Barry Crimmins, Political Satirist.

Gassed   link to this story »

“It’s full speed onto the White House," said Hillary Clinton last night, tossing caution aside and announcing a bold plan to level the venerated structure with a suicide bomb rather than allow anyone but her family to take up residence at the swank Pennsylvania Avenue address.

Before her late night remarks at Indianapolis' Murat Center, Clinton and her boosters suffered through a considerable wait brought on by the inability of Reich Limbaugh's supporters to reverse the will of legitimate participants in the Indiana Democratic Primary by any but the scantiest of margins. So the Hoosiers for Hillary stayed up well beyond their bedtimes, save for the Klansman for Klinton who spend most evenings night-riding, cross-burning and harrying race-mixers as is the Ku Klux Kustom begun all those years ago on fertile Indiana soil. Hoodless, they were unrecognizable from other factions in the Hillarightist coalition, Operation Chaos.

The dragged out evening allowed physicians time to make some emergency pharmaceutical adjustments to the candidate. The psychotropic tune-up was necessitated by a security breach that allowed reality, in the form of North Carolina Democratic Primary results, to briefly confront the New York Senator. Her pitiful margin in Indiana combined with the malicious Tarheel thumping to make for the cruelest kind of double-digit disaster she could face -- one in which she fell behind her opponent by at least another ten pledged delegates. Dawn came at around midnight for Clinton who now knows that unless she uses nukes as conventional weapons in Denver, she has no chance of becoming the nominee. None. This means it will be Barack Obama who tears the gift-wrapping off a doddering Republican opponent this fall. This means we will not be duck-duck-goosed by yet another Bush or Clinton presidency. And that means something.

Judging how she finally took the stage with a burst of frenetic smiling and waving, it looked like the medicos may have pulled off a miracle. But all too soon, gaseous rhetorical vapors began taking a terrible toll on both candidate and audience. Before it was over, everyone had wilted like orchids on an ice floe. As Clinton sung with the swans, her husband loomed behind her looking so red-cheeked that it seemed possible that he might actually be feeling embarrassment (although the smart money was on the former prez's involvement in an accident involving a tanning bed, gin and a junior staffer.)

Even if Hillary Clinton somehow managed to bludgeon her way to the nomination and then defeat John McCain this fall, her presidency would reek of Robert Mugabe, or even worse, George W. Bush. But it'll never happen because this race is over. References to the Eveready Bunny, Rasputin and trick candles that re-ignite have grown threadbare. Of course disillusionment with her novelty shop Lazurus act won't stop the New York senator from demanding that super delegates give her the nomination. The voters have had their chance-- now it's your turn! Right, and at the end of the regular baseball season, let's skip the playoffs and simply have the owners hold meetings to decide which team wins the World Series.

As the night wore on and the crowd grew restive waiting for their candidate, Hoosier Senator Evan Bayh tap-danced the full length of the Indy 500 in an attempt to limit the spread of narcolepsy at the Clinton wake. In the meantime, Obama's remarks electrified the throng at his enormous North Carolina victory party while simultaneously euthanizing the hopes of Clinton dead-enders.

While waiting for the Indiana totals, the cable networks marked time by reeling in some of the slack from the jaws of their commentators, who finally seemed to have worked through the denial stage of their grief over the terminal status of the Clinton campaign. Serious hilarity ensued on CNN when Clinton family bootblack Lanny Davis, accustomed to leisurely swatting softballs in such surroundings, was asked to try to explain how his candidate could possibly garner the Democratic nomination. His clumsy response looked even shiftier as Davis squirmed in a suit last worn by Joseph Bologna as King Kaiser in the "Boss Hijack" sketch in My Favorite Year.

