Somali Pirates Extremely Glad Not to be known as Somali Terrorists

By Rafael Sturdevant

MOGADISHU- Public attention has been focused on civilian uprisings across the Middle East in recent weeks, but another news story has persisted in the region: Somali Pirates in the Gulf of Aden continue to attack ships and capture hostages to hold for ransom. While these attacks have been only moderately successful, perhaps the Pirates’ greatest success has been in avoiding the label “terrorist” from the American government. As long as they maintain the pirate moniker, they will likely remain free to plunder as much booty as they please.

Ever since the attacks of September 11, the application of the term “terrorist” to any person or political entity has been an essential death sentence. The name “pirate,” on the other hand, is more often associated terrible baseball teams and Halloween costumes, especially slutty ones. And even though the government’s official policy is to never negotiate with terrorists, its official policy toward pirates is to make fun of them and laugh.

The American public has a similarly light-hearted view of pirates. Most Americans have little knowledge of the Somali Pirates’ attacks. When asked for his reaction to the recent execution of four hostages by the Somali Pirates, Darren Grovsky, a factory worker from Dayton, Ohio responded, “What did they do, make them walk the plank?” He proceeded to high five a nearby white guy.

If the Somali Pirates truly want to be taken seriously, it will be crucial for them to do things that don’t seem so damn funny. The fact that their “pirate ships” look like chunks of flotsam that Cubans use to raft from Havana to Miami does not create the same terrifying imagery as the Jolly Roger. Moreover, their actions would not seem like such a joke if they started choosing hostages who did not share names with correspondents from the Daily Show. When Americans hear that Rob Riggle was killed at sea, it is difficult to take the suggestion seriously.

[LEFT- These guys need to work on their costumes. They don't look anything like Captain Jack Sparrow from the movies.]

President Obama recently delivered a speech to the American people in which he urged the country to take the threat of Somali Pirates seriously. “These actions by the rebels in Somalia are uncalled for and extremely dangerous,” Obama snickered. “Continued behavior that goes against international law will not be tolerated… or we’ll make you swab the deck. I’m sorry, I just can’t take these guys seriously.” Obama then covered his face and turned away, and could be seen laughing so hard he almost started to cry.

While the benefit of being known as pirates rather than terrorists is probably responsible for the Somalis continued success, some of the pirates feel that they are not getting the respect they deserve. “I do not wear a skull-and-crossbones hat; I am a vicious killer who deserves recognition,” said Mohammad Hassan, the captain of a Somali Pirate ship with a crew of more than 10 men. “Do the Americans think that I am not evil enough? For Christ sakes, who does a guy need to kill to get carpet bombed these days?”

Nonetheless, the Somali Pirate craze has caught on in some unexpected ways. For instance, birthday party supplies with a Somali Pirate theme have been flying off the shelves of party stores nationwide. Sherri MacDougal, the mother of 8-year old Teddy Masterson-MacDougal, said she recently threw a Somali Pirate birthday party for her son, and it was a smash hit. “It was such a fun time! Instead of making pirate hats, all of the kids just wore blackface. We played ‘pin the machete on the sailor,’ and he kids sat in a circle for a game of ‘innocent civilian, innocent civilian, hostage.’ Everybody had a great time. I would definitely recommend it to a friend.”

As the threat of Somali Pirates remains problematic for American tourists in the horn of Africa, the American government has considered measures that would encourage civilians to undergo the appropriate threat assessment. Rejected ideas include a color-coded threat level for the area and educational brochures to be sent to anyone who buys plane tickets to Somalia. One idea that has gained some traction is simply rebranding the Somali Pirates with a more appropriate name. So far, the name with the most support has been Somali Seamen, because it sounds even funnier.

Dear Seattle Police Department,

I often hear people say that you cannot fully understand someone’s suffering until you have walked a mile in their shoes. I think this saying is true, because it is almost impossible to grasp the intensity of a situation until you are thrust into the middle of it with no way out.

I am writing this letter to tell you that I finally had my moment of true realization, my epiphany. The Seattle Police Department has faced massive amounts of criticism for the last few months due to uses of excessive force and possible police brutality. Communities of color have been especially angry that the police have seemingly targeted them with their use of excessive force. From the very beginning, I felt a sense of solidarity with the marginalized populations who had been victimized by overzealous law enforcement, but it wasn’t until this week that I felt fully motivated.

After passing through Tuesday’s protest outside of police headquarters, I finally “got it.” I finally felt true sympathy over the police situation. When I saw those protestors with their raw emotion, their feeling of betrayal by the system, and their blind rage against a government that did not do for them what they wanted, I knew that I had no choice but to throw my support behind the Seattle Police Department.

