I am the NRA

Benjamin Colton Barnes seemed like the patriotic kind of guy you'd like to have for a neighbor. He loved firearms. He kept a personal arsenal. He sported the "Odin" and "manacled warrior" tattoos so favored by our most proudly white patriots. Who would believe he'd murder a forest ranger?

Department of Book Reports: Happy New Year

The very exhausted bookstore people wish you and yours a very Happy New Year. We're looking forward to talking about good books next year.

Another Fistful of Foreskin

Here's another example of people confusing the fine sport of wrestling for some kind of wild homosexualist porkin' party:

Former pro wrestling superstar Hulk Hogan is suing his ex-wife for telling interviewers that he had a long-term gay relationship with fellow wrestler Brutus Beefcake.

It seems like no matter how hard the wrestling world works to dispel such perceptions--even going so far as to butch up the wrestlers by giving them names like "Brutus Beefcake"--nothing they try seems to work. There's just something about seeing two big sweaty guys grinding against each other that sends filthy minds into overdrive.

A Fist Full of Foreskins

Edward John
Edward John Ministries
Christian Advice Columnist

Dear Pastor John,

My preparations to transfer ownership of my daughter's uterus to a nice young man have a hit a bit of a snag. Yesterday, he was arrested while putting together a 1 Samuel 18:27 dowry. Apparently, the secularistofascists who write and enforce our laws consider the biblically-approved practice of forcibly taking a man's foreskin to be a serious crime.

My potential son-in-law has been working on the dowry for months, but has only collected 7 of the 200 required foreskins. Sitting in jail is going to really hamper his gathering efforts. I don't think he'll make it.

My daughter is very upset. She wants me to take an unblemished red heifer or a couple of morale ewes instead. I suppose I could--both are biblically acceptible--but dang it, I want him to prove his worth. More importantly, I want those 200 foreskins framing a Tim Tebow poster I have hanging in my den.

This feels a bit like cheating, but I'm hoping you could ask your readers to help my daughter's fiance. Ask them to send him their foreskins. They probably should dry them first, either by tanning or perhaps jerking; I doubt the jail will accept ice coolers.

Have them send their foreskins to:

1 Samuel 18:27 Foreskin Drive
c/o Inmate #20975-37J
Tremonton City Jail
31 Tremont Street
Tremonton, UT 84337

Thanks.

Heterosexually yours,

Gen. JC Christian

Department of Book Reports: A Christmas Carol

It has become our tradition to post this passage from A Christmas Carol every Saturday before Christmas here at the General's place. It remains as relevant today as it was when Dickens first had it published in 1843. This year I will add this passage from the first Stave, as it may have reflected English society then, and may soon again.

"At this festive season of the year, Mr Scrooge, ... it is more than usually desirable that we should make some slight provision for the Poor and destitute, who suffer greatly at the present time. Many thousands are in want of common necessaries; hundreds of thousands are in want of common comforts, sir." "Are there no prisons?" "Plenty of prisons..." "And the Union workhouses." demanded Scrooge. "Are they still in operation?" "Both very busy, sir..." "Those who are badly off must go there." "Many can't go there; and many would rather die." "If they would rather die," said Scrooge, "they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population."

The following is, of course, from the climax of Stave Three, as Dickens called it, when Scrooge is abandoned by the Spirit of Christmas Present. Among my English major friends, Charles Dickens is regarded as a rank sentimentalist, and, worse, a writer who achieved popularity with the reading public of his time. At the same time, I argue that he was also one of the most acute social critics of the 19th Century, and a critic that helped transform that world for the better.

The scene below contains one of the most powerful images in English Literature. And it still holds true today.

From the foldings of its robe, it brought two children; wretched, abject, frightful, hideous, miserable. They knelt down at its feet, and clung upon the outside of its garment. "Oh, Man, look here! Look, look, down here!" exclaimed the Ghost. They were a boy and a girl. Yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish; but prostrate, too, in their humility. Where graceful youth should have filled their features out, and touched them with its freshest tints, a stale and shrivelled hand, like that of age, had pinched, and twisted them, and pulled them into shreds. Where angels might have sat enthroned, devils lurked, and glared out menacing. No change, no degradation, no perversion of humanity, in any grade, through all the mysteries of wonderful creation, has monsters half so horrible and dread. Scrooge started back, appalled. Having them shown to him in this way, he tried to say they were fine children, but the words choked themselves, rather than be parties to a lie of such enormous magnitude. "Spirit, are they yours?" Scrooge could say no more. "They are Man's," said the Spirit, looking down upon them. "And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased. Deny it!" cried the Spirit, stretching out its hand towards the city. "Slander those who tell it ye. Admit it for your factious purposes, and make it worse. And abide the end."
"Have they no refuge or resource?" cried Scrooge.
"Are there no prisons?" said the Spirit, turning on him for the last time with his own words. "Are there no workhouses?"
The bell struck twelve.

Rick Perry: Still 110% Committed to the Heterosexual Lifestyle

A man who once stood upon the sacred soil of Texas as a legislator is saying horrible thinks about its governor. In his new book, Glen Maxey, details the claims of several men who accuse Rick Perry of being a homosexualist and having a very tiny .17 cal. man-derringer with a hair trigger.

I've seen pieces of these reports, and I think there's a perfectly heterosexual explanation for the events these men describe.  I mean, hey, how many of us haven't taken out a Craigslist ad looking for "someone willing to unlock the door, turn off the lights, and lie face-down on the bed, legs spread." Nothing homosexualist about that. Sounds like Saturday night at the compound to me.

And yeah, so a real estate agent answers the Governor's ad and lays out all spread eagle over the bed, the taught firm hills of his hind parts defiantly rising high above his luscious lumbarian valley. Gov. Perry enters the room and notices that something about this idyllic setting is very wrong; there is a gas, perhaps a poisonous gas, escaping from a cave--perhaps a terrorist hideout--located in the cleft the cleft between hind part hills.

So the Governor does what heroic men do. He grabs whatever weapon is at hand--in this case, his tiny baton of furious justice, and rams it deep into the heart of the terrorists' lair.

Once.

Twice.

Lets loose with a victory moan.

And leaves.

Nothing homosexualist about that. Heck, it's heroic, like something a Spartan, a very well oiled, muscular, Spartan, would do.

The Conservative's Guide To Socioeconomic Class

As right and holy as I think my GOP brothers may be, I think they're blowing it when they talk about the middle class. You know what I mean. The Demislamunistofascists put up a proposal to "tax the rich," and it seems like every Republican in Congress scrambles to condemn it as a tax on the poor souls who make a meager $250,000 a year. That wouldn't be a problem if they'd continue on to actually defining what "middle class" actually means.

The problem is that the average Joe thinks "middle class" is a literal term; that it is the class that sits in the middle of the economic spectrum. They ask the question, "If $250K is at one end of the spectrum, what figure is at the other end? Am I middle or working class?" After they do a little research, they learn that someone making $250K is sitting at the 96th percentile of annual income (top 4%). At the other end of the spectrum, the 4th percentile, a person makes $6000/year. From 6K to 250K a year makes for a pretty darn big middle class.

 I've come up with a better way of defining socioeconomic class. It's a definition based on conservative values, a definition that doesn't lump the "struggling elect" with those lazy assholes who can't afford both a Porsche and a vacation chalet at Vail.