More Riches for Dynastic Sports Paupers

The Boston Bruins won the Stanley Cup last night, pulling off a city's exacta of being insufferable in every major sport.

Assuming you were once fond of Boston sports fans, watching them this last decade has felt a lot like watching episodes of The Simpsons after the eighth season. A few clunkers aside, they both delivered a reliable product — one angsty heartbreak, the other comedy. You grew up with both of their charms. Then at some point, there came an inexorable process of encrappening that eventually everyone had to admit would devour the greater body, the last human and appealing bits subsumed by dickheaded metastasis.

In both cases, smart people better able to see inevitability coming at them like a thunderhead convinced themselves that this wasn't happening, that everyone else had gone Chicken Little and lost perspective. Clever people rationalized The Simpsons' having covered every practical storyline and needing to move to extremes to seem novel. Boston apologists pointed to cases of other teams with bandwagons to marginalize the odium of deep-south Pats fans, held up The Evil Empire's payroll-lusty fans as evidence of the smaller and necessary evil of Boston's funds-fueled die-hards. Conversely, a drunk could have made a far more astute observation: "These guys are assholes."

Just like those two hilarious gags in even the worst Simpsons episodes, Boston apologists have plenty of rationalizing details to cling to. No matter how egregious the Sox become, it's absurd to think they'll approach the Yankees in gross revenue. Teams can't really control their bandwagons, or at least that's what (to take a wild "for instance") every Idaho-born Steelers fan has claimed when condemning bandwagon fans without a trace of irony. But there's still plenty of behavior for which they can be held accountable.

Idi Amin's Briefs Rodeo: SNAP INTO A COAL PIT

Note: every week, news aggregators address hundreds of worthwhile stories or opinions that never catch on, either because they lack an obvious follow-up or because sites that live off ad revenue would rather bang high-traffic drums over and over. Idi Amin's Briefs Rodeo provides a summary of good stuff you might have missed. He has a Bachelor's degree in political science, the rank of Field Marshal and was the last ruler of a free Uganda. He has not eaten anyone since 1980.


Passengers Traveling with Small Children Are Encouraged to Stop Somewhere Other Than the United States
by IDI AMIN DADA

• President Obama's annual promise to end the Bush tax cuts (this year he'll finally keep his word, liberals are sure of it!) is taking a toll on conservatives who are sick and tired of class warfare. They can't even hide their disgust with his statement that taxes are lower now than they were under President Reagan, something which is factually true. As is par for the course, they respond to correct statements by mocking the person making them and joking as if laughter chases away reality. They could have even cited this shitty Politifact calculation which ignores the context of the tax rate discussions and was tailor-made for conservatives who want to misrepresent history, but that would offer too much dignity to the truth, which deserves nothing more than mockery.

• Unrelenting in their anti-reality stance, Republicans blocked President Obama's nominee to the 9th Circuit Court by portraying his views as the exact opposite of what they actually are. Now Obama has no choice but to try to swear him in on Opposite Day.

• President Obama's nominee to the Federal Reserve Board, Peter Diamond, has withdrawn his nomination for the position after being blocked and renominated several times since April 2010. Not even some award he got in October 2010 helped his cause, which is evidenced by the scathing and wickedly awesome letter titled, "When a Nobel Prize Isn't Enough." The letter was written by Peter Diamond.

It's really worth reading in full, as it castigates the relevant GOP senators with exactly the level of scorn they deserve. Also noteworthy is this quote from Norm Ornstein of the fucking American Enterprise Institute, of all sources:

We've had huge numbers of nominees blocked, and very few of them for reasons to do with the qualifications or character....

You wonder if there's anything that could bring some level of shame to those who block nominees for partisan purposes and just take people hostage and leave them twisting in the wind for months.

GQ: LeBron James Is a Dickhead—A Taxonomy

Thanks to the good-natured badgering of Bethlehem Shoals (a/k/a @freedarko), I have a piece today on GQ about the various kinds of LeBron hatred and where they seem to come from.

It's peculiar how unwilling many people are to accept the story of a man who essentially did what he was supposed to: take less money, to be part of a team, to win a championship. Those are the sorts of high-minded goals we demand of sports figures, but this time they don't seem to count.

Although there wasn't space to explore the idea in the piece, it's interesting how LeBron's conduct is so readily dismissed as phony; yet, when a former superstar devalues his own play by being lazy, troublesome or a malcontent, then cleans up his act after a low-value trade to a contender, we are often willing to see the act as redemptive. There's a value in preemptively being a cad: it makes the steps of ingratiating yourself seem laboriously insincere instead of slickly insincere. Lie to us if you must; just make it look like work.

