My Fellow Americans,

How about a little primary analysis, eh? I’d like to say that I’ve been busy these last two months staunchly campaigning, attending town hall meetings, raising funds, and getting my message of hope out to the people. But I can’t lie to America, friends, so here’s the truth: I spent most of the last two months drinking Scotch and playing PS2. And I hereby promise to appoint Kratos as my Secretary of Defense!

Anyway. The Iowa, New Hampshire, and (for the GOP only) Wyoming primaries are behind us, and those traditionally overhyped contests have yielded some surprising results. Last Thursday in Iowa, two long-neglected groups dominated the election, and delivered a big “fuck you” to the Clinton/Giuliani hubris machine. On the Democrat side, progressives who want to move beyond the divisiveness of skin color and party affiliation and keep this country from going down the toilet voted for Barack Obama. On the Republican side, Christians who are tired of phony atheist NeoCons pretending to give a shit about Jesus elected a real Christian for once, in the form of Mike Huckabee. While these results seem surprising, we all secretly knew it had to happen sooner or later.

In the GOP-only primary in Wyoming on Saturday, Mitt Romney won, probably because he bothered to show up once or twice. I was going to try to evoke some kind of disgust at the way the media ignored the whole thing, but when was the last time you heard anyone get excited about Wyoming in any context? They’ve got three electoral votes. They’re the leading exporter of trona, a mineral used to make baking soda. Hose me down. Hell, I didn’t bother campaigning there either.

And then there was New Hampshire’s primary on Tuesday, where voters took one look at the shakeups in Iowa and decided to deliver a “fuck you” of their own by electing the most long-running establishment monsters available, Hillary Clinton and John “McLovin” McCain. If McCain were the Straight Talk Express evangelist-bashing chop-busting badass of the year 2000, I would be a lot more excited about this. Oh sure, I know it’s possible, even likely, that the lovably cantankerous old McCain is still in there somewhere. But to find out, we’ll have to give up our first shot at a genuinely interesting election in years.

A McCain candidacy will be viewed as a “Let’s get this over with” affair. If he becomes the nominee, it will only be because there’s a consensus that it’s “his turn.” Sorta like Kerry, or Bob Dole. It’s the political equivalent of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy movie: you know it won’t be great, but you waited for it for so long that you feel obligated to check it out. The solution is to pit McCain against someone more exciting. Obama, for example.

McCain vs. Clinton, on the other hand, is not promising. Hillary Clinton already feels like a McCain-style Presidential Wannabe in training, who will spend the next four or five election cycles wondering when her turn will come. Put two of those up against each other in the general election, and people will go with the most boring choice possible. Probably McCain.

For those of you keeping score, that’s five total victories to five completely different people, none of whom are Rudy Giuliani, and none of whom are The Shadow Candidate. Dennis Kucinich is already quietly directing his supporters in Obama’s direction, and John Edwards and Bill Richardson will probably both do the same in about five weeks. Ron Paul will continue to win a small percentage of the votes, at least until he gets enough attention that some major news outlet finally bothers to do some research on what a nutcase he is. Mike Gravel is far more entertaining than Duncan Hunter, and neither will ever get anywhere (though I hope Gravel makes more YouTube videos). Best of all, as February rolls around, these primary results will finally help the media realize that Fred Thompson was never a serious candidate.

Oh, one more thing: you’ll never see The Shadow Candidate cry when his motives are questioned. Or at any other time, either. And that’s your loss, because The Shadow Candidate’s tears are made of straight gin.

Thank you, and may the Beak bless America.

Last year, I made an animated Beaksmas special for a few friends, and they liked it. This year, I made a new one and posted it on YouTube so that more than ten people will have a chance to see it.

The usual warnings apply — it’s got a lot of inside jokes and senseless violence. Plus some foul language, though not as much as usual. On the upside, it has Christmas Ogres.

Those of you with long memories may recall Night of the Ponies, a cartoon I posted last year. I promised a follow-up, then failed to deliver it for a very long time. Then my cousin got married and I turned it into a cartoon, creatively titled My Cousin Got Married.

Like every other artsy type out there, I’m not entirely satisfied with the end product, but you didn’t come here to listen to me apologize. So watch it.

