Oh. No. He. Didn't.

So today, United States President Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize. Um. I want this blog to be more sort of pygmy raccoons with irritable bowel syndrome and less sort of my useless political ravings, so I won't go on about this, but frankly I haven't noticed any Guantanamo-shutting or Kyoto signing or Afghanistan-resolving going on that would warrant such recognition.

Oh but wait. The press release says he won because he gave the world "hope for a better future," and for striving for nuclear disarmament. Ohhh. I see. I don't think sitting politicians should be able to get the Nobel Peace Prize anyway. That's like giving The New York Times a Most Indie New Blog Award or something.

Anyway, I voted for Obama and was pretty fucking excited about it, and compared to the last guy, Obama isn't so much a breath of fresh air as a mighty wind. Oh oops, that came out wrong. Now it sounds like I don't totally love him.

To prove my affection, I have posted pics of these quality paintings you see here by some painter named Dan Lacey that came from this website. Dan Lacey has a blog here. Dan must be kind of awesome, unless he isn't employing enough layers of meta-irony, in which case I don't really understand these paintings any more. Actually, I don't really understand them anyway.

This was actually part of the previous post. I suck at this.

If CNN was the way I want it to be, the announcer would have flat hair and crooked glasses and look like Beth Ditto and the news would go like this:

"Good evening ladies and gentleman. Today in Crapistan a lot of people were protesting fraudulent elections, so their government called them terrorists, because right now we're all totally waging war on terrorism, and locked them up, and then right in front of everyone Crapistan stole a glance at the U.S. and muttered out of the corner of its mouth, "This is how this works, right?", and the U.S. tried not make eye contact, which Crapistan, not unreasonably, took for a yes, and then Crapistan security forces proceeded to pull out the protesters' toenails one by one, which hurt more than anything that you or I can possibly imagine and probably bled a lot. Which frankly, Crapistan, really fucking sucks, you bullies.

"But then, instead of saying something helpful, like "Free Money for Bleeding Crapistani Protesters," the European Union and the United States government waited until some famous activists got on TV and were like, "Honestly? I dare you guys to be bigger hypocrites." This precipitated a totally fucking novel move by the leaders of the free world, who announced this afternoon that democracy is a pillar of democracy, which is a nice sentiment but too bad we already fucking KNEW that democracy is a pillar of democracy, you stupid shits.

"Also this afternoon, the right-wing spindoctors held a press conference pointing out what an asshole socialist our president is, and how incompatible his values are with theirs and how there can be no compromising on this right and wrong stuff. Although, just a couple of years ago the same politicians thought Hussein had totally cooperated with the 9/11 terrorists (Yes I'm STILL talking about this. Fuck you.), and so by extension, even though Republicans are apparently made of sugar and spice and Democrats are made of snips and snails and puppy dog tails, which are totally incompatible, they should still be able to work together. And I don't even know what the implications of this analogy are, but let me just say that if you go splitting the world into bad and good you're basically going to end up with the half the world hating you and the other half pretending to like you, which, DUH, we totally just did last century.

"Also, maybe we should all just shut up and simmer down for a hot minute because studies show that all the hating is not going to bring back the polar caps OR the aborted babies.

"On the other hand, really the whole distracted, sound byte presentation of misinformation is my own damn fault because I love being invited to lunch so much and I love it when politicians call me, because frankly politicians are the best-dressed people I know, so no way am I ever going to do what I would do if we were honest, which is call bullshit on basically everyone. Including myself and the rest of the media. But frankly? My attention span is even shorter than yours. We're all just working here.

"Thank you for your kind attention to the news. You may now return to our life-renewing programming. Up next, the remarkable fable of Silky Clam and Thundernuts the Sea Cucumber, which features a lot of real life lessons. Good night."

In the long run, maybe that isn't preferable to the real eight o'clock news at all. I would watch, though.

P.S. If you click on the picture then when it opens in another tab it twinkles. I would make it twinkle here, but I have no idea how to do that.