Also, for those of you who might panic that this place will be closing shop and the contributors off to seersuckier pastures, in the land of glossy pages and cravat blogging ("SEE THE FALL '11 ASCOTS!"), I own too much Hickey Freeman and not nearly enough Italian stuff to hang out with quartered gentlemen.

Click here to go to GQ.

Wailing Walls: Bela Lugosi's Dead, Part III

Note: After the death of Osama Bin Laden, we, the good people of Et tu, Mr. Destructo? turn for insight to General Rehavam "Gandhi" Ze'evi, former Israeli Minister of Tourism. Having faked his assassination in the Mt. Scopus Hyatt Hotel, the General has been in deep cover, in Judea and Samaria, posing as an American goy pursuing graduate studies in the Middle East. He last joined us for Bela Lugosi's Dead, Part II: The Real Story Sucks: Bin Laden, the ISI and a Dawood Sandstorm.


Killing the Bastard Bin Laden, Stage IV of the American Fever Dream
by GENERAL REHAVAM "GANDHI" ZE'EVI

"And he cried mightily with a strong voice, saying, Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is become the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit, and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird."
— Revelation 18:2

"An America that uses its military power less promiscuously, more intelligently and in a targeted and focused manner might once again gain the world’s respect and fear, if not affection."
— Fareed Zakaria, Time, May 20, 2011

The boozy cheering of the blood-mad spectator echoes across a lacuna in the brittle American soul. Never forget the slaughter of 9/11 and never forget that the brick and mortar of this nation was slapped atop a continent-wide Indian burial ground. The American Revolution was an assertion of human worth that has been studied and admired by everyone from Simon Bolivar to Ho Chi Minh. And since that clinching moment at Yorktown, America has paved the low road over any peoples in its way and assumed it would pay no price.

The world should embrace America the way cattle egrets dote on elephants, and America should elevate the world in the same way, a symbiotic beneficence between the gentle giant and the greater multitude of the flock. Instead, usually, we shirk, creep away from the trajectory of our best instincts and better potential, a fiend loping off into the weeds to kill something. We'd rather be a pack of hyenas than anything as noble as an elephant. Those cannibals will eat almost anything when hungry — bones, metal pots, their shit and their children. They should be hunted to extinction, yet they roam free and plentiful on the African continent; elephants and buffalo and other noble animals are always the endangered creatures.

Of course we would misname a strutting punk like Bin Laden "Geronimo"; when you hunt in the high grass, you don't care if you've bagged a gazelle or garbage. They're all something to be torn apart. There is no moral symmetry in which Osama and Geronimo can be compared; a reedy child-murdering sybarite like Bin Laden doesn't deserve to be so much as incinerated in the same sentence as an actual freedom-fighter like Geronimo. The only thing they share is a status as enemy of America, to be disposed of like every other villain. In the eerie silence of falling footsteps pursuing their quarry into a back bedroom, safety off to eject Osama's intellect onto a greasy daybed, the SEALs ran kill-confirmation through their heads, lest they be the lucky triggerman: "GERONIMO... ENEMY KIA."

Those three garbled little words constitute an express elevator to the bowels of the American soul, to the same killing rage that metastasized in the heart of every pioneer. We can hear the deafening roar of our forefathers in that hidden, potent store of true bloody-murder grit, adrenaline from beyond the grave, a hypernationalist virus that grips like tetanus and holds on harder: "FASTER. KILL, KILL, KILL. EXTERMINATE THE BRUTES."

Idi Amin's Briefs Rodeo: Liberal Extremism

Note: every week, news aggregators address hundreds of worthwhile stories or opinions that never catch on, either because they lack an obvious follow-up or because sites that live off ad revenue would rather bang high-traffic drums over and over. Idi Amin's Briefs Rodeo provides a summary of good stuff you might have missed. He has a Bachelor's degree in political science, the rank of Field Marshal and was the last ruler of a free Uganda. He has not eaten anyone since 1980.


You Can Keep the 'Climate Change'; I'll Cling to My Fracking and Logs
by IDI AMIN DADA

• Due to budget cuts, the government will shut down or significantly scale back several web projects which increase government transparency. One of those projects involves showing which private companies were awarded stimulus contracts. Surely this move won't benefit companies owing millions in back taxes, for a total of almost $25 billion given to companies that hate the government so much that they want to ensure it won't be able to afford to give them contracts in the future.

• Blue Dog fuckhead Steny Hoyer insists on ruining the well-being of Federal employees, by asking as a part of budget negotiations to bring down their employee benefits to the nonexistent level of the private sector. Give Hoyer credit for mastering the art of Democratic negotiation: abandoning all major demands as a prerequisite for getting to the bargaining table and converting all those golden concessions into the lead of GOP demands rubber-stamped by "liberal" policymakers.