My Fellow Americans,

Faced with the conundrum of increasing military ambitions, but not an increasing population to go with it, in 1831 King Louis-Philippe of France created the famous French Foreign Legion, an all-foreign volunteer segment of France’s military. Men from all over the world could sign up and join the esprit décor of the first globalized fighting force, dedicated to serving a single nation’s goals, much like aliens from many different planets sign up to serve the goals of the Federation Starfleet on Star Trek.

Perhaps you’re already familiar with the French Foreign Legion’s popular image as depicted in Bugs Bunny cartoons and 1970s issues of Mad Magazine. Maybe your father was devoured by a lion while you were on safari, and you let it happen because you always secretly hated him. Maybe you left your bride at the altar because you couldn’t tell her about your past as a Mafia assassin. Maybe you were fleeing the scene of a bank robbery and left your best friend behind to be arrested while you made your escape. Whatever the case, you’re running from something absolutely hideous in your past, and you can either join the Foreign Legion, or hop aboard the Tramp Steamer of the Damned.

Apart from being absolutely fucking awesome in that respect, the French Foreign Legion was also a tremendous asset to the French, relieving some of the burden on their native soldiers, as well as providing strength for France’s growing Imperial ambitions.

Today, the military of the United States faces a similar problem. With hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops, as well as Reservists and National Guard, on overextended, long-term deployment in the Middle East, our defenses at home and abroad are weakening. Enlistment rates are down across the board, and casualties, while decreasing in recent months, are still unpleasantly high.

Meanwhile, we have a second problem, related to the first: porous, undefended borders allowing millions of illegal immigrants into our country. Weak borders are an obvious security risk, but they’re also very informative to a creative mind. All of the illegal immigration statistics point to one very important trend: lots and lots of people want to be United States citizens. My fellow Americans, we are not using this knowledge to our advantage.

While my opponents in this election are condemning illegal aliens as dangerous invaders, I say that they are an untapped resource. The vast majority of illegal immigrants are not subversives, but people who want only to join our club! And that is why I am proposing the formation of the first American Foreign Legion.

The American Foreign Legion would follow the all-foreign, all-volunteer tradition of the French version. It would protect us from needing to institute a draft in an emergency. It would provide an alternative path to U.S. citizenship, based on service and commitment to our country. For those voters who see everything in terms of simplistic slogans, “They took our jobs” would be swiftly replaced with “Support our troops.”

“The purpose of the Legion was to remove disruptive elements from society and put them to use fighting the enemies of France. Recruits included failed revolutionaries from the rest of Europe, soldiers from the disbanded foreign regiments, and troublemakers in general, both foreign and French.”
–Wikipedia

An American Foreign Legion will provide opportunities for lots of people besides dissatisfied day-laborers wanting a path to citizenship. Think of all the times over the years that you’ve heard a politician talking about how this or that oppressed population wants the U.S. military to show up and start shooting. Iraqis wanted us to take out Saddam, Iranian students want liberal reforms, Venezuelans are being crushed by Chavez, etc., etc.

Well, here’s a chance for them to step the fuck up. If they really want the American military to overthrow their leaders or reform their governments, they’d probably jump at a chance to join up and fight that battle in an official capacity. Provided everyone has an equal chance to join (possibly by going under the radar of foreign leaders), the membership of such a group could provide some preliminary polling data on who actually wants military intervention. If we give Venezuelans a real chance to get on board, and they don’t, we probably should leave them alone. If a whole bunch of Iranians suddenly enlist, we can be pretty sure that something big is happening there.

Again, we’d need a system in place to ensure that everyone gets an equal chance to sign up. If a society is closed to the outside world (such as North Korea), we’d need a way to make sure anyone there who wants to enlist can do so safely. If we can do that, we’ve got instant demographic data on who wants outside assistance and who wants to be left alone.

To return to its rightful place in the international community, our military must shake off the stigma of invaders and regain the reputation of heroes. Our weary soldiers must have fresh reinforcements. Our illegal immigrant interlopers must become our immigrant friends and colleagues. Only one plan can simultaneously solve all of these problems: my plan.

Thank you, and may the Beak bless America.

My fellow Americans, I have a confession to make. I don’t know shit about Sam Brownback. At least, I didn’t until I started researching this article.

Kansas Senator Sam Brownback, until Friday, was one of my rivals in the 2008 presidential election, campaigning for the Republican Party nomination. He officially dropped out of the race yesterday, lacking donations and poll numbers. And until today, that was the sum total of my knowledge about the man. In comparison, if what I know about, say, Mitt Romney, could fill the text of one of those Chinese takeout menus that delivery boys slip under my apartment door (Mormon, millionaire, creepy, etc.), then what I know about Sam Brownback could fit onto that little slip of paper inside the fortune cookie.

