Undoctrination.org

If you’re a politically-based, liberal comedian (are there other kinds?), I don’t envy you in this current climate. I mean, how much longer are Sarah Palin and her hapless family going to prop you up on stage or keep the writers’ room fresh? You have a real problem. The folks who are allowed by the establishment to be targeted, derided, and humiliated—the folks on the right—just aren’t that cartoonish. Sure, you’ve got your John McCains and Newt Gingriches here and there, or maybe a rogue tea-partier out looking for attention, but not a whole lot more. Mark Foley with his penchant for teenage boys is long gone. Your notoriously uninformed audiences will still grind out a laugh at any distortion of reality you can manufacture to make the joke work, but your problem is that the really good stuff emanates from the protected class—from the very structural components who post the rules for the humor mills. How frustrating it must be to have a Marianna Trench of source material that you can’t touch—can’t even think about—whether your own screwed-up ideology gives you the green light on it or not.

Day after day, political comedy writers must pass up easy pickings in the same way real men pass up government subsidies. The list of socialist Laurel and Hardys and statist Keystone Cops in the public arena is as long as the list of excuses for the cash in their freezers. Yet those people skate unassailably past the Saturday Night Live audiences like Obama’s history past the American media. Where but from the bottomless pool of left-wing politicians and commentators can you extract gems like “Guam will tip over if it gets too crowded,” or “Arizona is not a border state.” Every one of the collectivist icons who claws his way to the cameras is a treasure trove of bloopers, bleepers, and historic ineptitude. But, alas, they and their antics are taboo. How about you and I consider what things would be like if they weren’t.

HOWARD DEAN

Like “Michelle Obama sure has nice legs,” one sentence you’ll never hear repeated in Washington D.C. is “Howard Dean is no dummy.” The reason you’ll never hear it is that Howard Dean is a dummy—of the Charlie McCarthy variety—and everybody but Howard Dean knows it. Howard Dean is no more capable of original thought than Al Gore is capable of riveting oratory. Dean can only parrot, and he parrots clichés—the most worn-out, baseless, and sophomoric tripe that any sleep-deprived Democrat ever conjured up on a pilgrimage to Trotsky’s shrine in Mexico City. “You Fox News people are all right-wingers (giggle).” In his affronts against his political foes, Dean recycles long-discredited bunk with the enthusiasm of an overbearing sixth-grader who’s just heard a new pun. He’ll smirk with pride at his own cleverness after uttering some hackneyed verbal jewel that would’ve barely ranked in brilliance above nyeh nyeh nyeh on the day of its inception ten years ago. “Right-wingers are all racists (snort and nostril leakage).” He and his cringe-inducing comments have generated more eye-rolling than the Blue Angels on quadriplegic day. To remove the garnish from it, Howard Dean is a stupid man. That he was ever a doctor disorients the rational mind, and to a greater degree even than the notion that Wesley Clark was a four-star general. One imagines Dr. Howard asking the mother of a colicky infant if she’s ever considered abortion. Dean isn’t typical stupid—he’s foreskin-in-the-zipper, blow-dryer-in-the-bathtub, finger-in-the-big-metal-fan stupid. If Plato’s mind was an ocean vast and deep, Dean’s is a stopped-up toilet—one that overflows while the whole family scrambles for mops and towels. And he’s not only stupid in Washington, D.C. He’s also stupid in Washington state. And in Idaho and Oregon. He’s stupid in Wisconsin and Michigan. He’s stupid in New Hampshire, in South Carolina, in Florida, in Texas, in Virginia, in Puerto Rico, in Cuba, in Venezuela, in the bedroom, in the shower, and in the kitchen! Yeeearrrgh!

JOE BIDEN

Joe Biden is the vice president of the United States, which comes as a surprise to 73.8% of the American people. But he’s unique in that he’s the first make-work vice president, continually being sent to East Devolvula or Lower Scameroon to hash out a fledgling joke of a constitution or express condolences for the passing of some revered witch doctor. The one thing a sinking ship doesn’t need is an unsecured gun rolling around on its deck, and Joe the loose cannon Biden can’t be given leave to speak where someone might have a microphone; namely, in the United States.

If Joe says that the Obama administration will allow no new coal operations, you can bet that his boss has just finished feigning support for the coal industry. If Joe enjoins the world to avoid commercial flights owing to the risk of the Mexican flu, odds are Obama’s people were in the midst of assuring the country of the safety of air travel. One would, from a general observation, be likely to conclude that Joe Biden is the type to say giddyup to his mouth before his brain is hitched to it. The problem is, that IS his brain you’re hearing, all hitched and ready to travel, and it’s a doozy.

