By the Comics Curmudgeon
As your Comics Curmudgeon demonstrated earlier this year, political cartoonists love butts. Just love ’em! The ass is the most polysemous of images, representing everything from sex appeal to debasement and humiliation to an actual butt. So we’re presenting a panoply of ass shots this week, with a greater emphasis on sodomy. But those of you who aren’t butt fans (even though such a person is scarcely imaginable), fear not! There will also be severed limbs. MORE »

Hot on the heels of yesterday’s impossibly exciting news of the opportunity to pay at least $70 to hear Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton sitting in adjacent armchairs and mumble talking points in a vaguely conversational rhythm: a cancellation of that exact thing! Apparently everyone was too into it, and this is why it had to end before it began. According to some Clinton spokesperson: “This event … was supposed to be a discussion between the two former presidents, and has been cancelled because it was not being billed as such by an overeager promoter.” How dare the promoter describe the event in such a way as to attempt to convince people to attend?  [New York Post]

Bill Clinton and George W. Bush will simultaneously perform impressions of relevance at Radio City Music Hall, where in February they will “debate topics ranging from the economy, to foreign policy, to the current administration.” Details are still fuzzy re: why anyone suggested this in the first place, what anyone believes the stakes to be or hopes to gain from this, or what’s in it for absolutely anyone—Clinton, Bush, the audience, Radio City Music Hall, or you, simply hearing in passing that this thing even exists. MORE »

Bill Clinton would rather be a dead President than an alive non-President, he announced, apropos of let’s just say nothing in Istanbul on Monday. “It’s good that we have a (term) limit. Otherwise I would have stayed until I was carried away in a coffin. Or defeated in an election.” Six in one, half dozen in the other though. Anyway, Michael Bloomberg will now buy and destroy all New York’s coffins. [Reuters]

• Erick Erickson insists upon a Great Purge to keep the GOP pure. Erick, you sick sick Stalinist bastard! [RedState]
• Sarah Palin is “ready” to be “president,” according to “Rush” “Limbaugh.” [Gateway Pundit]
• Who else is on the CIA payroll, besides Ahmed Wali Karzai and Luis Posada Carriles? The answer will not surprise you in the least. [The Plank]
• Oh, GREAT: The terrorists get free swine flu vaccines while pregnant women and stray children are encouraged to stock up on Emergen-C and hope for the best. This is health care reform? We want America back! [Ace of Spades]
• Remember when Bill Clinton parachuted into North Korea and whispered delicious lies into Kim Jong-il’s tender ear and then saved two lady-journalists from a decade of slave labor? Yeah well, that part about Kim Jong-il never actually happened — hot damn, it was Photoshopped! [Daily Intel]

Haha Bill Clinton, who even is this guy? Not that you would even know this by reading the corrosive falsehoods spread by the so-called media, but back in the 90s, he was the victim survivor of a “vast right-wing conspiracy,” a phrase he and his wife cold made up that quickly became one of the Clintons’ buzzy catchphrases. And Bill Clinton’s vast right-wing conspiracy, or BCVRWC as it is known in the BCVRWC secret dungeon planning control chamber, is as sinister and formidable as ever! Its henchmen are everywhere, and they continue to accuse Barack Obama of murdering Vince Foster. Clinton will simply not stand for this! MORE »

“LIKE MUSSOLINI”: THE MORE INTELLECTUAL ALTERNATIVE TO YOUR STANDARD HITLER SIMILE. Here’s another weirdly boring thing from the new Clinton oral history that also exposéd the fuck out of Boris Yeltsin getting drunk that one time. “Describing one interview in which Clinton was evaluating Gore’s campaigning during the 2000 election, Branch writes, ‘Gore lacked confidence in a light touch. Whenever he tried to be aggressive, said Clinton, Gore could come off ponderous and harsh, like Mussolini.’” OUTLANDISH! We will pre-order one million Kindles immédiatement. [Mother Jones]

• TODAY IN MARKETED EXCERPTS FROM UPCOMING BOOKS, ABOUT POLITICS: “Boris Yeltsin got so drunk during a visit to Washington in 1995 that Secret Service agents found him standing on Pennsylvania Avenue clad only in his underwear and trying to hail a cab so he could fetch a pizza. That was among the indiscretions revealed in a new ‘oral history’ of Bill Clinton’s presidency, based on 79 taped interviews between Mr Clinton and the historian Taylor Branch in late night visits to the White House family quarters. ” Ha ha, nice job with the ironi-quotes there, Times of London. (Because of blowjobs.) [Times of London]

• You, the worker, have actually been getting paid more, not less, over the last year.* (*Except if you are unemployed. Salaries of the unemployed have been comparatively static.) [New York Times]
• The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has joined most of Congress in thinking Obama’s idea about a new surge in Afghanistan is in fact a terrible one. [Times Online]
• Bill Clinton, on one of his bimonthly goodwill visits to Earth, has endorsed attractive Californian Gavin Newsom for the position of Governor of California. [Los Angeles Times]
• Police announced that Blagojevich’s former gal Friday, Christopher Kelley, who died of an overdose last weekend had previously tried to die of an overdose. [Chicago Tribune]
• Some religious Southwesterners are fighting to keep Big Government from taking away their constitutional right to brew psychedelic tea, which … helps them with their God. [WSJ]
• Here is your CLOSURE: Kanye West has apologized to Hilary Duff for his failure to observe congressional protocol. She was like, “Fine.” The end. [CNN]

Did you dress as Professor Dumbledore or a sneering Bank Goblin for yesterday’s midnight release party of the “new” Ted Kennedy memoir? What? You went as Gandalf? HE’S NOT EVEN *IN* THIS BOOK YOU IDIOT. But yes: Ted Kennedy’s new book is out today, and every journalist and blogger is reading it in bed, looking for the hottest blockquotes. The best excerpt we’ve seen thus far is one involving Sen. Robert Byrd, who was invited, along with Kennedy and other powerful humans, to the White House early on in Clinton’s presidency for their first meeting about gays in the military. Robert Byrd had concerns, but only because he thought they were discussing whether blacks should be allowed in the military. No no no, that wasn’t why. It had something to do with… rape, in Ancient Rome? MORE »

Here is what we know about John Ensign: he was schtupping his buddy’s wife for six months or so until they got caught, at which point Ensign begged his old parents to give his buddy $96,000 in hush money (that worked out in the end!), which they did, spread across eight $12,000 checks to various family members so the sum wouldn’t have to be declared as taxable income. He shouldn’t be forced to resign. It’s better this way, to see him roaming around the desert, giving interviews, meekly trying to hedge his failures, shaming himself, and coming across like a dingbat fraud, which he is: “Ensign told The Associated Press that he didn’t lie under oath like Clinton did and that he hasn’t ‘done anything legally wrong.’” Indeed, this would make a fine re-election campaign slogan. [AP, Las Vegas Gleaner]