Politics - page 2

In a dazzling display of weapons-grade stupidity, imbeciles and ideologues from both Left-wing and Right-wing persuasions got together to hash out where exactly double standards ought and ought not to be applied. Meeting at a capacity-filled Moby Arena this weekend, these dimwits filled the parking lot with short yellow school busses. In little over an hour, the retards confounded your intrepid reporters, who would rather have gotten endoscopies than have covered this pageant of willful stupidity and obfuscation where cognitive dissonance magically ruled the day.

Opening the moronathon, mediator Roger Duff implicitly clarified members’ abject ignorance as being voluntary, and not the result of genetic misfortune, “Whether we’re of the right or the left, we can all agree on one thing: we don’t speak for ourselves- we let our ideology speak for us. We may even be individually intelligent, but we forfeit our right to think and instead allow our political obligations and our ideals to take over our better senses.”

Speaking for the left, a recent transplant from the suburbs of Boston, was Kennedy Michael. In a distinct non-rhotic (that’s when you don’t pronounce the ending, and occasional medial ‘r’ in wuhds) mid-Atlantic English, Mr. Michael began, “As true leftists, we repudiate the 1%, but we love Jared Polis and think it’s okay for Bernie Sanders to buy a multi-acre estate in Vermont. After all, he bought it with his own hard-earned money, right? We also believe that the rich should pay more taxes than anyone, but it’s just fine for Jared Polis to incorporate his multi-million dollar businesses in the Caymans, or the Isle of Man or wherever, as it saves him money, and we won’t call him a tax-dodger. But it’s not okay for Donald Trump or Mitt Romney to do so, because they’re 1%-ers!” Applause roared from the left-end of the arena as he continued. “We also believe that science is real, and we ought to teach that in our schools so that our children can have a brighter future… except when it comes to gender, which is a social construct, because we don’t necessarily believe in DNA. We’ll go ahead and teach our kids that there are 114 different genders and counting! How do I know this? Well, that’s what my colleagues at the Gender Sciences Department of Harvard say, and that’s good enough for me.” Moving on to the subject of the #MeToo movement, Kennedy Michael proceeded, “Brett Kavanaugh and Donald Trump are incorrigible sexual predators, and we need to believe it when women accuse a man of sexual impropriety. But when it comes to Bill Clinton? Uh… I don’t think Paula Jones is telling the truth. Besides that, all the stories of Clinton cheating and stuff, that’s just his personal life, right?”

Speaking for the right, Warren “Spud” Douglas was no less non-sensical. “We believe in hard science when it comes to gender. All this baloney about gender being a social construct is unscientific, but the earth is only 6000 years old, and scientific proof of that can be found in the Bible!” Thunderous roars of applause erupted from the right-side of the arena as Spud continued, “As representatives of true American Conservatism, we must practice small government, charge low taxes and have a balanced budget. Therefore, we want to expand the military to be an even more global force than it is already, and we want the government to get their dirty, tyrannical hands off of our Medicare, ‘cause we need it. Where should the money come from? The mint, duh!” He paused. “I think there’s one in Denver. In any case, America’s probably got a FICO score of almost 700, so no problem there.” Commenting on the #MeToo movement, Spud added, “Allegations against Brett Kavanaugh are just that: allegations. As for Donald Trump’s cheating on his wife with a porn star while she (Trump’s wife, not necessarily the porn star) was pregnant? Well, that’s just his personal life, and we have no business in that, nor does the press. But Bill Clinton is an immoral adulterer and a serial sexual harasser- just ask Paula Jones.”

The conference ended with a convivial cocktail hour, and with both sides agreeing on how wonderful and useful double standards are, but no clear agreement was reached on where and how to draw them.

Greetings, loyal Focopolitan Tribune readers!  This is our first of hopefully a series of interviews with candidates for political office.  We thought we’d start with a doctor whose office we hope you will not visit anytime soon; a doctor whose job is not to cure you, but to determine how you died: our coroner, Dr. James Wilkerson.  Yeah, coroners are elected.  We were curious as to why, so we asked.  We were also curious about a bunch of other things.  Check this out…

Ludwig Schnee: Dr. Wilkerson, you’re the coroner.  Why is the coroner elected?

Dr. Wilkerson: Well the coroner actually originated in feudal England, and they were the crowner, and the crowner determined when somebody died, when a landowner died, how much they owed the king: the crown.

LS: So they owed money after they died?

Dr. W: It’s an estate tax, depending on how they died.  For instance if you committed suicide, you forfeited your estate.  It didn’t matter if you had ten wives and a hundred kids, it all goes to the king.  So they became powerful officials for the amount of money and property and stuff they moved.  Obviously they could be biased to one group or another, so I think they became elected to be fair- to let everybody have a chance of getting the crowner they wanted.  The other reason to elect people is to get the people we want and the ideas… and actions we want people to take.

