It's been getting kind of confusing keeping track of what's truly American anymore, so we came up with a handy list of things that are socialist and foreign because Barack Obama has soiled them, by doing them.

Winning the Nobel Peace Prize
Used to be a win for America back when Henry Kissinger won it. Now it's a sign of a "weakened, neutered U.S.," unless John McCain had won it, which he should have, in which case it would have been awesome.

Puppies
Bo is a ringer, a fake rescue dog who was personally raised by Ted Kennedy for the Obamas and the press won't look into it because they're too busy writing about how cute he is. And he's Portuguese!

Classrooms
That's where kids get indoctrinated. Keep them away.

Community Organizing
What sort of person helps other people?

Doctors
They're all socialists now, since some of them met with Obama at the White House, and people took photos.

Farming
Michelle Obama started a vegetable garden on the White House lawn, but it's fake and how dare she?

Chicago, Ill.
Obama lived there, so it can't be in America, and therefore it's not un-American to celebrate the fact that it lost its Olympic bid, since it's Chicago that lost, not America. Fuck you, Chicago.

Hawaii
He lived there, too, which is why 6% of Americans now consider it part of un-America.

Beer
He had one with that awesome cop and some black Harvard guy, ruining it for the rest of us.

Smoking
He never quit, and so is a liar, and probably smokes Gauloises.

Checking Out Asses
Would a real American ever glance at a lady's ass, like Obama did? In Italy!? No, he would never do that.

Loving Your Wife
Obama took Michelle on a date to New York City in May to see a play, prompting the RNC to ask, "If President Obama wants to go to the theater, isn't the Presidential box at the Kennedy Center good enough?" We're still waiting for an answer, Mr. President.

Basketball
He replaced the White House bowling alley—which can be used to play a white-people game—with a basketball court. Didn't O.J. Simpson or someone play basketball? And he goes to games, instead of fixing America, constantly.

Baseball
He throws like a girl. A European girl.

Several Midwestern towns with Danish heritage have seen fit, over the years, to use a portion of their municipal budgets to construct replicas of Copenhagen's famous "Little Mermaid" statue. Now the ancestors of the sculptor are going after poor little Greenville, Michigan—demanding licensing payments for the town's statue (even though "it's half the size of the original and has a different face and other distinct features, including larger breasts"). This is just the beginning of the Danish assault!

Annette Andersen, a resident of Kimballton, Iowa, headed a community group that raised the $12,000 needed to restore that town's mermaid statue a few years ago. "Oh boy, I hope they don't find us," says Ms. Andersen, when told about the controversy in Michigan. She says she knows of several towns that have mermaids, including one in Minnesota, but adds, "Theirs aren't as pretty as ours."

Rest assured they've found you now, Annette. Who are the layabout Danish sculptor ancestors to decide how Real Americans see fit to honor mermaids, big-breasted and otherwise? Particularly when the Danes themselves are god damn statue hypocrites:

The statue in Copenhagen is itself a copy; the original has been attacked repeatedly — pieces stolen, arm cut off, painted pink, draped in a burqa — and is now stored in a secret location.

That secret location: Kimballton, Iowa. We hope nobody finds out.
[WSJ. Pic via]

CIA: Use "intelligence" as a euphemism for doing who knows what.
Bankers: Use "finance" as a euphemism for doing who knows what.


The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.CIA: Train to ingratiate themselves with sources of information.
Bankers: Train to ingratiate themselves with sources of revenue.

CIA: Did cocaine with Colombians and spent all night partying with hookers in a drug lord's villa. It was a mission.
Bankers: Did cocaine with Colombians and spent all night partying with hookers in a Murray Hill co-op. It was Tuesday.

CIA: Have been known to foster regime change in far-flung foreign countries to bolster the interests of the US military-industrial complex.
Bankers: Ditto.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.CIA: Hunt down moles.
Bankers: Hunt down the city's best molé sauce; price is no object, just bring us our fucking food, Pedro.

CIA: Will ride through the rugged mountains of Afghanistan on horseback to make contact with tribal leaders.
Bankers: Wife once suggested some sort of "adventure vacation" crap. I was like, I don't work 100 hours a week to spend my vacation in some tent in the desert getting pissed on by a camel. Go shopping, why don't you, I have a client meeting tonight.

We predict success!
[NYP]

The crew members have arrived back here in the USA, and they're telling their tales—tales of swashbuckling, high seas marauding, and murderous, bloodthirsty rage. By them! Here's the story of how they snatched one of the pirates (the one still alive) who was trying to hijack their ship:

"I pulled a knife on his face and said, 'We are going to kill you,' and my supervisor said, 'Don't do anything to this guy,' " deckmate Miguel Ruiz, 46, of The Bronx, recalled.

