PootieFact

Introducing PootieFact, an occasional feature in which our roving reporter Pootie seeks to separate the factual from the fatuous. Our first guest, Mr. Newt Gingrich, has kindly consented to be interviewed in the interest of affordable publicity.


In this election year, many are asking why Americans should trust the Republican Party with our economic recovery when it is the Republican principles of deregulation and tax reduction that got us into trouble in the first place.


The problem here, little dog, is that the deregulation and tax reduction have not been tried long and hard enough. Americans want a president with a firm grasp on our rising fortunes. And that president will be a Republican. Every one of us knew Obama's state of the union speech was pathetic, even before he delivered it. That's the kind of vision we need.

Obama has come under fire from Republicans for saying things could be worse. Should he have said things couldn't be worse? It sounds like there's no way he can do anything right.


Correct.

You, yourself, have referred to Barack Obama on several occasions as the "food stamp president." Many have seen this as thinly veiled code language directed at a racist audience. Do you have a comment?


That is as close to despicable as anything I can think of. That is an abomination. That is a fabrication of the lint-headed media.

Hey, now.

Listen. This racism thing is just another trumped-up charge meant to distract us from the big issues of the day. I have always said that the president is surprisingly articulate. But he is a major playa on the world stage and we cannot afford to have a man in that position making one jigabooboo after another. And you can quote me on that.

Others have pronounced you morally unfit to lead because of your serial infidelities. How do you react to that?

I'll tell you how I react to that. I react to that, which is even closer to despicable than the other thing, with the kind of barely controlled, manly outrage Americans like to see in a leader who will have to stand up to terrorists and liberals. Do you want a president who is so maritally passive as to stick to one thing even when it's not working? I don't, and I don't think America does either.

How about accusing Obama of not being an American?


Listen. I've always said he should just show us his birth certificate. End of story.

But he did show his birth certificate.


If I had been president, I would have showed it harder. I would have thrust it.

Let's move on.


Hey, now.

I see here you are proposing a base on the moon.


I am proposing a permanent Chinaman-free station on the moon, a showcase of American technology and a model for new resource depletion, manned by Cuban friends I will reach out to, and a couple of Jews, with a staff of little colored boys sweeping up.

It sounds prohibitively expensive.


On the contrary. All we need to do is jump-start the American entrepreneurial spirit and pay for the whole thing by raffling off prizes. IPads, hoodies, Starbucks gift certificates. Done.

Still, it is no coincidence that you made this proposal on the Space Coast in Florida, which is reeling from a loss of jobs. If you have similar proposals for the other states, that can start to add up.


Not necessarily. Our potato-based Aryan Monument in Idaho, 4 electoral votes, excites people, while remaining quite reasonable.

Do you have anything in mind for us here in Oregon?


Oregon. What kind of people do you have out there, again? White, mostly? Some Russians?

I don't see how that--yes. Pretty much.


Oregonians know what's best for them. What Oregonians need is for the federal government to get out of their way. We remove job-killing regulation and you can clear-cut your way to a new golf tourism economy.

Actually, we do miss the timber jobs, but we're still fond of our forests. We were thinking more along the lines of an artisanal toothpick factory. But we're pretty self-sufficient. There's not much we need. You could come down to the root cellar and rotate the canned peaches, maybe.


Consider them spun.

Michele Bachmann accused Barack Obama of going all over the world apologizing for America. Do you agree with her?


I do, and when I'm president, I will stand erect for America. The one time Obama should have apologized, he didn't. The Environmentalist-Wacko-In-Chief, in an unconscionable display of hypocrisy, refused to apologize to India for soiling her ocean with dead terrorist.

Surely you are not suggesting that the environment is not worthy of protection.


I am not. We have come very far in the protection of environmental degraders. In the last year alone, we have created hundreds of jobs on Madison Avenue and sunk millions of dollars into the rebranding of Coal.

What are we calling it now?


"Clean Coal."

But there are those who say that this does nothing to forestall a critical warming of the planet.  Do you not believe that human-caused climate change is occurring? A vast majority of climate scientists do.


