Wonkette Weekette! August 7, 2008

Monday

Obama Sends Secret Message in Code: Hillary Clinton Will Not Be Veep Pick
With the exception of the two days following the conclusion of the Democratic primaries, when Hillary Clinton and all her dumb minions seemed to really push the whole “Hillary will be vice president or we will sabotage this whole election” idea, she has pretty much kept her head down, surfacing only occasionally to make another tacky request for money. But, mean Barack Obama continues to state publicly and openly that there isn’t a snowball’s chance in hell she’ll get on the ticket with him. Witness the latest damning quotes, delivered on Meet the Press yesterday.

Obama told Tom Brokaw he would like the following qualities in a running mate:

• Integrity.

• Independence.

• Someone “who shares a vision of the country, where we need to go, that we’ve got to fundamentally change not only our policies, but how our politics works, how business is done in Washington.”

He might as well have just added, “Oh, and no pantsuits.” Hillary in ’12! –Sara K. Smith

OMG Barry Hurt His Hip!
Sweet Jesus, the news is some kind of slow today. So here’s your latest installment in our Presidential Candidate Physique Watch: Barack Obama has a sore hip from playing basketball in foreign lands! He went to the doctor in Chicago and got an X-ray. Is Obama some sort of secret old person?

He apparently told a pool reporter “it’s all good” after his doctor’s visit, so his hip isn’t broken or anything. This is literally the most exciting news we have read in four hours. –SKS

Robert Novak Has a Brain Tumor!
Is this why he ran over that guy last week? Best wishes for a speedy recovery, Prince of Darkness. –SKS

Crippled War Vets Tell Cheney to Get Bent
Despised warmonger Dick Cheney continues to be an evil sack of shit who can’t even pretend to like war veterans. The hate-filled colostomy bag was scheduled to lecture a group of injured war veterans about how he evaded the draft through five deferments, but the veterans group finally told him to get fucked after he demanded the maimed heroes be sequestered for hours before he delivered his bitter propaganda.

Cheney was supposed to speak at the Disabled Veterans of America convention in Las Vegas next month, but the evil scumsack demanded the old, crippled soldiers go through a humiliating security process and then be locked in the auditorium for two hours before Cheney would deliver his canned bullshit – and nobody would be allowed to leave until the asshole finished!

Many of the vets are elderly and left pieces of themselves on foreign battlefields since World War II, and others were crippled by recent service in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“It was a huge imposition on our delegates,” added David Autry, another Disabled American Veterans official. Autry said vets would’ve had to get up “at Oh-dark-30 and try to get breakfast and showered and get their prosthetics on.” Once inside, they “could not leave the meeting room, and the bathrooms are outside,” he said.

So the war heroes told the evil creep to eat shit and die, the end. –Ken Layne

Bush Leaving $490 BILLION Deficit
The new president will get a very special gift from the George W. Bush administration next year: an all-time record deficit of $490 billion American dollars, or “nine Euros.” Before Bush took office in 2001 – and we do mean “took,” har har! – the federal budget deficit didn’t exist, but there was a surplus of $230 billion in the budget. –KL

Tuesday

New Jersey Legislator’s Kiddie Porn Scandal Teaches Valuable Lessons
Here is a helpful tip for all you local lawmakers who want to look at porn in your office: DON’T PRINT IT OUT AND THEN LEAVE YOUR PORNOGRAPHY LYING AROUND. Oh, and if it is horrible child pornography? First, quit looking at that shit, and second, DO NOT LEAVE IT LYING AROUND. Sadly, New Jersey Assemblyman Neil Cohen seems not to have mastered this valuable concept.

Cohen served 17 years in New Jersey’s General Assembly before resigning when evidence surfaced last week that he was maybe looking at kiddie porn at his office:

Last week, a staffer in the Union Township legislative office shared by Cohen, Assemblyman Joseph Cryan, and state Sen. Raymond Lesniak, all Democrats, found a printout of a nude girl who appeared to be in her early teens or younger.