"We could have killed the hostage, but we didn't have the orders to do it. We are not killers. We try to help other nations."

Miguel displays just the type of benevolent American power that extends our nation's influence to the far corners of the earth. Even our merchant seamen are helping other nations, not killing them! That wretched pirate is now coming to stand trial in America and serve as a proxy for the sins of his entire nation, dang. We promise to only imprison him in a foreign country for a mind-boggling number of years, not kill him. USA!
[NYP. Pic via]

The Yankees started playing "God Bless America" over the loudspeakers during the seventh-inning stretch shortly after 9/11. At a game last August, Bradford Campeau-Laurion attempted to use the seventh-inning stretch for the reason God intended it—to take a leak. But two New York City police officers—the NYCLU believes they were off-duty and working security for the stadium—tried to bodily prevent him from leaving his seat because everybody knows that relieving oneself while patriotic music is playing is a grave offense to the freedoms we all hold dear. From the NYCLU press release:

Campeau-Laurion quietly watched the game, ate a bag of peanuts and drank two beers. He decided to use the restroom at the start of the seventh-inning stretch – a period when fans often choose to use the restroom. He got up and made his way down the aisle as "God Bless America" began playing. A police officer blocked his path and indicated that he could not leave during the song. Campeau-Laurion explained that he needed to use the restroom and was not concerned about "God Bless America." Then he attempted to walk past the officer.

Before Campeau-Laurion could take a step, the police officer grabbed his right arm and twisted it behind his back. A second officer twisted Campeau-Laurion's left arm behind his back, and the two officers then marched him down several ramps to the stadium's exit with his arms pinned behind his back. The officers refused to ease their grip, even though Campeau-Laurion was not resisting them.

The encounter ended with one of the officers telling Campeau-Laurion to leave the country if he didn't like it.

If you ever go to the bathroom on the Fourth of July in New York City, expect a beatdown from the NYPD.

Campeau-Laurion, who works for Forbes.com (according to his Plaxo profile), is suing the NYPD, the Yankees, and the City of New York.

Jo Jensen will save the GOP with arena rock!


Christopher Hall PROVES that voting for Barack Obama causes murder. He's also from Georgia. HIRE HIM.

Heather Kydd knows the key to building a broad-based diverse coalition to transform the Republican party for the 21st century: White Nevadans.

Patrick Maloney is standing before a bust of Lincoln and a painting of Lincoln. Let him help the GOP save Lincoln from Obama comparisons!


Adam J. Schmidt wears an American flag lapel pin.

According to the American media (consisting of reporters who are high, mostly), Japanese authority figures are totally peeing their pants right now because marijuana arrests are on the rise among Japanese youth. Even among athletes! And famous people! And most disappointingly, among college kids! Dude, it's a nation of lightweights:

While hard numbers are difficult to come by, marijuana use in Japan appears to be low compared with other countries. In a survey of 85,000 households from 17 countries published last year by the Public Library of Science, a nonprofit group based in San Francisco and Cambridge, U.K., only 1.5% of Japanese respondents said they have used cannabis, compared with 42% in the U.S. and 18% in Germany.

You. Ess. Ay. Baby. That's right. Japan simply cannot hang. They banned a famous sumo wrestler for life, for being caught with weed. They'll jail you for five years for simple possession. And when an "elite private college" in Tokyo caught some kids growing hydro in the bathroom, the entire nation's educational philosophy was shaken to its very core:

"We thought university students had more conscience," said Juichi Shimomura, a director in the bureau of welfare and public health of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government. "Now we realize they have to be taught just like everyone else."

Japan does, however, retain its world title in "Embarrassingly Drunk Businessmen." [WSJ]

I had the good fortune to mistakenly watch this show last night, so let me just describe for you two instances of drama and intrigue, accompanied by copious dramatic music and editing, that went down in this one episode, and which were broadcast out to the world, by choice, to illustrate the dramatic perils the Homeland Security department faces while keeping us safe:

• A dude coming into America claimed to be an American. Turned out to be true.
• Somebody attempted to bring a sandwich into the USA.

Although al-Zaidi himself is currently locked who knows where with who knows who doing who knows what to him, everyone in Iraq not currently receiving money from the Coalition Forces thinks he is, like, so freaking awesome. They've demonstrated in the streets for his release, futilely! Now let's hear what the "ARAB STREET" (thanks, Tom Friedman!) has to say. The religious version:

“I swear by God that all Iraqis with their different nationalities are glad about this act,” said Yaareb Yousif Matti, a 45-year-old teacher from Mosul.

