2012 Year End Review: Part 1

2012 was a year dominated by politics, from beginning to end.  The batshittery started early, like on January 1st, and did not let up through the November elections and beyond.  2013 looks like it's going to do much the same, as scary as that sounds, but for right now let's review shall we - Why 2012 Sucked:

Theatre of the Damned (Presidential Election Edition):  The Presidential election this year was a galaxy-class train wreck, populated by the creepiest characters this side of a zombie apocalypse.  It was like someone loaded up your DVR with the most badly-written, incomprehensible, nonsensical, parallel-universe, bad-LSD-induced, four-month-long psychodrama imaginable.  Possibly the zenith (or the nadir, if you prefer) of that whole passion-play-from-hell was the Republican National Convention.  Almost derailed at the beginning by a hurricane, even devout atheists like myself knew that was a big "thumbs-down" from the Old Man Up In The Clouds.  It most certainly did not disappoint when it came to utter, total disappointment.  Spectacularly boring, this celebration of fat, old, white people had something to offend and annoy everyone.  The most unbelievable thing of the whole convention was aging, grizzled movie icon Clint Eastwood having some sort of bizarro-world conversation with a chair.  Once revered as the ultimate big-screen tough guy in edgy, stylized westerns (like High Plains Drifter or The Outlaw Josie Wales) and shoot-the-uppity-minorities cop potboilers (the Dirty Harry series), it was more than a little disconcerting seeing him degenerate into a disheveled, wild-eyed, crazy old man who could easily be mistaken for a deranged old coot having a political shouting-match with his dish of lime Jell-o in any cafeteria in this country.  It showed once again that mental illness is not at all pretty, and I can only hope when I turn into an unkempt, babbling, glassy-eyed old geezer, I can hopefully get caught talking back to a radio or something.  At least THAT would make a tiny bit of sense.

2012 Douchebag of the Year:  Hands down, the leader in this sorry category has to be Willard Mittens Romney, The Asshole That Roared.  Republicans have this uncanny talent for choosing the most repellent, unattractive and unelectable candidates for national office, and we didn't think they could do any worse than John McCain, the goofy, senile old dickhead they nominated for President in 2008, or the execrable Queen of the Inbred Sarah Palin, but damned if they didn't top themselves this year.  Apparently they base their choices on the highly questionable premise that if you stick around on the political radar for years and years, losing more primary elections that you can count, eventually that will make you look supremely qualified for the highest office in the land.  Romney's candidacy was its own worst enemy, and it was very entertaining to watch him torpedo his own chances at every turn - the leaked "47%" comment, his disastrous European visit - the list goes on.  At nearly every instance he came across as a creepy, awkward, socially inept douchenozzle with a very unfunny sense of humor, and I think a lot of Americans decided early on that they did not want to put up with his weirdly stilted persona and scary, sexual-predator smirk for four long years.  Dishonorable mention in this category has to go to anyone who participated in the Republican primary debates, a veritable smorgasbord of everything that's wrong with American politics, but the mildly-surprising runner-up to Mitt is his own wife, Ann.  Ostensibly brought into the campaign to "humanize" her husband to wary, unfamiliar voters, she managed to hammer the last couple of nails into the coffin of his candidacy by coming across as nasty, imperious, short-tempered, sharp-tongued, condescending, bitchy and elitist.  I find it endlessly amusing that Ann Romney turned out to be the one who needed "humanizing," and I'm just waiting for all the tell-all post-election books that will document her sloppy-drunk (I wouldn't be surprised if she has a drinking problem, Mormon or not), profanity-laced, behind-the-campaign-scenes tirades.  You just know she used the N-word a lot.

Welcome Back My Friends To The Show That Never Ends: Gun violence is like a big ugly wound across the heart of America. Gun violence in this country left its mark in a big way on 2012, most horribly on December 14th when 20 young children and 6 adults lost their lives to one deranged, monstrous murderer with a semi-automatic rifle.  Earlier this year another psychotic loser shot up a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado.  There was also a smattering of mall shootings and workplace violence incidents and incredibly, on Christmas Eve, some scumbag shot to death two firemen responding to a building fire.  But, the 20 dead children in Newtown, Connecticut, seem to have really set people off, maybe because of the sheer immensity of the horror or the fact that it has happened so close to the holidays.  Not surprisingly, the NRA held a news conference in which they blamed everyone and everything in the world for what happened, without even touching, however tangentially, on the fact that some of the blame just might be due to the easy availability of ridiculously powerful assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition delivery systems.  Even for a bunch of ignorant douchebags like the NRA, it was an astonishingly stupid, arrogantly defiant, self-serving, tone-deaf non-response to a really critical national problem.  Their "solution" is to place armed guards in every school in the United States, at an estimated cost of nearly $7 billion a year.  Yeah, I'm sure the Republicans in Congress are going to pass THAT appropriation.  According to the NRA, the answer is guns, guns, and more guns.  It's really amazing that the NRA can't see what everyone else can - what hopeless, pathetic assholes they are, and what spineless, evil cowards the members of Congress are who buckle under it like wet cardboard.


Death We Regret The Most:  Lots of notable people passed away this year (Michael Clarke Duncan, Neil Armstrong, Whitney Houston, Phyllis Diller, Donna Summer to name a very few), but one passing hardly anyone noticed was the death of representative democracy. We learned this year that Congress does not give a single crap about doing its job - which is representing their constituents and working to, you know, get stuff done and accomplish things.  Instead, we learned that they prefer to spend their time manufacturing financial-Armageddon events in order to scare themselves into doing something (i.e. THEIR JOBS), and then when they do nothing and the contrived financial-Armageddon event actually begins to draw near and - much to their surprise and horror - MIGHT ACTUALLY HAPPEN, what do they do?  Bail out of town on a Christmas break, leaving the rest of us to peer over the edge of the so-called "fiscal cliff" they created and wonder how the hell we got into this situation.  It's pretty easy to understand - Congress is utterly and totally devoid of integrity and courage, does not give a rat's ass about what's best for this country, and would much rather postpone uncomfortable decisions so they can screw stuff up not only in the present but in the future, too.

More vicious slander and blatantly biased criticism in 2012 Year End Review Part 2, coming up next!