Which got me to wondering, what is it about Sam Brownback that no one knows anything about him? Why were we content to leave him on the third-tier GOP laundry list alongside candidates like Ron Paul and Tom Tancredo? I assume he must suck in some fashion, if he can’t even compete with the likes of Nasty Man Giuliani. But exactly how he sucks, that was the mystery. After a couple of hours of research, I believe I have discovered why Sam Brownback sucks, not only to the likes of liberals, but also why he failed as a GOP nominee.

He doesn’t believe in evolution, he simplifies everything into terms of faith, and he’s against abortion, even for victims of rape and incest. That’s why the average Beak reader doesn’t like him, but they’re irrelevant, because he had to win the GOP nomination first before caring what we think. But run a YouTube search on Brownback, and guess what you’ll find? Endless videos related to the aforementioned topics. Abortion and evolution, and nothing else. Seriously, if he has opinions on other issues, it’s not widely publicized.

What’s so telling about these talking points isn’t their ass-backwards moralist pandering. A pro-life/pro-Jesus stance is part of the GOP prerequisite checklist, and the first rule of debates is to avoid wasting time on issues that all of the debaters agree upon.

And that’s why the GOP voters and cash contributors ignored the twit. Because the Morality Checklist is irrelevant in Election 2008. GOP voters want to know about the war in Iraq, about Iran, terrorists and national security in general. They want to know about balancing the goddamn budget and re-valuing the dollar. They’re probably concerned with things like Mexican labor and Chinese imports. And they’re really sick of all these GOP congressmen getting caught in stupid corruption scandals, making them look as depraved as all those Catholic priests that got caught molesting little boys a few years ago.

In other words, Republican voters still aren’t fans of evolution or abortion, but right now, they really don’t fucking care, because for once they have bigger problems than judging other people’s private lives. And that’s why Brownback was a shitty GOP candidate.

Thank you, and may the Beak bless America.

My fellow Americans, what the hell is going on here? Have you seen what’s passing for election coverage? Ranking the candidates’ haircuts and freaking out over an absent lapel pin? Pundits pinning their hopes on a dude from “Law and Order?” Seriously writing articles about Mrs. Clinton’s sorta-cleavage?

But that’s not what made me decide to enter this race, America. I made my decision after stumbling upon this website, which lists the candidates’ positions on reproductive rights. Almost every Democrat in the race has a perfect 100% score from NARAL Pro-Choice America, but they’re all being very careful to tiptoe around the topics of abortion, sex ed programs, and — if I may use an eye-rollingly awful expression — “lady issues” in general.

All I want to see is a Democrat get up there and admit that damn near everyone fucks outside of marriage, and if you don’t want people to get pregnant, or get abortions, you should teach them how to put on a goddamn condom. I mean, people get hurt playing football, but we don’t try talking people out of playing. We give them helmets. If you can cover your head, you should be allowed to cover your dick.

How’s that for a position? Safe, affordable contraceptives, a condom machine in every location we can fit one, accessible abortion services for anyone who needs them, and comprehensive education on how to fuck responsibly, in or out of marriage. Sounds pretty sweet, huh? Bet you wish you had something like that when you were in high school. Probably would’ve worked better than that abstinence pledge you took. How’d that work out for you, by the way?

Of course, nobody will come right out and say any of this during campaign season, lest they alienate such mythical beasts as Swing Voters and Security Moms. Let me assure you, both of these groups did their share of premarital boning. And I believe that if someone actually took the time to address their concerns, and to gently point out how fucking stupid those concerns are, my position would start making a whole lot of sense to them.

Thank you, and may the Beak bless America.

Campaign 2008. A canned response for every occasion. Pundits manufacturing ridiculous scandals from thin air. Enough candidates to form a P-Funk cover band. And more than a year before it’s all over.

We at the Beak will probably end up endorsing whoever the Democratic Party nominates. But that doesn’t mean we can’t get pissed off at our own party. We can.

You see, there’s an unwritten law on the campaign trail which states that Democrats have to pretend they don’t have any good ideas in order to seem “serious” and “electable.” This is, for lack of a better term, fucking moronic. Bush’s approval rating is as low as it’s gonna get, and Americans are angry at Congress for their failure to lay the smack down on the Administration.