Quite! The diplomatic version:

“Although that action was not expressed in a civilized manner, it showed the Iraqi’s feelings, which oppose American occupation,” said Dr. Qutaiba Rajaa, a 58-year old physician.

The academic version:

"The flying shoe speaks more for Arab public opinion than all the despots/puppets that Bush meets with during his travels in the Middle East," Khalil wrote at angryarab.blogspot.com.

And finally, the historic context version:

"It was so gratifying to see Bush being hit in this manner. It was especially gratifying that it happened toward the end of his presidency because this is how he will be forever remembered," said Nermine Gabaly, a 32-year-old homemaker.

In the end, Bush sucked shoe.

[WP, NYT]

He added: “So the frame of patriotism in the Obama campaign holistically is oriented around openness and inclusion and the American dream, and the American ideal that there is a place for everyone in our society.”

That’s usually the sort of thematic turf taken up by the purebred liberals who run in primaries but don’t actually win. But with an Obama presidency so close to becoming a reality—promising an unprecedented experiment, following the Bush years, in global image reclamation—it’s all dovetailing nicely with how the new patriotism might play out among the kids. “I think people will see Americans differently,” said 19-year-old Cindy Morand, a student at the University of Buffalo who grew up in the East Village; she contributed an essay to Red: The Book, an anthology of teenage girl writing, and has also blogged for the Huffington Post. “They can see we’re getting over our own social problems. We’ve changed as a country.”

Even our elite liberal media is getting into the act, with decadent metrosexual magazine Men's Vogue sending out flag lapel pins. Fellow godless liberals, we've just spent seven years defining patriotism as the right to find flag pins tacky and stupid, are we really turning our back on all that just because our guy's probably going to win? Shouldn't we be taking this opportunity to engage in a grand "I told you so" moment, not encouraging that "No Red America, No Blue America" garbage? If we give in to loving America, it will just hurt us again.

She's over there in filthy old England (though she's been bountied to the Russians.) As is her baby sister in catastrophe, Lily Allen, who is well on her way to Disaster City. All of the good meltdowns these days have been across the pond. Maybe American gossip is dying, after all. Add the treading-on-me insult of the Chrysler Building being bought by an Arab company, and it begins to feel like what makes America great — our drunken supernovas and towering phalluses — are being spirited away to foreign lands. We're gonna lose the Olympics, aren't we? Even the basketball. (Well, there's hope.)

"We all read 'em," said Pfc. Paul Rubio, 31, of Bakersfield, Calif. "There are times we just read 'em for the technological parts like the new gadgets that come out. They have good stories sometimes too."

Sgt. Simon Brown, 34, of Daytona Beach, Fla., said men's magazines build morale. "It's not all about the pictures, although 80 percent of it is," he said.

Pfc. Greg Smith, 21, of Northboro, Mass., a regular Playboy reader, said soldiers should be allowed to buy nudie magazines at the exchange.

"Playboy is good entertainment while you are on the can. They have jokes and good stories," he said...

"It would suck if they ban it," he said. "It's bad enough we are down there to begin with. Taking that away would be like a knife in the chest. I'm not saying I'm depending on Maxim to keep me alive over there, but it helps."

[Military.com via Dan Savage]

WlRED has the 2006 report, in which consultants suggest "clandestinely recruiting or hiring prominent bloggers or other persons of prominence... to pass the U.S. message," as well as putting in the effort to build blogs from the ground up. What about when an unfriendly bloggers appears on the scene?

Hacking the site and subtly changing the messages and data—merely a few words or phrases—may be sufficient to begin destroying the blogger's credibility with the audience.

While blogger types who typically rail against imagined "injustices" might oppose such actions, it should be understood that the military has one single underlying goal: the safety of American citizens. That includes you, me, and even "liberal" bloggers who insult our government even as it's trying to guarantee them the right to do so by stopping threats where they start—in Iraq.

It's easy to spew out a knee-jerk reaction with phrases like "COINTELPRO," "Government lies," or "The Bill of Rights." But do you know how all these ideas came about? Through intellectual warfare, much like the one the government is seeking to wage in the blogosphere, for the collective benefit of us all.

So before you go off and criticize this new covert military blogger strategy, ask yourself: Isn't it better than getting shot, or blown up with a bomb? Then, consider whether you are between the ages of 17-45, and call us now: 1-800-USA-ARMY, or visit GoArmy.com. It may be the best decision you ever made.

"Constant Criticism"

"Lots of Yelling"

"You're Not Invited to Lunch or Meetings"

"You Always Need Mental Health Days"

"Sabotage"

Stop the war!