Joe’s brain marvels that some African Americans bathe regularly, speak properly, and are bright (you know, can really, like, think). Joe’s brain registers the necessity of speaking with an Indian (sic) accent when entering a convenience store. Joe’s brain imagines a world where Joe has not only set foot in a Home Depot, but has chatted up his buddies who work there. Joe’s brain rearranges history all by itself, placing FDR in the White House during the 1929 stock market crash, and then sticking him on yet-to-be-invented network television to calm the public. Joe’s brain sees “jobs” as a 3-letter word, and it commands wheelchair-bound state senators to rise and walk (“Come on up here, Chuck. God love ya.”) If an Irish prime minister’s mother is alive and well, Joe’s brain makes Joe ask God to rest her soul anyway. And Joe’s brain construes the lowering of taxes as a “smart-ass” concept. That one’s not Joe’s brain’s fault, though. Joe’s brain is a Democrat.

Joe’s illustrious assignments are the result of high turnover in the White House damage-control department. When the staff can’t keep Joe out of the country, they put him in a Hannibal Lector prison-transport outfit so he doesn’t lash out and rip a chunk out of Obama’s arse. Joe teeters ever so precariously on the edge of a “nappy-headed ho” comment, and his boss is burdened as it is with all the apologies he’s compelled to make for his country without having to throw in a bunch more for Joe’s mouth. Sadly for the rest of us, Joe will decide he wants to spend more time with his family by the next campaign season. We shall dearly miss him. On the other hand, his replacement will be no less of a comedy skit herself.

HARRY REID

Nevada senator Harry Reid is a light-skinned cracker who speaks in a proper Marxist dialectic without a pro-constitution accent, although he can sound like a free-market capitalist in brief two-second snatches when he really really wants to. Even after astounding the public with the revelation that unemployed men in Nevada pummel their wives until they can find work, Harry labors tirelessly to maintain a jobless economy for his state. This has inspired his wants-to-be-but-won’t-be-governor son to shed himself of the family name, and nobody blames him. They laugh at him, but they don’t blame him. Harry is running for reelection in a tight campaign, but because it’s not an American military campaign, he won’t prematurely concede defeat. In fact, he won’t concede defeat regardless of the vote count.

Harry Reid becomes confused sometimes; for example, he doesn’t understand how Hispanics can be Republicans, how businesses can earn a profit, or why people won’t go to hear him speak without being issued an agreed-upon safe-word. Even though, as Harry tells us, tourists at the Capitol building in Washington offend his senses with their peasant odors, he will still magnanimously jump in and favor the disgusting surfs at home with one of his parent-to-child, I’ll-make-it-all-better, sickeningly soft-spoken driftings when he has to. He just burns incense around the speaker’s dais. And anyway, there usually aren’t enough people at his speeches to make any noticeable difference as Harry’s public ramblings have a fairly pungent emanation of their own.

In times of trouble, Harry invokes an imaginary friend named Tommy, who is incapable of surviving in life unless Harry’s pet legislative projects are foisted upon the public. Poor Tommy. Poor, sad, helpless, unmotivated, lazy, dependent, shiftless Tommy. Harry is the only one who can see this Dickensian character of his, but Harry swears he’s real. The mainstream media have never (surprise) troubled to flush Tommy out of his hovel, but the rest of us know that Tommy is just a metaphor—a metaphor like the American people being slugs and Harry Reid being a big, fat, giant salt shaker.

The first three Democrat names to mind and we’ve barely even run our fingernails across the surface of the comedy chalkboard. Try to imagine a well-known Democrat who isn’t a talking caricature, a breathing parody. Congressman Emanuel Cleaver, DEMOCRAT, Mo., on a trip to Cuba to pay loving fealty to bloody communist dictator Fidel Castro with the Congressional Black Caucus, noted that the Cubans he saw in the streets didn’t seem to have cell phones. Upon his return to the U.S., Cleaver beamed with pride as he described how he’d told “El Presidente” that it was the dear leader’s lucky day. Cleaver’s district, you see, was where communications giant Sprint had its headquarters, and Cleaver could fix the Cubans up because of that. Somehow.

Whether or not anyone explained to the good congressman why the citizens of communist countries don’t have cell phones is anybody’s guess. Whether or not anyone explained to the good congressman that Sprint’s headquarters was not in is district—that it was across the state line in Kansas—is also up for conjecture. All we know for sure is that those Cubans are still turning the cranks on their wall-mounts to send the right number of rings. And the dear leader is still listening in.

Congressional seats are routinely filled on the left by bizarre characters whose aptitudes would barely squeak them through as community organizers or lemonade-stand operators much less masters of our destiny.  And the Che-worshipping crowds that graduate journalism school don’t fare much better in the wit department. You just don’t find that inanity on the right, not in those numbers and not to that depth. Leftist comedians have to distort and exaggerate to make their jokes funny; if they lampooned their own, no such stretching would be necessary. In fact, no writing would be necessary. With subjects like Pelosi, Frank, Grayson, Waters, Rangel, Boxer, Chris Matthews, Cindy Sheehan, Bill Ayers, Reverend Wright, the Obamas, the Clintons, and so forth, the comedy writes itself. And the list goes on—a list that begs exploitation. I believe I’ll throw a few more darts at the board of names next week, and we’ll see who gets the bathroom door opened on them. The establishment comedians can have their Sarah Palin.