Now investigators have seized all the computers in the office and Cohen has checked himself into a psychiatric hospital. He should just be glad he doesn’t live in Louisiana, where Bobby Jindal would have personally castrated him with a rusty can opener, for Jesus. –SKS

McCain Endorses Obama’s Troop Withdrawal Plan
John McCain went on Larry King Live last night and said that Barack Obama had been right about everything and he was withdrawing from the presidential race in order to pursue his dream of being a Wal-Mart greeter. Ha ha, we kid! But McCain did say he was maybe OK with a 16-month “time horizon” or whatever they’re calling it these days, if “conditions on the ground” in Iraq permitted. In other words, what Barack Obama said. Oh he is a terrible flip-flopping elitist pig, this John McCain! Why does he hate America? –SKS

Senator Ted Stevens Indicted
The elusive Alaskan snow leopard who brought you “a series of tubes” has been indicted by a federal grand jury in relation to a year-long corruption investigation. –SKS

John McCain Loves Pennsylvania So Much He Will Get a Post Office Box There
When a gentleman loves a state very very much, he gives it a box of chocolates and then asks it to go “parking” with him, and then he gropes it for a while and if his love is truly true, he opens up a “post office box” in that state. Thus, a declaration from John McCain’s campaign that the candidate intends to open up a PO box in Pennsylvania means he is serious about romancing the voters there.

Barack Obama has like a million campaign offices in Pennsylvania, while John McCain has negative fifty, but none of this matters because John McCain will take back PA for the Republicans in the fall through his postal wizardry.

“You’re just starting to see the tip of the iceberg,” McCain’s state campaign manager, Ted Christian, said of visits by the candidate and surrogates. “I think he’ll open his own post office box here. This state is of the utmost importance to the senator.”

He will go to his post office box every day and even though it’s empty he will stick his hand in there to feel around and mutter, “Hmm, sumbuddy must be stealing my mail,” and then he’ll try to strike up a conversation with the postal clerk who thinks to herself, “I need to be paid a lot more than eight bucks an hour to put up with this depressing shit.” –SKS

Wednesday

Barack Obama Thinks He’s Pretty Cool
Oh dear. Looks like it’s about time for Michelle Obama to deploy one of those “he farts in his sleep and never flosses”-style truth bombs, because the Hawaiian Unicorn is getting a leetle too big for his britches. “I have become a symbol of the possibility of America returning to our best traditions,” Barack Obama told a group of House Democrats, who promptly wrote down this embarrassing quote verbatim and called up their reporter friends to tattle on him. Barry should take a page from our current president’s playbook and work on becoming a symbol of America returning to our worst traditions. –SKS

David Axelrod Lies Hilariously About Patti Solis Doyle Hiring Blowback
By March or April or whenever it was that she got fired, everybody knew that Patti Solis Doyle was personally responsible for every single thing that went wrong with the Clinton campaign, except for the things Mark Penn and Bill Clinton and the candidate herself and even Harold Ickes were responsible for. Ms. Doyle was banished to her native Chicago uranium mines with only her public humiliation to keep her company, until the Obama campaign hired her, with predictable results: The Clinton people went insane with rage.

Now, in a very looong article in the Washington Post, notable mainly for Solis Doyle’s marvelous Katharine-Hepburn-plays-intrepid-lady-journalist-in-North-Africa tab-sleeved shirt, David Axelrod professes wonderment that anyone would assume that Obama’s hiring Mistress Spendsalot would mean Hillary Clinton had no spot on the Democratic ticket.

“There was no message — absolutely not,” Obama senior strategist David Axelrod says. He said he never asked Solis Doyle, whom he’s known for 20 years, where she stood with Clinton, and he says he was not aware of issues associated with her management style. “Honestly, we were not privy to the history of the campaign’s relationships,” he says.

David Axelrod will be here all week, and advises you to try the veal. –SKS

Karl Rove in Contempt
“A U.S. congressional panel voted on Wednesday to find former presidential adviser Karl Rove in contempt for defying a subpoena to testify in its probe into suspected political meddling at the Justice Department.” –KL

Barack Obama to Shoot & Kill John McCain
Barack Obama today revealed that he hates John McCain’s tax plan and will therefore kill him with guns: “Obama jokingly claimed that Wild Bill Hickock, a famous old Western gunslinger, was a distant cousin of his so McCain should be on the alert. ‘I’m ready to duel John McCain on taxes. Right now, right here. I’m a quick draw,’ Obama quipped.” OK, we get it, Hussein, YOU HAD WHITE ANCESTORS. McCain responded that he knew Bill Hickock and you, sir, are no Bill Hickock.

–Jim Newell

Thursday

Hilton Family FURIOUS Over McCain Insulting Paris Hilton
While everybody else was laughing at that ridiculous Paris Hilton/Obama ad the McCain people released yesterday, at least two very wealthy Republican donors were furious: William Barron Hilton and Rick Hilton, Paris’s grandf ather and father.