Also on CNN was Clinton acolyte Paul Begala, who smiled falsely while attempting to write off Obama's supporters as a combination of "African-Americans and Eggheads." He cautioned that Obama would alienate "working class whites." Begala made himself scarce after spewing this anti-intellectual and racist bile. Too bad no one bothered to ask him why working class blacks don't matter. Nor was he challenged on his assertion that white working folks simply won't vote for Obama because, we were left to conclude, the only thing they hate more than black people is smart black people. And no one bothered to call this Bill and Hill apologist on the most glaring insult of all-- it was W.J. Clinton and his so-called "free trade" deals that backed up the trucks to America's loading docks and jammed them full of decent jobs for deportation to the Third World. Conscience-free trade has screwed over working class people of every background and stripe. So now we're supposed to hate one another rather than the Clintons and the slime at the DLC and their corporate masters who have sold our decent and secure lives down the river and across oceans for the sake of profiteering? Spare me.

As the race in Indiana grew as tight as the grip of the political grim reaper on the Clinton Campaign, I thought of Paul Begala and did some smiling of my own. Unlike Begala's, my grin was genuine because it came at a moment when I knew the shameless, unethical and divisive campaign of Hillary Clinton was taking its last few zombified steps. I smiled because I knew that finally a drain had been installed in Clinton's notorious kitchen sink and that its vile contents were gushing onto the Guccis of the candidate and her strategists. What a tragedy for the working class!

In a week in which Clinton promised to bring down both OPEC and taxes at the pump, one thing was clear last night -- her campaign isn't cooking with gas, it's just cooked.

last updated Wednesday, May 7th, 2008 12:05AM

9 COMMENTS COMMENT ON THIS

No Taxation On Acceleration!   link to this story »

I just arrived home from Boston. The shows were terrific and we raised enough money to buy Bob Lazarus a barrel of oil. Laz is doing great and so are all the Ding Ho alums. It was wonderful to see everyone, including so many of the Ding's patrons.

Speaking of oil, the federal gas tax really added up during my trip from upstate NY to Beantown. If only someone had declared a holiday from that brutal tariff, my trip would have been perfect. The idea of untaxed unleaded is an obvious winner --especially considering how the fee could simply be reassigned to the oil companies. They'd never risk any precious profits by lobbying to fight such a move. Once Big Oil is good and saddled with our old gas taxes, it would never try to pull off anything so sleazy as passing along the cost of the increased tax (and then some) to the consumer.

Besides, it's about time a politician showed the moral courage required to take a stand for the haggard and downtrodden Humvee owners.
Best of all, such a plan would eventually lead to reduced consumption of foreign oil because once highway maintenance is suspended due to lack of funding, the resulting bridge collapses, tunnel cave-ins and overpass failures will serve as a deterrent to joy riding. But first comes this year's summer driving months with nary a road project to slow us down between here and Chico's Monkey Farm (Live Grandmother Monkeys!)

Once the gas tax holiday is over, I'm sure the American people will be thrilled to start paying it again. What's another 18 cents [or so] when it's September and you're already spending upwards of $4 per gallon? Hell, the goddamned pols will fight for the honor of announcing the reinstatement of the petrol levy.

So the gas tax holiday can't miss. An occasional bridge plunge is a small price to pay for a few months of tax-free fill-ups. -- BC

last updated Tuesday, May 6th, 2008 12:05AM

2 COMMENTS COMMENT ON THIS

Lloyd the Dog 8/23/98 - 8/25/07   link to this story »

It is with extreme sadness that the family of Lloyd the Dog announces his passing at 8:45 AM Saturday, August 25, 2007. He was a remarkable friend, loyal family member and brilliant and loving dog.

He will never, ever be forgotten. He will always, always remain in our hearts. We were so lucky to have him illuminate our lives for the past eight years and forty-six weeks

We'd like to express our gratitude for all the kindness shown to all of us during his illness as well as the rest of his life. In his memory we humbly request that you treat animals with love, dignity and respect.