“What we need,” I mused to myself, “is a brutally honest candidate. This candidate wouldn’t have a hope in hell of winning, of course, but goddamn it would be awesome to watch him tell off reporters and call the other candidates on their bullshit.”

So we went out and found one, and thus was born Shadow Campaign 2008.

The Beak’s own Shadow Candidate will be along to cover this Presidential campaign, with a focus on cutting to the heart of each and every non-issue that gets trotted out to distract us. With any luck, he’ll bring a unique brand of Monday-morning quarterbackery to the proceedings, and probably find time to make fun of every single person on Fox News.

We’re getting an account set up for him as I type this. Once that’s taken care of, he can rain down satirical indignation on our hallowed electoral process, and hopefully be the sort of guy you wish you could vote for.

Smells Like Dead Elephants: Dispatches from a Rotting Empire
By Matt Taibbi
Published October 2007

“Bush in person always strikes me as the kind of guy who would ask a woman for a hand job at the end of a first date. He has days where he looks like she said yes, and days where the answer was no.”
–Matt Taibbi

Smells Like Dead Elephants: Dispatches from a Rotting Empire is the best book I’ve read all year, and that’s not surprising, as it’s the long-awaited follow-up to 2005’s Spanking the Donkey, the book that started everyone referring to Matt Taibbi as “The New Hunter S. Thompson.”

While he may still be perfecting the beautiful art of Gonzo Journalism, Taibbi is, if anything, more focused than Thompson. This may simply be a by-product of the perpetual shit flood pouring out of Washington these days, or it may be an after-effect of Taibbi’s years in Russia, but either way, Taibbi’s reporting hearkens back to the skull-bashing, chop-busting ruthlessness of Thompson’s best work, and you don’t have to stop every five minutes to talk about sports gambling and abusive hotel bills.

The secret to Taibbi’s writing is not simply his abundant candor or his vicious humor, but his genuine and ever-present outrage at the corrupt, greedy, senseless idiocy that will forever pollute the legacy of the Bush administration. It’s the same shocked rage that a mother might find upon returning from a trip to the supermarket to discover that her house is on fire because her five-year-old dropped his crack pipe while her husband was fucking the babysitter. It’s a baffled and appalled “what the hell happened while I was away?” kind of feeling.

Which is understandable, because Taibbi really was out of the loop for a while. In 2002, Matt Taibbi returned to the United States after 11 years of bumming around the remains of the then-newly-collapsed U.S.S.R. Still reeling from culture shock, he jumped headfirst onto the 2004 campaign trail and, with the aid of LSD and a gorilla suit, managed to write Spanking the Donkey, the best campaign book since Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72. Throughout Spanking the Donkey, you could tell that Taibbi hadn’t quite gotten his America legs back. After all, he left at the dawn of Bill Clinton, the Internet, and grunge rock, and returned to find it all crushed under the weight of the post-9/11 Bush administration. This is a transition that was scary enough to observe gradually, and for Taibbi to get it all at once, it’s astonishing that he didn’t catch the next flight straight back to Moscow.

In Smells Like Dead Elephants, released last week, Taibbi continues his quest to understand what the hell is happening to the United States. He writes of his paranoid quest to decipher the secrets of the nefarious conspiracy underpinning all the monstrosities of Karl Rove, Enron, and every other stupid, mean mess of the last six years.

“But in the end I understood that there was a good reason that I never tapped into what the hidden truth of the Bush years was, and the reason for that is that there never was anything to tap into. The tragedy of the Bush era is that there was never any depth under its absurd surface — and when the ridiculous exterior washed away, in scandal and indictment and disaster and failure and ignominy, we were left with nothing but emptiness, disorganization, and chaos.”

Here you will find scathing (and completely appropriate) critiques of the 109th Congress, Jack Abramoff, Tom DeLay, Joe Lieberman, and the thievery beneath the Hurricane Katrina “reconstruction” effort. And while his analysis is consistently insightful, Taibbi is at his best when he follows the pure Gonzo ethos of throwing himself into the story he’s covering. Particularly brilliant is his coverage of New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, in which Taibbi teams up with Sean Penn and a black Baptist minister named Reverend Willie Walker to rescue survivors in the Ninth Ward.