LS: By the way, how’s the campaign going?

Dr. W: The campaign is good this time, the last time I ran…[the office of coroner] was the only Republican primary in Larimer County.  There were a couple other [offices] had Democrats running against them.  But this was the only Republican primary last year.  So, since it was the only race, everybody wanted to talk to me.  Everybody wanted to do debates, and stuff.  So I was constantly…  My whole evenings and sometimes my weekends were used up with that.  This time, because nobody’s running against me, I still go to some events, people still want to hear from me, but it’s not as stressful.

LS: So nobody’s running against you?

Dr. W: Nobody’s running against me.

LS: Do you expect to win?

Dr. W: I hope so.

LS: Like by what margin?

Dr. W: I suppose there could be people writing in.  I don’t know if they still allow write-ins on the ballots or not.

LS: I was gonna ask you ‘tell me about your opponents in this election.’

Dr. W: So, I don’t have any opponents.  The first opponent I had, she had a bookstore and she was a bodybuilder, and that was the one I had in the first time. And then for a brief time period, I had somebody running against me but she dropped out, and she was a yoga instructor, I think.

LS: So, a bodybuilder and a yoga instructor!  Are there any formal qualifications for to be a coroner?

Dr. W: To be a coroner: you have to be 18, a resident of your county and a non-felon.  Those are the requirements to be coroner.

LS: Wow!  That sounds like a little bit of a low bar, but could you tell us your qualifications?

Dr. W: Sure.  I’m a forensic pathologist.  So I went to medical school and then did six years of post-graduate training and I’m board-certified in forensic pathology, anatomic pathology and clinical pathology.  I trained in the military.  I did autopsies all over the world.

LS: So you’re a vet?

Dr. W: I am a vet.

LS: Since when is a doctorate of veterinary medicine a requirement for your position?

Dr. W: No, I’m a veteran.

LS: Oh, okay.

Dr. W: Not a doctor of veterinary medicine.

LS: Oh.

Dr. W: An MD.

LS: Not a DVM, got it.

Dr. W: And I’ve done about 7500 autopsies.  To give you a perspective, the Budweiser Events Center holds 7200.  So I’ve done a lot of work.  I’ve been in leadership positions in the hospitals, when I used to work in the hospitals, so I’ve learned from that; and this is a fairly small office, and it doesn’t have a whole lot of leadership challenges.  So, that’s my qualifications.

LS: Sounds quite like a lot of qualifications, sir.  Finish the following sentence: Republicans make better coroners than Democrats because…

Dr. W: Well, Republicans tend to be more conservative and not spend as much money on things that they don’t really need.  We try not to spend money… so… I think that might be the one thing… I don’t think that it’s really much of a partisan office.  ‘Cause I take care of Democrats, Republicans, whoever dies.

LS: You take care of the dead.

Dr. W: It doesn’t really matter what their political standing is.  And I try to treat all families with respect and treat ’em all the same.  You know, even though doing the autopsies and presenting things in court, and finding the cause and manner of death is the basic thing you do, the most challenging thing is notifying the families, and then keeping up with the families [of the deceased] and telling them what we found and asking them additional questions, so we try to do that with just one individual.  We try to notify in person, and that one individual will go to the autopsy, find out what happened, tell the family, ask any more questions and then work out a report and follow it through to the end.  And so taking care of the living is probably the most important part of the job and the most challenging.

LS: I can imagine that.  Tell us about the medicine you practice.  Do you have problems dealing with Medicare and Medicaid?

Dr. W: No.  Actually, when I first started out in the army, I did hospital pathology and forensic pathology.  In the army, obviously we didn’t have it [Medicare and Medicaid].  But I was in private practice for nine years and since I was the leadership guy, I had to deal with all of that; the insurance companies, Medicare and Medicaid, and it’s no fun.  It wastes a lot of time.  At one time, I had 17 employees in a lab and four of them were there to deal with insurance.  And Medicare the first time you bill ’em, automatically they say ‘no.’  So you always have to bill them again, at least one more time.  And that’s just the way they work.  We don’t take insurance.  The counties pay for autopsies on a fee-for-service basis.

LS: Are there many therapeutic misadventures in your line of work?

Dr. W: Well, probably not, because they’re already dead.

LS: Oh…

Dr. W: We don’t have to stop the bleeding, nor do we have to worry about infection, nor do we have to worry about getting everything back together exactly how it started out.

LS: Were you in my position, what would you ask you?

Dr. W: You could ask me some of the things that we see that are not funny, but that could be amusing.

