only to keep our children away from clergy, but also to acknowledge that our kids would be safer still with Chad dropping trou in the ladies’ room.

Yet this is nothing new; the narrative in North Carolina closely follows the script already played out in Houston. There, the city council passed a gender-neutral washroom policy only to see the Texas Supreme Court force a public vote, which predictably reversed it. This notwithstanding, state legislators, including Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, are clambering up the steps of the Capitol with plans to codify gender-specific — and, God willing, racially segregated — bathroom use. Even if enacted, though, the bill would fail to address the admittedly rare yet complex cases of penis transplantation and hermaphroditism. The whole thing is becoming far too complicated, and perhaps that’s why Michael Phelps dumped his intersex girlfriend and tastefully impregnated his far more conventionally generated fiancée.

In the end, the Christian Right’s assertion that any lack of eliminatory restriction will lead to widespread voyeurism and sexual assault is nonsensical: North Carolina’s law notwithstanding, any man can today happily saunter into the Tar Heels women’s locker room and start beating off; it’s not like there’s three TSA agents with a clitometer at the door. While one hopes the threat of criminal prosecution remains a deterrent to such behavior, I remain wholly unconcerned where Chaz Bono or Caitlyn Jenner takes a dump. My only hope is that they wash their hands afterwards.

Agents of Doom

February 28, 2016 by Adam Cherry Leave a Comment

Everyone by now is aware of the aquatic cataclysm that has besotted Flint, MI. Corrosive chemicals – in the guise of drinking water – siphoned from the Flint River are leaching lead from the city’s ageing pipes and delivering their pernicious admixture more efficaciously to consumers than could a phalanx of Chipotle employees. While residents are far from dismissive regarding the long-term risks caused by ingesting decades of industrial waste the governor has sluiced into their spigots, most attention understandably centers on the debilitating and irreversible effects of lead poisoning that had, scholars posit, the wherewithal to topple the mighty Roman Empire.

And still the pollution in Rio’s Guanabara Bay (sailing), Olympic lagoon (rowing) and Copacabana beach (marathon swimming) seems even more parlous if not self-inflicted. Alarming quantities of human detritus (read: trash and feces) are bobbing along the surface carrying pathogens at 1.7 million times what would be considered pandemic in the developed world. Virologist Kristina Mena cautioned that none of the venues are fit for swimmers or boaters, adding athletes who ingest merely three teaspoons of water have a 99 percent chance of being infected by viruses. This summer, in fact, one in sixteen participants in both the junior rowing championships and a pre-Olympic sailing event fell ill, including Olympic sailor Erik Heil who contracted the flesh-eating MRSA bacteria. Predictably, International Sailing Federation Chief Executive Peter Sowrey was shit-canned after suggesting television producers eschew the iconic imagery of Christ the Redeemer overlooking the races and move them 100 miles up the coast to Búzios. The show, after all, must go on.

Nonetheless, Olympic spectators and participants alike have a still greater problem on their hands, namely the mosquito-borne Zika virus that has overrun the continent faster than a Roman Legion. The specter of worldwide infection is quite real, given the hundreds of thousands of international visitors soon to set upon Rio de Janeiro, certain to contract the virus and then vector it back across the globe. Pregnant women are of particular concern what with the thousands of babies recently born with microcephaly. Yet it gets worse: Only weeks after medical personnel in Brazil claimed the virus cannot be conveyed via direct human contact, the Center for Disease Control has confirmed a sexually transmitted case in Texas. Truthfully, I could handle the thought of never seeing Venezuela again. A complete pussy ban, on the other hand, might be a tougher pill to swallow. In such a fluid and uncertain situation, the bottom line is this: With rapid diagnostics and vaccines years away, I’d advise you, until the by-and-by, to just keep swiping left.

ALERT: only moments after the last paragraph was completed, the CDC reported 14 more sexually transmitted cases, positioning Zika as the next STD to be featured in those high school pamphlets dissuading students from pre-marital coitus.

Between the shrunken heads and large-scale contagion, one might think this a clumsy mash up of Hollywood tropes (recall: Outbreak, The Four Skulls of Jonathan Drake). Yet the Brazilian government is trying to flip the script, blaming the infestation on hordes of disease-ridden Africans who attended the 2014 World Cup soccer tournament. But with millions now infected, the etiology has become moot. Circumstances dictate we rather focus on prevention; in other words, Donald Trump can’t build that wall fast enough.

That the Donald has been adopted into the KKK for his vicious attacks on Mexicans and Muslims, has only sharpened the complaint that he need be far more socialistic (think: Bernie Sanders) or humanistic (think: the EU) were he to lead this great nation. And yet, dare I say, the criticism is both unfounded and unfair. To wit: After hundreds of women were nearly simultaneously assaulted in Cologne, Germany by swarthy immigrants in what can only described as a New Year’s flash mob wilding blitzkrieg, Chancellor Angela Merkel caved in to demands to tighten the country’s immigration policies. Once Denmark passed a draconian law allowing the seizure of refugees’ assets, Sweden and Finland announced the summary deportation of tens of thousands of asylum seekers. Prime Ministers across the continent are calling for Greece to be either cordoned off or tossed from the federation altogether, while, at the same time, EU interior ministers clamber to suspend the Schengen agreement that eliminates border controls among member countries.

In the final analysis, Europe has decayed into a shit show we care not to recreate. And while our founding fathers are often given credit for limiting government’s reach by setting Congress against the Presidency, their prescience extends far beyond that. We are, for whatever reason, better than the rest of the world, and now it’s to us to continue their efforts to keep it that way.