You can kick Downton Abbey all you want, but leave the Muppets out of this

It used to be if you missed something on television, you had to depend on your friends who watched it to tell you all about the next day.  Now we have the Internet where there’s thousands of outlets to let you know what you missed and also provide further insight that may have been missed whilst seeing it live.  This is our long-winded way of saying we missed the Presidential debate this past week because we were doing more constructive things – like not watching Jim Lehrer be useless.

Anyway, so in the debate Romney actually stated something specific for once by declaring he would stop the government subsidy for PBS public television, which airs Jim Lehrer’s news show, saying: “I like PBS. I love Big Bird. I actually like you, too. But I’m not gonna keep on spending money on things to borrow from China to pay for.”

“When did ‘fuck you Big Bird’ become a viable campaign strategy?”  says Tina the Lesbian.

“Ever see what Sesame Street looks like?”  I say.  “The 1% don’t live there.  It’s not the nicest looking neighborhood.  No one’s even bothered trying to gentrify it yet.”

“But it’s Big Bird,” says Tina the Lesbian. “Big Bird never hurt anyone.  Big Bird has taught valuable lessons to young children for decades.  Big Bird brings joy and happiness wherever he goes.  Who has beef with Big Bird?”

“The nation’s poultry industry, maybe,” I say.  “Big Bird also doesn’t have a job or pay taxes.  He might not even be a citizen of the United States, though he probably hasn’t been grabbed by the INS because no one can figure out where exactly to deport him to.  He’s obviously that 47% of the population that Romney says will never vote for him.”

“This just seemly more assholish than usual to curb stomp public television – and in particular, educational children’s programming,” says Tina the Lesbian.  “Have we reached Peak Asshole yet – where we’ve finally reached the highest point of assholishness that cannot be exceeded?”

Peak Asshole is a myth, a fable told to spare people of the cold, harsh reality of how society and the universe at large works.  And to prove it, here’s professional horrible person Rick Santorum with some words of defense for the idea of taking down Big Bird.

“I’ve voted to kill Big Bird in the past,” Romney’s ex-primary rival said. “I have a record there that I have to disclose. That doesn’t mean I don’t like Big Bird. You can kill things and still like them, maybe to eat them, I don’t know. That’s probably that. Can we — can we go back on that one?”

“Every day I get up and try to find reasons not to write off the human race as a mass of irredeemable psychopaths,” says Tina the Lesbian.  “This is not helping!”

“I was going to say maybe Rick Santorum was talking about easing the suffering of your terminally-ill loved ones with a painless death, but he’s against euthanasia,” I say.  “So maybe he just saw the movie Commando where Schwarzenegger says ‘You’re a funny guy Sully, I like you. That’s why I’m going to kill you last.’  But he doesn’t kill that guy last though so I don’t think that’s applicable.”

“Or maybe he’s talking about when you have to put your dog or cat down when they’re too sick and old,” says Tina the Lesbian.  “Like when I was nine and my cat Whiskers the Calico got feline leukemia.”

“Is Rick Santorum saying Big Bird is dying of leukemia?”  I say.  “That is messed up.  Can Big Bird get treatment under ObamaCare?”

“It won’t matter because Romney wants to repeal ObamaCare, which was originally RomneyCare,” says Tina the Lesbian.  “Big Bird won’t get the medical care he needs without it.”

So if you’re keeping score at home, we’ve figured out that Mitt Romney wants to fire Big Bird and have him die in the gutter of untreated leukemia.  And for a surprisingly significant portion of the voting population, this is seen as a plus.

If I hold your hand, I’m halfway to getting a handjob and anal

We almost forgot that April is Confederate History Month, a glorious month in which certain southern states of the Union celebrate that one time 160 years ago when they decided not to be American anymore rather than stop owning black people. It’s like sticking your genitals in a bear trap, having the ripped from your body, and then throwing a party every year proclaiming that you’re going to get new genitals some day and when you do they’re going to right back in that bear trap to show it what’s what.  To us fast-talking Yankee bastards, it reminds us to mock the South.

Now to be fair, Tennessee does not celebrate Confederate History Month, but they were still part of the Confederacy and still do some pants-on-head retarded shit, like bring up a bill in their Senate that updates their abstinence-only sexual education law that prohibits teachers from discussing “gateway sexual activities” such as “holding hands.”

Ah… just when I think there’s nothing in the news to skewer, the South never fails verify my abysmal opinion of it. It’s Happy Hour at the Failure, and we’ve got half-off specials on ridicule and snark.

“I don’t remember holding hands being talked about in my sex ed class,” says Anonymous Doug.  “I remember the whole penis goes into the vagina and ejaculates part, but apparently they’re not that far advanced in Tennessee to get to that point.  That knowledge only gets unlocked by the minister presiding over your wedding.”

“Do you know what’s really a gateway sexual activity?  Having genitals,” says Tina the Lesbian.  “Either seal up your cooch or lop off your twig and berries because as long as you have those, the gate’s always open.”