The elder Hilton, co-chairman of the Hilton Hotel chain and former owner of the San Diego Chargers, gave the McCain campaign $18,400 and contributed another $35,000 to the GOP Senate committee. Paris’s dad gave McCain nearly $7,000. And then that rotten Walnuts runs an ad calling Paris Hilton a piece of celebrity trash?

Conservative analyst and McCain supporter Martin Eisenstadt writes on his blog:

I hear whispers from the inner campaign staff that the phone was burning off the hook today with calls from Paris Hilton’s grandfather, William Barron Hilton (co-chair of the Hilton Hotel empire), furious that the McCain ad drew an unflattering comparison between Obama and his own granddaughter.

Ha ha ha.

Eisenstadt says he suspects “heads will roll” at McCain HQ, or at least the agency that made the ad will be dumped. –KL

John Edwards ‘Love Child’ Has No Daddy Listed on Its Birth Certificate!
Here’s some weird news about the already-weird John Edwards baby-mama alleged scandal: The “love child” in question has no daddy listed on the birth certificate! And we can’t even dismiss this latest tiny bit of scandal as “tabloid trash” because it comes from Edwards’ hometown mainstream media, McClatchy Newspapers’ News & Observer.

Rielle Hunter, 44, is the gal who met Edwards in a New York bar and then earned $114,000 from his PAC making “webisodes” which all mysteriously vanished from his website when she quit working for him because she wound up pregnant and then his loyal North Carolina aide (who is married with kids) gallantly claimed he was the father and then installed Ms. Hunter (real name: “Rielle Jaya James Druck” or just “Lisa Druck”) in lodgings adjoining his own home in a gated North Carolina neighborhood.

Edwards is acting so guilty – hiding in hotel bathrooms, escaping through the service entrance after a speech in Washington – that even the Liberal Media is slowly being forced to find out what’s going on with Mr. Public Displays of Affection who used to always be kissin’ on his saintly wife with cancer, Elizabeth Edwards.

Here’s what the paper has to say about the baby girl with no known daddy:

Asked Thursday why no father was listed on the birth certificate, Hunter’s attorney, Robert Gordon of New York, said, “A lot of women do that.” Reminded that he and Hunter had publicly revealed the father’s identity two months earlier to the National Enquirer, Gordon said, “That’s a personal matter between them.”

Gordon declined to comment further.

Anybody want a 30-minute prime-time spot at the Democratic Convention, probably on Tuesday night? We hear there’s an opening.

Also, anybody want to be Poverty Czar for President Obama? Get your resumes in before the rush next week, when The New York Times is finally forced to do a story. Let’s hope it’s a bit better sourced than that “John McCain screws his lobbyist young-Cindy lookalike on corporate jets,” because that story was totally true and look how it still somehow got discredited! –KL

FRIDAY

Every Newspaper on Earth Says John McCain Is an Idiot
Oh good God what is going on today? Pretty much every publication in the country has a big article about how John McCain – the guy who just attacked Barack Obama for being all style and no substance – knows literally nothing about anything, and just blurts out a random arrangement of words whenever he’s asked about foreign or domestic policy. As a consequence, he comes off sounding underinformed and not terribly interested in the details of governance, not to mention possibly senile and a little bit retarded.

A little gem from the deputy editorial page editor of your liberal daily rag, The Wall Street Journal:

On Sunday, he said on national television that to solve Social Security “everything’s on the table,” which of course means raising payroll taxes. On July 7 in Denver he said: “Senator Obama will raise your taxes. I won’t.”

This isn’t a flip-flop. It’s a sex-change operation.

He got back to the subject Tuesday in Reno, Nev. Reporters asked about the Sunday tax comments. Mr. McCain replied, “The worst thing you could do is raise people’s payroll taxes, my God!” Then he was asked about working with Democrats to fix Social Security, and he repeated, “everything has to be on the table.” But how can . . . ? Oh never mind.

And then this thing from that “John McCain is an idiot, but he has Core Values that come from his Gut” article in the Washington Post:

[I]n a speech this past spring, McCain called for expelling Russia from the Group of Eight, the club of leading economic powers, on the grounds that Russia is not a real democracy. Not long after, he gave a speech in Denver on arms control and suggested that the United States “can work in partnership with Russia to strengthen protections against weapons of mass destruction.”

