I Pity Da Foo

Seeing as it is April, and seeing as I've been noticing that Mr. T pressure cooker commercial quite a bit, I've decided to create a new annual tradition. So, without further ado, here's the 2009 April Fools List.

1. Roland Burris

If you're a politician with a history of being somewhat shady, and you're appointed to a high-profile office by a politician with a history of being criminally shady, and you have to give testimony regarding said appointment and your conversations about it with said criminally shady politician, wouldn't you try to be as straightforward as possible, so that absolutely no one could misconstrue your innocence? Well, it appears that for Mr. Burris, that was too difficult. First, he claimed in an affidavit for his testimony to the Illinois State Senate that he had never attempted to raise funds for Rod "Prisoner #364278-B" Blagojevich. Then, he admitted that he tried, but was unsuccessful. Then he tried to backpedal on that as well. There's a decent article on it here, and there are plenty of other sources for looking into this. The best part of the whole story is that Burris is still planning to run for reelection in 2010, despite the general consensus that he can't win his own party's primary, and despite overwhelmingly negative poll numbers (in a phone poll on Fox 32 Sunday night, over 78% thought it was wrong for Burris to pursue reelection). If nothing else, Burris has ensured that he will be remembered, though I doubt he expected his term as Senator to be less the culmination of a mediocre political career and more a monument to his own egocentric incompetence.

2. Barack Obama

Let me preface this by saying that this isn't related to any major policy decisions, though I do wish he'd let someone besides Summers and Geitner have a say in planning for economic recovery, especially regarding bank policy (Stiglitz in particular makes some good points here). It's also not related to the declassification of the legal memos the Bush Administration used to justify torture (more on that later), or easing travel restrictions to Cuba (about bloody time), or the polite conversations and gifts with Hugo Chavez (isn't that how a foreign dignitary is supposed to behave?) , or the president's picking of his NCAA bracket (for the record, up until the Final Four I had him outpicked). No, this one is related to his throwaway line on The Tonight Show about his relatively poor bowling ability in which he compared himself to someone in the Special Olympics. Now, I knew what he meant. You knew what he meant. Most everyone with a brain stem knew what he meant; it was designed to be self-depricating. However, when you're the most visible man on Earth, you absolutely cannot say something like that, even in jest, because the media will eat you alive for it. And, naturally, they were all over it. Jenova forbid they discuss the economic or military ideas he'd brought up that night; no, instead we get treated to a dozen "DURR I COULD OUTBOWL THE PRESIDENT DURR" stories. The man has a mind for this sort of thing, most of the time, which makes the blunder all the more surprising and inexplicable. So, for subjecting me to even more utterly banal news than usual, Obama gets a spot in this column.

3. Republicans in Congress

People always wonder why nothing ever gets done in Washington. Sometimes it's because things get so rapidly bogged down in committees and political grandstanding. Sometimes it's because lobbyists have altogether too much power (never used to be that way...thank you Ronald Reagan). And sometimes, it's because one party has decided to put its own pursuit of power ahead of doing its job. This has become the modus operandi for the Republican Party: do absolutely nothing to fix anything and hope that all measures fail. This isn't some hidden agenda for gaining power, this is the STATED GOAL of at least one Republican congressperson. A Republican senator from TEXAS is trying to have a say in the legal process for seating the (finally) elected Al Franken. The goal seems to be to abdicate as much responsibility as possible so no mistakes can be tied to them, thereby allowing them to use those mistakes as a means to retake power in 2010 (the vote on the stimulus, particularly in the House, seems to symbolize this thoroughly). There's a little problem with this strategy, though: things are really bad right now! This is not the time to wait around and hope things go poorly so you can point and laugh, because if the plan works, there won't be anything left! I would think that being a subject in a semi-fertile kingdom would be superior to being the emperor of a wasteland, but hey, what do I know?

4. Democrats in Congress

Back in 2005, George W. "Thank God The Black Guy Has To Deal With It Now" Bush nominated a sizable number of judges to fill vacancies in the federal courts. A number of these nominees were ultraconservative sociopaths and as such were opposed by the Democratic minority. In response, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist began to tout the use of the so-called "nuclear option," by which the filibuster would be banned, in essence silencing the minority view and allowing anything with a simply majority to be pushed through. Democrats cried foul and promised to shut the Senate down if this went through; ultimately, 14 senators came to an agreement that pushed some of the nominations through in exchange for not eliminating the filibuster as an option. Now, Speaker of the House Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Reid are discussing the use of the "nuclear option" as a means to bypass the aforementioned Republican obstructionism. While I sympathize with the goal, this is the stupidest possible way to achieve it. Remember all that video footage of you decrying the idea of reconciliation, guys? They don't erase those tapes once you get into power! Pursuing this strategy is the fastest way to give up the moral high ground and would give the Republicans all the ammunition they needed to destroy any hopes of getting the President's agenda through Congress on the back of the currently burgeoning populist movement. The rules you play by have to be the same when you're in the minority as when you're in the majority. The Dems have been (correctly) ripping the Republicans for trying to play by two separate sets of rules for the last eight years; to do the exact same thing they did as soon as they get into power would be the definition of hypocrisy.