“Well, what are fingers but bony penises, right?”  says Mikka.  “The symbolism is there if you just look hard enough, and breathe in a lot of ammonia fumes in a small enclosed space.”

“I would think zealous repression of sexual knowledge is more of a gateway sexual activity than holding hands or kissing,” says Avonia the Wiccan Pimp.  “All this is going to do is eliminate foreplay and have teens go straight for awkward, unlubricated penetration.”

“I want to see what else is a gateway sexual activity according to these people,” says Bernie the Half-Cyborg Cat.  “Skirts above the knee?  Skinny jeans? Tetris?  We need to know what innocuous behavior will trigger a teen fuckfest according to the greatest minds the Volunteer State could assemble!”

“In Saudi Arabia, men holding hands in a sign of friendship and respect,” says Ninja Vicki.  “But in Tennessee it’s a sign that sexual passion is brewing.  How the hell are the Saudis more reasonable than Americans on this?”

Samurai Cathy found this passage interesting…

According to a 2009 Youth Risk Behavior Study, 61 percent of Memphis City high school students and 27 percent of middle school students have had sex.  That’s higher than the national average.

“So they already have abstinence-only education, their teen sex rate is still higher than average, and their answer to this problem is to reduce what little their teens can be taught about anything peripheral of sex?” says Samurai Cathy.  “So if this doesn’t work, what’s next?  Not telling children how to go to the bathroom for fear they will touch their own genitals?”

I have no doubt there are people in non-Confederate states here in the north that think that this would be a good idea, but the difference is that it’s harder to make that idiotic notion into law up here.  Not impossible, mind you (in fact it’s still quite probable), but you have to put a little more effort to turn lunacy into legislation outside of Dixie. We can’t rid the world of stupidity but could we at least do a better job of not letting stupidity gain the means to inflict itself on a large scale?

EXTRA SPECIAL NOTE: We noticed that we got over 200 hits on Wednesday of this week because Rick Santorum dropped out of the Presidential race because  any time Santorum is big in the news we get a lot of hits because of this picture we posted about five years ago commemorating the time he lost his Senate seat by a landslide and dragged his unwilling family on stage to be the backdrop for his concession speech.

Now that he quit trying to be president, we’re probably not going to see those Santorum traffic spikes anymore, but that’s a small price to pay for knowing that people still find it unpalatable for him to hold political office.  It’s a ray of sunshine on a cloudy day.

This brain has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down

We here at Renal Failure have a keen interest in the spokespeople/press secretaries who work for political candidates or government agencies because they often represent the worst in humanity in that they have evolved past the need to be tethered to rationality, tactile reality, and any sense of shame or discomfort for the actions they take in servitude to the person who signs their paychecks. And their weapon of choice in this putrid duty is word-smithing, which is something we at Renal Failure also take a keen interest in.

Allow us to digress into our vast Renal archives to bring forth our Hall of Political Press Bullshitterance…

1)There was Homeland Security Adviser Francis Townsend back in 2007 telling us that their failure to kill Osama bin Laden at the time was “a success that hadn’t occurred yet.” We deemed this the dumbest thing ever said in the 21st century (and had some fun with it too), up until Sherri Shepherd on “The View” opened her mouth a few months later about not knowing that the world wasn’t flat.

2) It took until 2011 for the next big advance in pants-on-head retarditity in the spokesperson realm when Senator Jon Kyl’s said that the Senator’s outlandish claim that 90 percent of Planned Parenthood’s business was abortions “was not intended to be a factual statement.” This opened our minds to brazen lies we had never even conceived of telling, for with this phrase we could absolve ourselves of having no relationship to truth whatsoever.

3) Shortly after came Newt Gingrich’s press secretary who, in defense of his boss claiming that anyone quoting him from the previous week was lying, penned such a grandiose screed against reality that we dubbed it the Beowulf of political wanking.”

The latest entry into this pantheon of bullshit is Rick Santorum’s press lackey Alice Stewart.  See, her boss came up with the wild claim out of the deep recesses of his lower GI tract that the Dutch involuntary euthanize their elderly, accounting for five percent of all deaths in the Netherlands.  Well, Word got back to Holland and they took being called a nation of murderers by a US Presidential candidate better than I would have, most likely because “Americans Saying Stupid Shit” is probably their favorite drinking game over in the Netherlands and most of Europe.  Anyway, the Dutch sent a reporter to a Santorum event to get some answers… and here’s where the fun begins.  Or ends.

“She’s like one of those Mattel See n’ Says where you put the arrow on the picture on a cow, pull the string, and it tell you the cow goes moo or the rooster says cock-a-doodle-do,”  I say.  “Except everything on her See n’ Say says ‘He is a strong pro-life person.’”

“So being ‘strong pro-life’ means being fucking retarded,”  says Tina the Lesbian.  “That makes a lot of sense.  More sense than I expected, actually.  Wow…”

“I wonder what the Catholic Church’s position on replicants is,” says Mikka.  “Because Rick Santorum is obviously employing one as a spokesperson in his campaign.  And a badly-programmed replicant who doesn’t quite grasp human interaction at that.”