Look, I’m not one to condone police brutality. But my visceral reaction to the situation has almost nothing to do with the police and almost everything to do with the filthy street urchins protesting outside police headquarters. It’s like the Seattle WTO protests from 1999 swept all of its rejects under a rock and they have been waiting to come out, only they are 12 years dirtier, crazier, and angrier now than they were then.

[RIGHT- Stopping people from getting to Northgate via Greenwood is not going to end police brutality. Now get down from there.]

The protest itself was an unapologetic assault on all five senses. As I innocently walked to the bus stop, people brushed by me, coating my jacket with a combination of putrid sweat and grimy filth layered from weeks without bathing. I could feel the threads on my cloth gloves turning into dreadlocks as I hurried past. Their stench wafted over the block like a hovering cloud. Although the smell of urine and stale cigarettes wasn’t visible, you could smell it like the dust cloud that follows Pigpen around in Peanuts cartoons. The stench was so intense that anyone who hadn’t been incrementally acclimated to it beforehand immediately gagged violently or vomited slightly. Needless to say, I had not spent time at disgusting protest boot camp, so I suffered the latter fate. As if the stench wasn’t painful enough on its own, it combined with the taste of partially-digested falafel in the back of my throat in a medley that made me want to find the nearest shotgun for quick relief.

If this situation sounds oppressive to you so far, you may want to avert your eyes, because it became even more torturous. I had almost made it through the fray when my attention was diverted by a 5-foot tall woman of some Hispanic descent. She was possibly the most foul-smelling beast in this whole circus, like a bear that had shit on itself but didn’t know enough to clean it off. Being around this many people must have been a new experience for her. She was coated with a thick layer of grease that was either sweat that she had worked up during her frothing fervor or a dusting of Crisco left over from breakfast that morning. Either one would be realistic considering that she weighed at least 250 pounds. She had the center of gravity of a paperweight.

Now, I would simply look away, but she apparently thought that the protest uniform was an undersized black tank top with spaghetti straps and not enough fabric to cover the stretch marks on her stomach or chest. I hate to be shallow, but the sight was so appalling that I couldn’t help but become transfixed. She was a human car wreck, and I was not immune to rubbernecking. Unfortunately, she caught my gaze and unleashed a fury upon me that made me wonder if she was actually part dragon. The fire she spewed at me was consistent with my dragon hypothesis, and it came out as shouts of “FUCK YOU WHITE BOY!” over and over, like some bizarre eastern religion mantra. I tried to walk away, but I was stunned- I had gone into a stupor as my senses were not prepared to deal with this enormous dose of the anti-culture (I hesitate to call it the counter-culture when the orienting principle of these monsters appeared to be entropy, destruction, or some hybrid of the two).

Luckily, I came to my senses before she got the crowd to turn on me. I speed-walked past my bus stop and caught the next available cab before things got really sideways. What’s $10 when your life is on the line? I narrowly escaped that morass of humanity, and my life will never be the same again.

I understand that police brutality can be a problem, but there are sociopaths in every line of work. I guess you should probably try to figure out which ones are crazy before you hand out the guns. While this disgusting mob treated a reputable city block as a cross between a mosh pit and a public latrine, dozens of cops stood around calmly and prevented anyone from getting hurt. Of course some cops are bad. And those cops should be punished. But the people who are so disaffected with society that they show up to a pointless, all-day protest instead of going to work or doing something productive are, on balance, more messed up than the police who they are protesting. That’s why the police protest moved me off the fence and squarely on the side of the law.

Sincerely,

Terrance Verona

Charlie Sheen Is Righteously Depraved

Pleasure is the most basic human desire. Our predecessors struggled through a nasty and brutish, yet they still got their serotonin receptors firing through putting meat on fire and inventing sexual perversions. Today, our world is just as nasty and brutish, but we have refined the realm of pleasure so completely that we’re tempted never to leave. Soon, we will have nutrient rich cocaine and fully realistic sex robots. Until that time, booze, coke, porn, and hookers will do nicely. At least that’s the case if you ask Charlie Sheen.

Mr. Sheen is the ultimate heathen. He seizes pleasure at every opportunity. In and out of marriages, rehab, and career trouble, Mr. Sheen unapologetically comes back to the pleasure drug. You can call him a drug addict or a sex addict, but he is simply addicted to Pleasure. He is a Junkie. The Junkie finds something he likes and does it until he does not like it any more. Usually, he stops liking it because it trades off with something else and the high is not worth it any more. The rules of the tradeoff don’t apply to Mr. Sheen.