• State Park Obituaries:

California — Democratic (questionable) Governor Jerry Brown has proposed closing a quarter of the state's parks, with 70 scheduled to shutter as a result of budget cuts. Thankfully, closing 16 of those parks may violate federal law, meaning a mere 56 would be closed. Besides, the ones remaining open are already in such bad shape, it's like, who cares?

Ohio - A bill to allow Oil and natural gas drilling in state parks has passed the state house, and famous asshole governor John Kasich supports the measure. Nevermind that fracking for natural gas is like sticking nitroglycerine in your air-popper before the start of movie night, and that it's worse for the environment than just straight-up using coal. The big problem is that otherwise there's just not enough of a chance that Ohio will experience earthquakes, and this is something fracking can finally correct.

Jim Tressel: The Kind of Satan Who Sends Whitman's Samplers

Even if you don't follow college sports, surely by now either workplace conversation or your friends' Facebook walls have brought you up to speed about Jim Tressel, former Head Coach of the Ohio State football team, a "wholesome good guy" who resigned amidst a cloud of ethics violations.

There was something almost awesomely square about Tressel, with his Transitions Lenses and ties. He was like a football Mr. Rogers, the only man in America who could come home from a sweater-vested day at work and change into something even more impossibly Protestant. You pictured him removing his loafers and putting on boat shoes, swapping out the sweater vest for an even goofier sweater, like Donald Sutherland's high-collared job in Animal House (only without his bare butt hanging out). Jim Tressel looked like the kind of guy who put on a bowtie to take a shower.

All of this makes him a wonderful target for shoddy sports column hand-wringing about propriety. Such high-minded considerations have drenched newspaper op-ed sections with the familiar ooze of column inches that slide by with Plaschkean carriage returns for each sentence and the kind of affectedly tightassed shock and dismay that — even in print — somehow makes you think of people who tell you Important Things with such emphasis that you can hear the capital letters. There's a lot of poor thinking and hypocrisy at work here, which Deadspin's Tommy Craggs neatly skewered yesterday:

Wailing Walls: Bela Lugosi's Dead, Part II

Note: After the death of Osama Bin Laden, we, the good people of Et tu, Mr. Destructo? turn for insight to General Rehavam "Gandhi" Ze'evi, former Israeli Minister of Tourism. Having faked his assassination in the Mt. Scopus Hyatt Hotel, the General has been in deep cover, in Judea and Samaria, posing as an American goy pursuing graduate studies in the Middle East. He last joined us for Bela Lugosi's Dead, Part I: A Shadow of Ourselves.


The Real Story Sucks: Bin Laden, the ISI and a Dawood Sandstorm
by GENERAL REHAVAM "GANDHI" ZE'EVI

We're being lied to with all the crude smugness of an Irish Setter with crumbs on his whiskers, oblivious as to who ate all the kaiser rolls off the counter. This horseshit bandage being spun around Osama's powder-burned chancres is enough to make any decent self-loathing American want to attempt a header off the Golden Gate. We have no decoder rings, yet, with the power of elementary deduction, we can cut through the web of lies ensnaring Lady Liberty.

In Part I of this piece, I told you about Al Qaeda, the most comically monstrous gang of murdering cretins to never have starred in a Roald Dahl novel. That group's "BFG" was recently introduced to the concept of mind-expanding hollowpoint bullets, a door of perception Mr. Bin Laden may not have been entirely prepared to traverse.

No matter. No one goes straight to the shrink when they find themselves fixated on the idea of carving 666 onto their bus driver's forehead or tearing apart their Keurig machine to see if the CIA has installed a tracking device in the coffee filter. It takes some building up to a point where one can accept they are nuts, and that is what a general practitioner is for — a medical hand who can gently break it to those clad only in tinfoil that it might be worth trying the Thorazine. The calorie-free, sociopathic banality of this Bin Laden hit is similarly more digestible if we first admit: one, that this official narrative does not make a great deal of sense; and, two, that it is a terrifying indication of how little the "War on Terror" has achieved.

If you want to accept the truth of the Bin Laden killing, you have to accept that you will be condemned as paranoid, unstable and soft on hard terror. From where I sit, true-blue madness and narcissistic delinquency came from the depravity of the American jubilation over the murder of that withered old Saudi lecher, but that will have to wait until Part III. Our task today is much more rote. Busting the lies of fat-necked warmongers and armchair militarists is always a boring, thankless, easy job, but it's an important one.