“When faced with an actual reporter, the Politi-Bot 3000 malfunctions and gets stuck in a feedback loop,” says Ninja Vicki.  “We should be lucky she didn’t activate her self-destruct module in an attempt to escape the conversation.”

“I like how she says ‘it’s a matter of ‘what’s in his heart’ when trying to explain his boss’s bullshit,”  says Anonymous Doug.  “That’s like the touchy-feely way of saying that’s ‘not intended to be a factual statement.’”

“It’s a variation on when Ronald Reagan had to come out and tell everyone that they did sell arms to Iran for hostages,” says Avonia the Wiccan Pimp.  That quote being:

“A few months ago, I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that’s true, but the facts and evidence tell me it is not.”

“The facts and evidence are irrelevant to what your heart tells you,”  Avonia continues.  “Which makes me distrust the heart as a decision-making organ because it is really is not working in the best interests of anyone.”

“I know in my heart I didn’t spray my urine by the front the door of my house to keep other cats away,”  says Bernie the Half-Cyborg Cat.  “But Marlie and everyone else with a nose tell me differently.  So I ignore them and listen to my kitty heart that tells me the things I want to hear, regardless of whether they make sense or not.”

“Why must reporters be so polite in the face of such contempt?”  says Samurai Cathy.   “I would take being told such bullshit as a personal insult to my honor, an insult that must be repaid with gushing amounts of blood.”

With this egregious affront to objective reality, among Santorum’s other hideous transgressions upon the universe, I won’t feel bad when he eventually loses and drags his mortified, crying kids on stage with him again when he gives his concession speech.

There is no honesty in your vicious violation of my person

We’ve realized at this late stage of the Republican primaries that we’ve taken a swing at all the remaining candidates at one point or another.  Mitt Romney got smacked down by Tag Larkin back in 2008.  We recently slapped Newt Gringich around for that time his press secretary wrote something out of a bargain-bin fantasy novel (and then there was the time in ’09 when he claimed good Christians like him were surrounded by paganism because he didn’t know how math worked)  Rick Santorum’s been getting the business from us since 2006 when he marched his mortified family to the stage when he lost his senatorial race in an embarrassing landslide (and now this post has become our most popular post ever – EDIT: Correction, second-most popular behind Historical Porn).  But one candidate has eluded our pimp hand until now… Ron Paul.

That is, until he went on the Piers Morgan show on CNN and made the unforgivable mistake of making Piers Morgan look like the likable one on TV.  Well, actually, Ron Paul’s fuck-up was this snippet:

MORGAN: But it’s a dilemma that I am going to put to you. You have two daughters. You have many granddaughters. If one of them was raped — and I accept it’s a very unlikely thing to happen. But if they were, would you honestly look at them in the eye and say they had to have that child if they were impregnated?

PAUL: No. If it’s an honest rape, that individual should go immediately to the emergency room. I would give them a shot of estrogen or give them –

And the elevator doors at the Overlook open and the blood rushes out…

“I’m not familiar with these honest rapes he speaks of,”  says Tina the Lesbian.  “Nor am I familiar with the necessary flip-side of that concept, the dishonest rape.”

“I think he’s saying that if you get raped by a guy, and he tells you he’s raping you, then that’s an honest rape,” says Anonymous Doug.  “Whereas if you’re being raped by a guy and he tells you he’s not raping you, then that’s a dishonest rape.  It’s a subtle distinction, full of rich cerebral nuance and deep intestinal bullshit.”

“So what would passing out and being raped while unconscious be classified as?”  says Samurai Cathy.  “Just sneaky rape?  That sounds kind of dishonest to me.”

“So how do the hospitals figure out if you’ve been honestly raped?”  says Mikka.  “I didn’t know rape kits had polygraph machines in them.”

“Obviously there are ways to discern in a hospital whether your rape was honest,”  says Bernie the Half-Cyborg Cat.  “Perhaps some sort of mystical gem you can dangle over a vagina that glows when it picks the lingering rape-o-gen particles from your violated genitals.”

“I don’t want the first thing my emergency room doctor to say to me when I tell him I was raped is ‘Did you?  Did you really?’ in a rudely skeptical voice,”  says Avonia the Wiccan Pimp.  “They don’t say that kind of incredulous shit to gunshot victims, that’s for sure.”

“At least Rick Santorum has the balls to tell women to suck it up and thank the Lord for the gift of their rape babies,”   says Ninja Vicki.  “Ron Paul’s trying to weasel his daughters and granddaughters out of having rape babies while still trying to strike an anti-abortion stand.  Yeah, Santorum’s batshit crazy, but at least he’s consistent at being batshit crazy.  I have no doubt he would tell his daughter straight to her face that when life gives you rape lemons, little missy, you make rape lemonade.  Ron Paul… not so much.”

Psycho Dave informed me by text message that his rape lemonade is 100% honest, which I guess would make it the Snapple of drug-spiked drinks.  Raped by the best stuff on Earth… that what it would say on the label if Psycho Dave labeled his sexual-assault victim drinks.  Well, if that’s what the capitalist free market wants…