The Junkie may lose his family. Without a doubt, some junkies feel the Guilt and Shame of the penitent Old Testament sinner- the type of resonant fire in his brain extending up from Dante’s Third Circle- each time they satiate their gluttonous desires. If Mr. Sheen is indeed the garden variety junkie, then he should be susceptible to God’s double-barreled Guilt and Shame shotgun of repentance. But Mr. Sheen puts no stake in fidelity. His treatment of fidelity ranges from indifference to the type of scorn usually seen only in abortion clinic protests. Mr. Sheen has broken up with more women than most men have imagined while masturbating. He has ended relationships with threats of beatings, actual beatings, and Old West gunfire. He has five children in the custody of three women and exalts the fact that he doesn’t have to worry about tracking down a reliable and tight-lipped babysitter when he has the urge for a 36-hour bender. At a minimum, one could say that family life is not the anchor that will keep Mr. Sheen’s flighty spirit grounded.

[RIGHT- Stay gold, Ponyboy's brother.]

The Junkie may lose his career. Regular saps like us can’t get away with devoting our lives to the pursuit of pleasure because it gets in the way of the Daily Grind. If we spent our nights smoking crack and fucking hookers from dusk til dawn, our productivity would take a hit. Lindsay Lohan is a junkie with some of the same pleasure-seeking qualities as Mr. Sheen, but her career has been derailed. He has maintained a more successful career with a more ambitious pleasure addiction. His secret is that he has landed the perfect junkie gig. He plays himself on a mindless sitcom. Every week, the network turns over a bank vault worth of unmarked, non-consecutive $100 bills and returns to its blissful ignorance. Mr. Sheen can show up hungover and read his lines off cue cards one afternoon each Thursday. He gets a bankroll for his pleasure addiction, CBS gets ratings, and the mouth-breathers get season upon season of Two and a Half Men to serve as a soundtrack for their pathetic march to the grave. Everyone wins.

The Junkie may lose his health. Indeed, the Overdose is the Junkie’s Waterloo. Without it, John Belushi would have his own mindless sitcom. Adam Sandler wouldn’t have to dress Kevin James up like Chris Farley and pretend to laugh every time he shows his gut. But the Overdose is real. The problem is that the Overdose scares everyone other than the Junkie. The Junkie wants his next infusion of pleasure- he is not concerned with the opportunity cost of death. The Abyss is the natural end, after which there is no pleasure and therefore nothing to interest the Junkie. Mr. Sheen’s orienting principle is pleasure, so the complete absence of pleasure does not register. It is not his concern; it is ours.

Mr. Sheen cannot bottom out. He can keep drinking, smoking, and fucking his way to pleasure as long Angus Jones still looks young enough to play a kid on TV. The Junkie gets religion when he has lost everything and hits the low bottom. Mr. Sheen does not have a low bottom. He has days where E! News talks more shit about him and the Average Joe’s give water cooler high fives in his honor. He might even have to spend a weekend in a glamorous rehab facility on the beach, which is nothing less than an indulgent vacation. With his batteries recharged and nothing to lose, Mr. Sheen can jump back on the train and embark on his quintessential human pursuit of pleasure again and again.

Mr. Sheen is a Shimmering Monument to Hedonism. But we are pathologically unable to acknowledge his achievement. He has attained great heights in a domain that we are not allowed to enter. Non-golfers cannot appreciate the genius of Tiger Woods and we- sad sacks of mediocrity- cannot appreciate the genius of the greatest heathen alive. Mr. Sheen is a Pleasure Junkie, and nothing could be more righteous.

How to Blame Obama for Problems in Egypt

By Alphonse de Smith, Coordinator, Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy

WASHINGTON- After a successful State of the Union Address and an inspirational speech at the sight of the Tucson massacre, the political crisis in Egypt has dampened President Obama’s momentum. We at the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy see the silver lining in this global calamity cloud- we now have the opportunity to destabilize Obama’s base, scare independents back into the arms of Republican politicians, and make everyone believe that Obama somehow caused all of the problems.

You might be thinking to yourself that it sounds impossible to formulate a way to blame Obama for Egypt’s ongoing problems before we know what will come out of the protests. I will be the first to admit that crisis-creation is more art than science. You will see that demonizing both sides is a tightrope, and I will demonstrate how to ride a unicycle down the middle of it.

One of the problems in Egypt is that nobody really knows who is going to be in power a day, a month, or a year from now. Without that information, it is hard to start creating lies about how evil and anti-American that group or individual is, and fabricating ties between Obama and the leadership will be extremely risky.

Our policy analysts suggest that President Mubarak or Murabak or whatever has lost the support of his military, which makes it seem like the populist protesters will likely oust him from power. We have dispatched Glen Beck to commence character assassination on these protesters, and he has already planted the seeds that they are Marxist revolutionaries and Islamic Jihadists. Americans reflexively hate both of those things. They are the two most demonic enemies of the last 50 years, so combining them in one group should make any unthinking American immediately want to blow them up. I am aware that Marxism is not especially compatible with a Jihad, but the people who are going to think about the issue that deeply make up 3% of the population and aren’t going to be on our side anyway. We thought about making them child molesters, but we were worried that it might sound too far-fetched, so we stuck with Marxist Jihadists- I’m really happy with how that sounds.