5. Denver Broncos owner Pat Bowlen

As a momentary break from the heavy stuff, let's hear a little bedtime story. Once upon a time there was a GM/coach who drafted his team's first franchise quarterback since their Hall of Famer retired. The new QB fit into the organization well and learned his craft, and for three years it was good, even if they didn't make the playoffs (when you go through 8 running backs in a season and couldn't play defense against the Indiana School for the Blind, that tends to happen). Then the owner fired the GM/coach. The new QB was not pleased, but understood the need for change and asked only that his offensive coordinator be kept (not too much to ask, seeing as the team had the 2nd best passing offense in the league in that last year). The owner of the team assured the new QB that he would do so. The owner then hired a new coach/GM with a massive ego despite no legitimate reason for possessing it. The new coach/GM then fired the offensive coordinator. The new QB was not pleased. The new coach then attempted to trade the new QB for another quarterback who, while lacking the raw talent of the new QB, was a better fit for the new coach's system. Ultimately the trade never happened, and the new QB found out he was being shopped and asked what was going on. The new coach/GM first denied that any such trade was in the works, then (once it was obvious that was a lie) admitted to the subterfuge and told the new QB that he could still be traded at any time. The new QB was irate and demanded a trade. The owner at this point stepped in and made it clear to both sides that they needed to be able to work together while simultaneously making no apologies for the extremely poor handling of the situation. The new coach/GM tried to play both sides, both stating that the new QB was "his guy" while also repeating that he could trade him whenever he felt like it. Meetings and phone calls produced nothing, and the owner continued to support his new coach's view, ultimately leading to the trade of the team's most valuable player to a team that hadn't seen a franchise QB in over 50 years. The new coach has gotten most of the blame (as he should), but the owner, the person with the most clout and the most power in ensuring that this didn't have to happen, has caught little flack for his impotence in resolving the situation positively. The moral of the story, boys and girls? If you're going to be an owner, grow a pair when you need to.

6. Organizers and participants in Tax Day Tea Parties

Seemingly since the birth of the nation (and, amusingly enough, done to an incredibly flagrant extent in D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation) people have perverted the image and the ideologies of the Founding Fathers to justify any and every crazy concept they could come up with. I'm not talking stuff like Sam Adams beer or Benjamin Franklin Plumbing, I'm talking stuff like "Jefferson and Madison founded the first major political party, so hardcore partisan politics are both hallmark and status quo for American democracy" and "Washington and Jefferson owned slaves, so they obviously were white supremacists." The newest in this line of utter idiocy comes in the form of the Tax Day Tea Party. The concept is simple and ludicrous: rather than go to work, meet up with a group of other ill-informed malcontents, make signs with ignorant catch phrases ("Commander-in-Thief" is one of my personal favorites), find the nearest government building, and throw tea bags at it while marching in a circle, waving the signs, and chanting moronic wanna-be populist drivel. Never mind that the primary protest makes no sense (apparently taxes on these fools have been made too high by the administration that just gave all of them a substantial tax cut), and never mind that the secondary argument makes no sense (if you haven't noticed, while they certainly are spending a large amount of taxpayer money, they aren't just throwing this away on laser-planes, unwinnable insurrection fighting, and parties for Henry Paulson's buddies; heck, Obama just asked each of his Cabinet members to find $100 million they can cut from their budget). My biggest issue lies in that they genuinely believe that their arguments are so in line with the Founders' response to the Tea Act that they can have a tea party of their own. It's not. The Boston Tea Party was about high taxes, but the issue wasn't that the taxes were unfairly high (in fact, the Tea Act of 1773 actually reduced taxes from their high under the Townshend Acts). The issues of the Boston Tea Party were that of taxation without representation, of government-created monopolies, and of government officials being unanswerable to anyone in the areas where they enforced laws. Do any of those jive with any part of the Tax Day Tea Party agenda? Didn't think so. The only thing more steeped in idiocy (pun totally intended) than the Tea Parties themselves were the people who attended them. If you want to sully the names of the Founders, there are certainly ways to do it, as none of them were without their vices...but don't insult my intelligence by doing it via pairing their protest against unjust treatment with your ignorant whining. You want to bitch, that's what MySpace is for.

7. Everyone on Fox News

I don't think this requires any explanation. However, as an example, let's toss this one out there. Today the Obama Administration declassified a number of memos drafted by Bush Administration legal scholars (if you can call them that) justifying the use of "enhanced interrogation techniques" such as waterboarding and "walling." As expected, there was an outcry from just about everyone. Most of the world saw these memos and their tortured (pun, again, totally intended) constitutional justifications as one more example of the wayward imperialistic tenor of Bush's executive branch. Fox News, too, decried the release of these memos, but for an entirely different reason: allegedly, now that Al Qaeda knows what techniques were used, the terrorists can train for these techniques and they will no longer be effective. Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the whole idea behind this Administration's policy regarding prisoners that we don't torture anymore? So if we're not going to be doing any of this stuff, what does it matter if people know how it was done when we did? Karl Rove and Bill Kristol in particular argue that the country is now less safe because these techniques will no longer be available to wrangle intelligence from captured "terrorists" (surprisingly few of the people being held as terrorists actually were when they were picked up, though I'd chance a guess that the numbers have increased since they first were taken into captivity). News flash, guys: Jack Bauer is a fictional character. Sometimes torture does work. The vast majority of the time, it does not. Numerous studies have been done that show the majority of people will say anything to make the pain stop, whether it makes any sense or not. Yes, something might be missed by not torturing prisoners. Am I willing to take that risk to uphold what I consider to be a necessary aspect of our honor and our national character? Yes.

I'm sure that, given enough time, I could add a ton more people to this list. However, I think this will do for this year.

Until next time, find your own fools to pity.