And it is an unwise president who does not seek out dissenting opinion no matter how expedient or mercenary and give it equal weight. I will not be that kind of president. I will exercise due belligerence in every decision.

But they are saying that in another fifty years, America will suffer extremes of climate unmatched anywhere else on earth.


U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S.A.!

Diapers Of Doom

Archival Photo

If anything will bring down this great country, it will be our inability to see past the next election cycle. We are doomed if we settle for short-term solutions to long-term problems. Thank God Texas is still producing Gomers who can see the big picture. No wait. Gohmert. Louie Gohmert. He is so far ahead of the curve he might actually be around the bend.

Here is a man who gets right to the heart of an issue. When he observed that some of his constituents were hopping mad about his opposition to health care reform, he concluded that congressmen should not be expected to take heat without being allowed to pack it, too, right there in the Capitol building. He's not only not going to listen to you, he's willing to put a cap in your ass, and trust me, he's already run it by Jesus. Jesus is cool with that.

His whole website reeks of common sense. To wit: "So if you are oriented sexually toward children or toward animals or corpses, or shoes, or whatever, that's okay." Don't be fooled. He means it's NOT okay, and I agree. That's why I always wear socks.

Or, in his most ringing statement: "It is high time the people of our country started deserving better." Amen, brother, we're already a quarter past rightful and they probably won't even seat us at entitled until intermission. More inspiring words have seldom been inflicted. It's a true call to reaction.

And best of all, thanks to Rep. Gohmert, we have been alerted to the threat of terror babies. Terror babies are those babies dropped in the U.S.A. via the international terrorist maternal missile system, consisting of visiting women with full-term pregnancies concealed beneath their burkas, who snatch up U.S. citizenship for their infants and whisk them back to their home countries to be schooled in mayhem with exploding training pants. There they remain until they come of age and are ready to be sent back to America as citizens and wreak havoc. Terror babies can be spotted by their garlic burps, suspicious diaper bulges and beards. Now that we're on to them, we can take them out, thanks to Louie. He'll see those infants past the threat of abortion, but once they've hit air, they're fair game.

Asked by an interviewer what evidence he had of this dastardly plot, Mr. Gohmert sighed, letting his bandolier out a notch. "Two things. One, you're a Nazi. Two, terror baby purveyors are very sneaky," he confided. "And this is a very sneaky plan. That's your proof right there."

And, America, he's right. It's almost unbelievably sneaky, but there already is a precedent for the degree of foresight required to launch the terror baby plan. One need look no further than the brilliant ploy by Kenyan agents who,  in 1959, managed to plant an African newborn in Hawaii, where people are distracted by falling pineapples and rogue chickens, and raise it up to be the President fifty years later. Most people in those days would not have placed much money on a black child accomplishing such a thing, but Eisenhower-era Kenyans took the long view, which is precisely what is lacking in modern America. We can't even get a bullet train built.

Do we, even now, have what it takes to put a terror baby plan together? I submit that we do not. Our children can't hide explosives with their pants on the ground, nor can we get them to leave home.

This is big-time, long-range thinking, Mr. Gohmert. This is moon-shot material. Some day, because of people with your kind of vision, we may be able to harness the power of Uranus.

Lee's Eel

It was recently reported that a 59-year-old Chinese man--let's call him Mr. Lee--died after having an eel inserted into his rectum. Naturally, I found this deeply disturbing. But upon further research, I was reassured that the variety of eel in question is not an endangered species. The Asian Swamp Eel, in fact, is an invasive species here in America, as it was in our Chinese friend. In a further parallel, it is beginning to dominate habitat in the southern states. Its method of introduction into this country is unknown. We do know the method of introduction into Mr. Lee.

The approved method of introducing an eel into the rectum is from the top end, breaded and fried, but unfortunately for Mr. Lee, the eel took a more direct route. It would not seem to be an easy trick, but my research shows that eels naturally hide in holes in the bottom of the ocean, so the hole in the bottom of Mr. Lee may not have been such a stretch. Insertion was also aided by the addition of alcohol, both into Mr. Lee (in sufficient quantities as to render him past objecting) and into several of his friends, who came up with the eel idea in a fit of hilarity. Doctors attending the suffering Mr. Lee days later discovered the eel, now deceased, had chewed up a considerable portion of bowel, and Mr. Lee died ten days later.