LS: So, tell us one thing or another…

Dr. W: One of the favorites is “Here, hold my beer and watch this…”  Whether it be a driving feat, or jumping off of a cliff into the lake feat or things like that.  Now they don’t end up funny, obviously because they come to us, but that’s kind of one of the things we see. “Hold my beer and watch this…” is a standard pre-death motion.

LS: Thank you Dr. Wilkerson for taking the time to talk to us.

In a brief press release last Friday, the University of Colorado’s Diversity, Inclusivity and Equity Office (DIE for short) stated, “We at DIE would like to announce that given the unprecedented numbers of people of color, gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transgendered and minorities of all types, attending our fine institution, our goals have been realized.  For that, first of all, we would like to congratulate ourselves heartily.  Secondly, we would like to announce that we’re closing our doors because our mission is accomplished.”

We reached gender-vapid spokeshuman, Dr. Wagglesnicks in xer Boulder office where xe was gracious enough to grant Ludwig Schnee an interview. “All too often institutions are established to deal with a given problem, but long after the problem has been solved,the institution remains and sucks money out of public coffers for nothing other than providing sinecures to useless, mediocre bureaucrats. We will not be such an institution. We defy (20th century sociologist) Max Weber who first articulated this phenomenon. Futhermore, we are of a consensus that the greatest threat to higher education today is not the phantoms of “institutional” (what exactly does ‘institutional’ mean, anyway?) racism, sexism, homophobia or transphobia. Higher education today is more inclusive of racial, sexual and gender minorities than it’s ever been. The biggest threat to our system of higher education is something much more mundane: the skyrocketing cost of tuition, which keeps the neediest of our population excluded from universities and saddled with unprecedented student loan debt. Rather than waste taxpayer money and student fees on offices that are self-evidently redundant, we’re just going to close up shop and allow our funding to bolster the university’s general fund. If I have a say in this though, I want our funding to go to scholarships to students who are financially needy, regardless of race, gender, sexual or gender orientation.”

Reporter Schnee then asked Dr. Wagglesnicks, “But isn’t there more work to be done in order better to include women, persons of color and sexual minorities in society?”

Dr. Wagglesnicks scoffed, “Women? People who identify as women are now more than 50% of the student body in all Colorado universities except for [The Colorado School of] Mines and the Air Force Academy. As for everyone else, sure, there’s work to be done, but not in Boulder, for God’s sake. We’re about the most tolerate of places in the world, except for when it comes to ideas that diverge from our ideological line.”

Asking Dr. Wagglesnicks what xe would do next, the academic waxed, “I’ll either get a real job or move to Charlottesville. There’s plenty of opportunity for xour type of activism there, I heard.”

We at the Focopolitan Tribune couldn’t agree more.

In a bizarre Facebook post, dissident Colorado Republican gubernatorial candidate, Warren “Spud” Douglas has taken a position on the recent teacher walkouts and protests that have occurred over the last two months in Colorado and other states. Douglas stated,

“As true Republicans, we should be no friends of government, and we don’t believe that government can do anything as well as the private sector. Our schools are the best example of that. Therefore, if we are going to be ideologically honest with ourselves and our base, the best thing we can do is to de-fund this failing program which does nothing other than squeeze the taxpayer and churn out mediocre human material. Thank God and Doug Bruce for TABOR, which limits the spending of government, including our schools. On top of that, teachers know and have always known what their profession pays, so if teachers tell me they’re poorly paid, I just tell them, ‘You’re not poorly paid, just badly married.’”

We at the Focopolitan Tribune were floored at reading this. We reached Mr. Douglas, and asked him to clarify what he said. We also reminded him that arguably the best time for American public education was in the years following the Soviet Union’s launch of the satellite Sputnik. The launching of that satellite prompted the Republican (yes, Republican!) Eisenhower-administration to pump federal money through the bi-partisan National Defense Education Act into public schools in support of science, technology, engineering and mathematics education. The result was a flourishing of American STEM over the following decade, which culminated in the 1968 moon landing. Douglas responded, “Eisenhower was a traitor to the GOP! He might as well have been our Petain and our Quisling rolled into one! I don’t care what people say happened to public education after the passage of the unconstitutional NDEA. What Ike did was treason to the Republican cause. Oh, yeah and that moon landing was a hoax. I read all about it on the internet, so that kind of nullifies whatever supposed achievement we got from the NDEA.”