“Here we are in the midst of the worst flood in the country’s history and I am in the middle of an armed convy, holding a plunger.”

However, the coup de grace of the entire book is Taibbi’s five-week tour of Iraq in the summer of 2006. Not content with simply riding alongside army caravans, visiting forward operating bases, and investigating the excesses of civilian subcontractors, Taibbi takes things a step further and eventually wanders off with a creepy mustachioed commando who proceeds to lock him up in Abu Ghraib prison for three days.

You want to know how Gonzo Matt Taibbi is? This is how Gonzo Matt Taibbi is:

“The Commando dumped me in an abandoned cell block and shut the door behind me almost immediately upon arrival. […]

“You go where I go,” he said on the first day. “And don’t ask any fucking questions. In the meantime, stay here and don’t move.”

He shut the cell door. I stood for a moment in the middle of my cell, staring at the white concrete walls; it took exactly ten seconds for me to burst out laughing.”

It gets better from there.

[Ed. note - I promised some general pop-culture commentary. So let’s start that trend off by paying tribute to nerds who know more than their bosses.]

If ever there was a marriage of convenience, it is that of Pixar and Disney. One had ideas, one had money, and they figured there would be no harm in combining those resources. As is often the case, cracks appeared.

The two companies clearly have differing opinions on what makes a good animated feature, and that becomes even more obvious whenever one of them releases a new movie. Over the last few years Disney’s animation department has become nearly irrelevant, while Pixar seems well on their way to becoming undisputed masters of the medium.

At this point in their relationship, I have to assume that Disney is growing quite uncomfortable with the beast they created. Pixar started out merely upstaging their parent company with prettier pictures, and have since moved on to films with smarter plots and more fully-drawn characters; true “all-ages movies” rather than “kids’ movies.” Now they’ve moved into viral marketing with a strong anti-consumerist tone.

Seriously, take some time to look at this site and bask in the insanity.

“Buy N Large” is a fictional mega-corporation that fits into the storyline of Pixar’s next movie, “WALL-E.” The concept is that Earth has been completely buried in the detritus of rampant consumerism (due mostly to the practices of companies like Buy N Large), so the human population migrates into space colonies, and a fleet of robots known as WALL-E’s (Waste Allocation Load Lifter - Earth class) is left behind to clean up the mess and make Earth habitable again. After 700 years, only one WALL-E unit remains active, and he’s struggling valiantly to clean everything up on his own, with little success. Meanwhile, the Earthlings have gone soft(er) after seven centuries of living the good life in space, becoming even more lazy, gluttonous, and materialistic than they were on their homeworld. That’s not even the plot of the movie, that’s just the premise.

Apart from that surprisingly dark concept (dark for a Disney property, at least), the other thing that caught my interest was the design of WALL-E himself (check out the trailer for a look at the little fella). Designers were instructed to “see it as an appliance first, then read character into it,” according to Pixar’s Andrew Stanton, who also joked, “I’m basically making ‘R2-D2: The Movie.’”

Is there even a market for WALL-E? I know I want to see it, and a few of my friends have expressed interest, but we’re a weird bunch of bastards.

The amusing part, which Horatio so astutely pointed out when I brought this up to him via e-mail, is that Disney isn’t going to do anything to stop this. From Horatio:

Disney is in an interesting position here. Generally just about any artist or company can get away with whatever they want, as long as they’re popular, successful, and profitable, which is why Trey Parker and Matt Stone can say absolutely anything they want on national television, and Viacom has to lick it up and meekly beg for more. […] Any media conglomerate would give up half their holdings for a property like South Park, or for that matter, a property like Pixar. […]

And whether they like it or not, Disney has accumulated a lot of social baggage. The Silent Majority Voters that make us so nervous make Disney nervous too, because they’re the ones who demand that Disney continue to serve up innocuous shit that can be put on the TV to babysit children without supervision.

Of course, Disney’s tried its hand at computer-animated features without Pixar’s assistance, with mixed results at best. That works in Pixar’s favor as well, not just by making them look good, but by providing some useful camouflage. Amid the sea of formulaic CGI crap produced by Disney and others (hello, Shrek!), it’s likely that weird little movies like WALL-E will slip unnoticed onto the DVD shelves of wholesome families nationwide. From there, it can go to work indoctrinating children against consumerism, and instilling in them an incurably nerdy love of robots.

Those kids sound pretty cool to me.