[LEFT- Whatever. They look scary enough.]

That bit of enemy creation has the external benefit of creating great villains for action movies. The Hollywood Liberals don’t think it’s PC to depict stereotypical Arab terrorists, and the Russian commie bit is getting tired, so seeing Sylvester Stallone curb stomp a few dozen Egyptian Marxist Jihadists should be a breath of fresh air.

If the protesters take over, we have to be ready for several contingencies. If Obama does not fully endorse the revolution, we plan on changing course and portraying the protesters as sympathetic characters. Even though we have already called them Marxist Jihadists, if we change course and start talking about how they are freedom-loving patriots who want a democratic election, nobody will remember what we said a week before. Then, we will have the Tea Party take their lead and organize a “peaceful protest” in Washington, but we will make the protest about the Second Amendment and gun control, and we will pretend that’s what the Egyptians were actually protesting. Again, nobody that is listening will know the difference.

If Obama endorses the revolution, we already have the Marxist Jihadist ball up in the air, and then we can make the current President seem like a sympathetic character by pointing out that Egypt has not been involved in any wars in the last decade. We can also make up some figures that make it seem like they were prosperous. If we tether Obama to the Marxist Jihadists who unseated a peaceful and economically sound leader, it’s pretty easy to play the Barack Hussein Obama card and indict his loyalty. Questioning his country of origin might even get people thinking about his birth certificate again, then we can try to stretch out the residency fervor we had going against Rahm Emmanuel for a while. I realize that Obama’s citizenship has nothing to do with who rented Emmanuel’s house, but if we just say “citizenship” and “residency” enough times, there is bound to be some cognitive resonance somewhere.

We also recognize that there is a possibility that the existing Egyptian government squashes the protesters Tiananmen Square-style, so we want to cover all of our bases. We have started digging up old press releases from Obama’s presidency where he said lukewarm things about the Egyptian government in order to keep from getting angry at the United States. If we take a few quotes out of context, we can make it seem like Obama was in the President’s pocket the whole time. With a little bit of creative wording, we might be able to suggest that Obama knew that Egypt was planning to massacre thousands of citizens and did nothing to stop it. That’s really the ideal scenario for us because it makes Obama unsympathetic to the American people and props up a dictatorship in the Middle East that is going to hate Obama anyway. It’s a lose-lose for him, so I have my fingers crossed that the massacre takes place.

Another avenue to pursue would be interventionism. If Obama decides to send peacekeeping troops to Egypt to help conduct an election, we will decry the notion that America is the world’s babysitter and talk about how the Progressive movement got us involved in so many global entanglements that we eventually found ourselves in the middle of World War I. There really is no reasonable line of thinking that connects Egyptian protests to World War III, but it’s such a powerful rhetorical tool that we will probably just throw those words around anyway.

On the other hand, if Obama decides not to send any troops or aid to Egypt, we get to say that he has stretched the military dangerously thin in Afghanistan, that the Egyptians will run a corrupt election that will result in an anti-American fascist government, and that he is a coward who does not have America’s national security at heart. I’m just brain-storming here, but we might also run with the idea that there is some connection between repealing Don’t Ask Don’t Tell and the American military becoming too weak to provide a deterrent. Ooh, I like the sound of that. I’m going to get the Westboro Baptist Church on the phone immediately to work out the details.

[RIGHT- GOD HATES MARXIST JIHADISTS!]

If all else fails, we can always fall back on oil prices. Instability in the Middle East always results in higher oil prices, so we will just blame the Democratic President for gas prices this summer. It’s one of the oldest tricks in the book, but it still works. That’s why we have opposed every energy policy for the last 40 years. People think that we want to prop up American oil companies for private gain, but we really just don’t want to lose the “blame Democratic leadership for high oil prices” as an ace in the hole. T. Boone Pickens was with us for a while and flipped. Luckily, by the time he started exposing our secrets, he was already so senile that nobody would listen. The oil prices argument is a steady backup plan that has won us at least two presidential elections, so we’re not about to let it go now.

So you can see that we have plenty of irons in the fire, or so to speak. I tried turning these contingencies into a decision tree, but I’ll be damned if Excel Pivot Tables aren’t too complicated for even the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy to figure out. We should be fine without it, though, because all that hard work we put into making everyone so racist for the last 400 years has been paying off big time- getting people to turn against the black President is probably the easiest job we have had in a generation.