“Would that happen before or after we kick them out of the G-8?” quipped a Republican arms control expert who held high positions in previous Republican administrations.

The most tragic thing about the next three months will be watching John McCain try to catch up on all of the news he has been ignoring for the past 50 years. It will be like that Rocky montage where he exercises and eats raw eggs, except it will be John McCain reading the large-print edition of Congressional Quarterly and falling asleep with his mouth open. –SKS

Was John McCain’s Ad Racist Because It Didn’t Include Tiger Woods?
There’s been a hilarious debate on the Internet the last couple of days, as per usual, about whether the McCain “Celeb” ad was Racist because it chose two young white gals, Paris Hilton and Britney Spears, as Barack Obama’s alter egos instead of the actual two most famous celebrities in the world. It is, apparently, a similar situation to the attack ad on Harold Ford in 2006, where he is constantly talking to loose white women on the telephone. If John McCain were to *objectively* pick the two most famous people in the world, the liberals argue, at least one of them would have been TIGER WOODS, the GOLFER. The conservatives do not believe Tiger Woods counts, however, because he has accomplishments!

Prepare to rock and/or roll.

Here’s a well-received liberal post from Newsday’s John Riley.

We just got off a conference call with Camp McCain, defending their new ad comparing Barack Obama to Paris Hilton and Britney Spears.

They said they thought the ad was legitimate because Obama is a big celebrity (which happens to be what John McCain was, too, when he came home from Vietnam and started to build his political career), and Britney and Paris were Number 2 and 3.

The problem: Anyone with even a vague sense of pop culture knows that Britney and Paris are yesterday’s news. Here’s a link to Forbes’ Celebrity 100. Paris and Britney don’t even make the list any more.

Instead, the top 10, in order: Oprah Winfrey, Tiger Woods, Angelina Jolie, Beyonce Knowles, David Beckham, Johnny Depp, Jay-Z, The Police, JK Rowling, Brad Pitt.

John Riley is not merely a political writer, folks. He is the official Arbiter of Pop Culture Celebrities as chosen by America’s hip youngsters. You think Britney Spears and Paris Hilton are famous? Well that’s a nice ROCK YOU’RE LIVING UNDER, SIR NERDLINGTON. Try reading some fucking FORBES whenever you leave your current loser chess tournament.

Someone, however, has chosen to challenge cool John Riley! And he works for… The Weekly Standard! (No, it’s not Bill Kristol in this case, but Monday’s only three days away and we bet he has a column idea already!) This is Dean Barnett, taking up the important issue of Tiger Woods’ non-inclusion in some dumb McCain ad:

Some of the ad’s critics have noted that Britney Spears and Paris Hilton aren’t even such enormous celebrities. Tiger Woods and Brad Pitt, they rightly argue, are much bigger stars. But that analysis misses the point as far as Obama is concerned. Unlike Britney and Paris, Tiger Woods earned his fame. No one could accuse Tiger Woods of being a media sensation or being famous just for being famous.

Not man enough to take up the pressing issue of Brad Pitt though, are you, Barnett?

Here’s the thing: Tiger Woods plays golf! He is famous for playing GOLF. Whatever Britney Spears and Paris Hilton have done to become famous — Britney’s (once) killer dance moves didn’t come to her in her sleep, by the way, idiots — was certainly more difficult than playing a little outdoors game really well. Tiger Woods got famous for the exact same reason Barack Obama got famous: because he’s a multiracial (a.k.a. “black”), “charismatic” and talented as shit entry into a field previously populated by old white men, exclusively, since forever.

In conclusion: John McCain should never have made this ad, at all, with any celebrities, because what the fuck. –JN

John McCain’s EPIC New Ad Loves Barack Obama!
Oh man, the new “The One” ad is so much better than “Celeb.” While that last one was creepy, this one is funny (or rather, “less creepy”), and expensive-looking, and has an upbeat soundtrack, and says all sorts of nice things about Barack Obama! Also, McCain finally admits that Barack Obama freed the Jews from Egypt back when he was a state senator in Illinois.

We don’t get it. Where’s the attack? Probably he’s trying to tell the Fundies that voting for Barack Obama is like worshiping the golden calf false idol. Same message for the Florida Jews. Oh God, so it actually is just as creepy as the Britney Spears ad. The Bitters must be so fucking confused. –JN

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