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.