Karen Crist
Barry Crimmins

last updated Saturday, August 25th, 2007 12:08AM

11 COMMENTS COMMENT ON THIS

Home and away   link to this story »

I'm preparing to get out of town to do get to Regent Theater in Arlington, Ma. to benefit Ding Ho original Bob Lazurus. Laz has been walloping the daylights out of leukemia, an unpaid, yet full-time endeavor. So the kids are putting on a couple of shows -- Jimmy Tingle and Tony V have doen the heavy lifting on production and here's to them! The Sunday show has sold out so we've added a Monday Ding Ho Reunion. Tickets have just gone on sale for Monday so scoop 'em up! The last time we did one of these full-blown reunions it became a show that everyone claims to have been at. So please come out and see some tremendous comics for a wonderful cause.

******

Speaking of reunions, my oldest pal in comedy, A. Whitney Brown, popped in and since I was busy getting ready to travel, I told him he was today's guest columnist. And so without any doing further, please welcome A. Whitney Brown!

I am your guest blogger. My name is A. Whitney Brown. I write from Barry's Hermitage in upstate New York, a hidden glade invisible from the road, shrouded by day in the bleak and stark greyness that haunts these hills, hidden by night among the treacherous fogs and sudden mists that slaughter by hundreds the impaired drivers. I lost my last car here, turned turtle into an erosion ditch. Don't try to find this place.

I'm in a period of transition. You see, I never expected life to be this long. Life is short, I always heard. It doesn't seem like it.

Or maybe it's just the Democratic primary that seems to go on forever. But something is wrong with me. I find myself saying the unthinkable, the unacceptable, I find myself way out of the mainstream. Like everyone, I've come to despise the Clintons. Bill has become a buffoon, as Barry says, the Willie Loman of politcs, the very model of what the great W.C. Fields made a career of parodying.

Hillary a screeching, shameless harpy, a were-candidate, a shapeshifter, a Grendelian soccer-mom-night-shift-gas-pumping waitress who has had not just a driver, but a convoy, for over three decades. And the voters are buying it. They want to tip her a little over the usual 15%.
And I thought the re-election of Bush was the apogee and epitome, of American stupidity. Oh, no. That, we now know, is a bottomless barrel. An abyss of ignorance that has yet to be sounded. And this is where I go off the tracks.

Because it is unjust, it is morally unacceptable, that stupidity this profound should not have consequences. A just man, a man with any conscience, must mourn, must cry out for punishment, for atonement. Is there no God, no karma, no righteousness, no power on earth or heaven that will intervene?

We burn our food in our SUV's. We murder at will, and complain that it costs us so much. Our foreign policy is simple armed robbery. We torture, we 're-educate.'

There are those of us, Americans, steeped in American ideals, American patriots, who celebrate the North Vietnamese victory to this day, a power that finally provided consequences for hubris and greed. Will the Iraqis stand up and defend their honor? Can the united Islamic world defeat this stupidity and greed, and drive us from their lands with our tails between our legs, helicopters ferrying the cowed survivors off roofs in the Green Zone? Please Allah make it so. It is devoutly to be hoped by all who cherish the values our forefathers died and starved for in the huts of Morristown.

Surely the souls of the Good Puritans who set this foundling nation afoot cry out from their hallowed graves for atonement.

I know in my heart that I can love this country again. Because I love the land itself. 400 years my people have walked it and we liked it well. But atonement must come, for the torture, for the greed, for the murder.

And so I find myself hoping the American people will be stupid enough to elect John McCain in this election, for the simple reason that stupidity must have consequences if the world is to be set aright.

But that is Naderism, pure and simple. That things must get worse before they get better, and of course it never works out that way. They just keep getting worse. But justice will come.
One day, a hundred million light years away, a dying star will collapse into a black hole, or two circling neutron stars will finally collide, releasing a burst of gamma rays so powerful it will be seen in galaxies not yet born for billions of years, and that burst will happen to be pointed at a remote and inconsequential arm of the Milky Way, and the earth will be sterilized in a hundredth part of a second. It's a comforting thought.

LINK: Regent Theatre Box Office

last updated Friday, May 2nd, 2008 12:05AM

5 COMMENTS COMMENT ON THIS