One wonders where people come up with these notions, but no matter how dumb an idea is, once it's introduced it's capable of spreading like wildfire. That's why there are so many young people shambling around with their pants under their butts, and also Birthers. And in the area of the world Mr. Lee inhabited, there is an abundance of swamp eels, and there had already been a well-publicized incident of a man inserting an eel into his own rectum in a bid to cure a bout of constipation. He was not only not relieved, but checked himself into a hospital with abdominal pains several days later. There the doctor, after consulting an x-ray, pointed out that he had an eel up his butt. "Oh that," the man said, admitting he had put it there, and apparently surprised that it might be the source of his problem. The eel was removed along with the constipation and the man continued on his merry way, sadly retaining the ability to procreate.

One can only guess that the intent was to use the eel as a sort of plumbing-snake to scour the intestinal tract clean, but unfortunately eels do not care for the contents of intestines, preferring to munch on the organ itself. Any of a number of other animals are known for eating feces, but for various reasons are not suitable candidates for rectal insertion (dung beetles: too creepy; Labrador Retrievers: too noisy). Rabbits are known to eat their own feces in case they missed anything the first time through, but they're notoriously jumpy. And rectal gerbiling, no matter what you may have heard, is a myth, so my research has met a dead end. However, two things can be concluded. One, the world has presented us with a rare opportunity to combat alcoholism and invasive Asian swamp eels at the same time. Two, we could all use more dietary fiber.

Birther De Blues

We've all heard of the "Birthers" by now, and isn't it fun? It's like when they found a group of Cro-Magnon people in some isolated island somewhere a while back. Here, in the face of all modernity, was a tribe of ancients who had not evolved in a significant manner since the Stone Age. And now here--right here!--in the middle of an America that had sent a man to the moon forty years ago is a tribe of Birther people without advanced cognitive abilities and who yet are able to lope off to the Burger King and bring down a Whopper.

The Birthers believe that we have recently elected as President a man who is not a bona fide American citizen, because he was of foreign birth. Hawaii is a little out there, for sure, but most of us recognize it as a state. So we think of him as being a little more pineapply than the rest of us but otherwise true-blue. The odd thing about the Birthers is that their numbers coincide neatly with a segment of America that, until recently, did not care where or how their President was born, as long as he claimed to have done it twice. So this is new.

Most of us get a chuckle out of the Birthers, and speculate as to whether they came about as a result of inbreeding or whether they're the product of a long-underfunded educational system. But the main thing about the Birthers is that they have totally missed the big picture. Even if Hawaii were a real state, which is in dispute--real states raise wheat--it only became a state less than two years before our President claimed to have been born there. The gestation of a human is nine months, reputedly, but aliens have been known to gestate for far longer. And that's the issue. It's not that Barack Obama is a Kenyan. He is out of this world. He has a six-foot wife who wears hot pink. His children are a little too perfect. He never acts perturbed no matter what the provocation. His ears stick out. Something's not right here. The Birthers may have the details wrong, but they're on to something.

Pay close attention to the issue of whether or not we should send a man to the moon. Please note that it is always a generic man who is proposed, and not someone specific like Lou Dobbs. So there is no pressing need to blast anyone off. The reason usually given is that we were all so inspired when we sent a man to the moon forty years ago--what could possibly be more inspiring than to see if we can do the whole thing all over again, especially after all those years of underfunding the educational system? Gosh, not much.

I personally agree with a number of scientists out there who believe that it would be a lot more fun and way less expensive to send off a bunch more of those little golf carts that creep about the Martian landscape going eep eep eep and find out all sorts of compelling scientific stuff. But, instead, we are being urged to fire off another random man to the moon who is not Lou Dobbs, and at great expense. Someone doesn't want us to find the true birth certificate. Someone doesn't want us to go to Mars and come nose to probe with a race of men of color. Green, or whatever.