Covering the teacher demonstrations at the State Capitol, Focopolitan Tribune reporter Ludwig Schnee contacted a professional educator for comment on Mr. Douglas’ declarations, and this is what Kyla Hernandez had to say, “Are you kidding me? First off, I’m not even married, so I can’t be badly married. Besides that, this idea of taking funding away from schools because they’re failing is kind of like taking cops off the street when crime becomes a problem. I’d like to see if that’s gonna happen. What in the hell are these people thinking? If that’s how people are going to keep treating this state’s educators, they’d better expect more walkouts. Goddam, I thought [Governor John] Hickenlooper was bad on education. It just goes to show: nothing is so bad that some asshole of an ideologue can’t possibly make it worse. Geeze, people! Are you really speaking for yourselves or is your politics speaking for you? Do your voters a favor: get your heads out of your ever-loving asses, and think about the people you represent! We’re taxpayers too, and we demand you do better than what you’ve done. Is that too hard to grasp?”

At a conference of science deniers last weekend, hosted by no less an institution than the Colorado School of Mines, representatives from CU Boulder’s Gender Science Department and Colorado Springs College of the Bible’s Geology Department literally came to blows over what subjects to exclude, and which to include, under the greater body of knowledge of Science.  While each touted pre-dispositions of ideology as taking primacy over verifiable truth, both sides paid lip-service to the scientific method, but only in support of their pre-ordained notions.

Gender vapid spokeshuman for CU Boulder’s Gender Science Department Dr. Wagglesnicks, commented, “Gender is nothing more than a social construct created by an oppressive white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy!  I don’t care what DNA says, we at CU have recognized no less than 72 different genders, and any person can flow from one to any one OR MORE of the others at any time, for any reason, including no reason at all.  However, we assert that a preponderance of evidence in the geological as well as the biological record shows that the earth is some 2.6 billion years old, and that we evolved from single-celled organism to apes over the course of hundreds of thousands of years and then evolved into homo sapiens like you and xus [a form of the second-person plural pronoun]. Anyone who disagrees with that assertion is at best a fool, and at worst, a nefarious peddler of pseudo science.”

After Dr. Wagglesnicks’ fiery opening statement, the spokesman for Colorado Springs College of the Bible, Reverend Cleatus Crowley angrily declared, “Don’t y’all call me no homo!  I’m not like you; I read Leviticus and I obey it!  As for this nonsense of the earth being 2.6 million years old, now THAT’S a bunch of baloney.  How do I know?  It’s in the Bible!  God said it, and God doesn’t lie.  Here are some truths that I can tell you: we’re just short of 6000 years old, God made the Earth in six days, and He made man from mud.  Then, he made woman from Adam’s rib.  That’s why men have one rib fewer than women.  Now THAT’S valid science.  As for this gender nonsense…well, it’s just nonsense.  Be a man or be a woman, and that’s it.  Just ask a police detective when there’s DNA at a crime scene, the first thing they tell you is whether it’s from a man or a woman.”

At this exchange, Wagglesnicks retorted even more angrily, “Homo sapiens is binomial nomenclature for human being- a basic term of biological categorization! And, when police collect DNA evidence from crime scenes, and they tell you that it’s a male or a female, they’re not using basic terms of categorization, they’re acting from unconscious bias that we at the Gender Science Department categorically denounce and repudiate. Anyone who disagrees with us is an oppressive member of the fascist patriarchy which has asserted its power to keep down the disadvantaged and marginalized.”

At this point, witnesses describe a descent into violence atypical for the School of Mines campus.  While it is unclear who started it, fists flew as did chairs.  After extensive hurling of insults and missiles, campus security was called in.  Amid loud chants of, “Jerry, Jerry, Jerry!” in reference to TV personality and talk show host Jerry Springer by amused students and passersby, the fracas was finally disentangled and arrests were made.

The Focopolitan Tribune managed to contact a spokesman for the Colorado School of Mines.  Dr. Farouk Ikani had the following to say, “How in God’s good name did we ever give these people permission to have their ridiculous conference here?  This is a SCIENCE college, not a battleground for the ideologically possessed!  Both sides need to spend their time in the can and get some sense kicked into them!  To the CU fuckwits out there: you’re born with a gender.  If you don’t like it, fine!  Choose the other gender, and maybe get a sex-change operation.  Then be happy with it, but don’t go around telling me that there are 72 different gender pronouns and you can turn from one into another and then feel insulted when I call you by the wrong one!  As for you religious nut jobs, get your heads out of your ever-loving asses.  I thought I saw the worst of you at the Creation Museum in Kentucky! Both of you need to realize this: Science is real, and you approach it by studying the evidence and then coming to a conclusion, not the other way around. Instead what you’re both doing is having your ideology possess you, instead of you possessing your ideology!”

Reverend Crowley and Dr. Wagglesnicks, among others, are currently being held at the Jefferson County jail on multiple counts ranging from: battery, disturbing the peace, assault, reckless endangerment, and others.  Reverend Crowley is in the men’s ward, and it is unclear where Dr. Wagglesnicks is as officials are debating where to house xim [the third-person singular].