If you're from Massachusetts, and voted for Ted Kennedy, never speak of Repubican elitism again

Ted Kennedy is a drunken, philandering, elitist troll of a man who should be serving time in prison like normal criminals.

Kennedy leaves a party and is traveling over a bridge in his 1967 Oldsmobile. In his passenger seat is Mary Jo Kopechne, a young blond staffer of his. He is, in all likeliness, drunk. He drives off the bridge, into the water, his car sinks, he swims free, Mary Jo dies. This all happens after midnight - the way Kennedy tells it, he leaves the scene of the accident, wanders around for a while in shock, goes back to his hotel room, and calls the police the next morning. So let's assume the incident happens at 1AM and "the next morning" means 8AM. I find it extremely hard to believe that he could wander around in a daze, "in shock," as most accounts put it, and then suddenly realize 7 HOURS LATER that OH SHIT! I might have er-ah, killed that Mary Jo girl. More likely what happened is he talked the whole thing over with his sleazy bretheren and decided on their damage control method. There is actually a lot of dispute about what happened. So I tried to get in touch with Mary Jo Kopechne, but unfortunately, she was unavailable for comment... cause she's dead...

Some people may say that I'm beating a dead horse. "Oh, Dave, everyone knows about the whole Chappaquiddick thing, it's old news. Get over it." If people want so badly to just "get over" things, then why is Sirhan Sirhan still in jail? Oh, he (supposedly) assassinated RFK, but we should get over that whole thing, I mean, jeez, it's old news. We put people away for life without parole. We are not a nation that tends to "get over" things easily. Hell, people in the South still call the Civil War the War of Northern Aggression. The way we prosecute criminals reflects this tendency for us, as a nation, to be loath to just "get over" things. I'm not endorsing our penal system, but that's the way it works. What I'm saying is that Ted Kennedy got off scott-free when anyone else would have gotten charged with manslaughter or worse, and still be in jail making sure they hold onto their soap in the shower.

Ted Kennedy got away with killing Mary Jo Kopechne because he is a man well-connected to political elites, specifically, because he's a Kennedy. He used his status in society to get himself off the hook and to get away with something any normal person would be locked away for. My problem here is that this is exactly what Kennedy and all his New England pie-in-the-sky liberals rip on Dick Cheney for. "Oh, he was a CEO of Halliburton," which automatically makes him a bad person, first of all, "and as CEO he abused his power to get away with screwing people out of money and skimming profits off for himself," or whatnot. As a member of the political elite he abused his power to get away with screwing Mary Jo Kopechne out of her life. I have no love for Cheney or even the Bush administration, but I simply do not understand how these liberals can rally behind Kennedy like he's the friggin' pope of liberalism when the guy is a goddamn case study of one of the reasons why Democrats hate Republicans like Dick Cheney.

Furthermore, you may remember Ted Kennedy trying to make a baseball analogy a few years back. Have you ever heard of Sammy Sooser or Mike McGwire? In 4 years of playing fantasy baseball, I sure haven't. Apparently Ted Kennedy has though. One of two explanations for this. One, he was drunk. Which is not entirely implausible given Senator Kennedy's rumored affinity for liquid courage. Or two, he's so out of touch with reality that he can't even name two of the most prominent baseball players of the past 15 years. Hm, let's try to act like I can connect with the ordinary baseball-watchin', beer-drinkin' average guy. Except he probably has watched as many baseball games as Orrin Hatch has watched episodes of Queer Eye. Based on the Red Sox's recent World Series victory and the way people from Massachusetts acted, I've concluded that everyone in Massachusetts is a baseball fan. Hell, they all act like they know everything there is to know about baseball... and then ask me what the infield fly rule is. But since they all know so much about baseball and since every Masshole on campus was at Kogan Plaza feigning civil disobedience (no one at GW has enough cajones for a real riot anyways, I mean, c'mon, it might scuff their Guccis), I'm going to conclude that everyone from Massachusetts is a huge baseball fan. Which leads me to my next point... why the fuck do you guys keep voting this idiot in, if he doesn't even know the most prominent names in a sport so near and dear to you?! Not to mention the fact that he's a killer.

If you live in Massachusetts, and voted for Kennedy in spite of the aforementioned evidence, please go out and commit a felony. And make sure to leave plenty of evidence so you can be a convicted felon. If you don't understand why I'm asking you to do this, then you really need to go out and commit a felony.

Keeping idiots from running the country

I'm fed up with idiots who don't know their shit trying to debate politics with me. Over this past election season, I came to the conclusion that what this country needs is a political aptitude test. Consider this. Immigrants entering this country are required to take a citizenship test to make sure they know enough about this country to exercise their voting rights. A friend of mine moved to this country from China when he was very young. As a result, he had to pass a citizenship test in order to vote when he was of age. An interesting aside to this, is that he was asked during the test what the U.N. was. Now, my friend is a dyed-in-the-wool conservative who writes for our conservative newspaper here at GW. His answer? "Oh, it's an organization that gives third world despots the power of industrialized nations," and, I'm sure, proceeded to rip the U.N. for a good five minutes before the administrator gave up and checked whatever box he had to on his clipboard.

I submit to you that we should require not just immigrants, but everyone to take a citizenship test (hereafter referred to as a political aptitude test) prior to every presidential election.

Having heard that, if you have even so much as thought that "Whoa, Dave is a (racist/elitist/hateful/evil) person," find a sharp object and poke yourself in the eye with it. Or, better yet, do the country a favor: staple an American flag to your head and move your dumb ass to Pakistan. I hear they make some mean donkey meat over there.

And for every time I hear the world discrimination in reference to what I'm saying, I'm going to find an old refrigerator and release the freon - just to piss off you stupid hippies. Permit me to dissect the main counterargument to my proposed Political Aptitude Tests: "that is so discriminatory." Get off your fucking high horse. I don't care if you consider yourself liberal, conservative, vegetable, whatever� unless you are an anarchist, you espouse some kind of discriminatory policy (and even if you are an anarchist, you're discriminating against fat and slow people because they, inevitably, will be the first to go if there were anarchy).

Liberals? You guys want to raise taxes on the rich, so that we can give poor people who spent all their money on PCP more money to buy PCP with. You're discriminating against rich people because they or someone in their family had the business sense to make some serious dough and you are proposing that the government steal even more of it. Furthermore, many of you hippies espouse the profoundly discriminatory policy of affirmative action. What can be more discriminatory or undemocratic than giving some people an advantage over others because their ancestors came from a different chunk of land? From what I remember of high school history, other than my teacher's unfathomable yet hilarious inability to play nice with technology, we fought a war over this type of inequity. But today, our policies still reinforce it.

Conservatives? Last time I checked, you guys were trying to pass a law that would prevent same-sex couples from receiving the same recognition and benefits as "normal" couples. Look, I don't care what you dumbasses say, people don't choose to be gay - that's just the way they are. By denying them equal protection under the law, you are practicing discrimination. Want more evidence that you practice discrimination? Go walk outside and ask someone who lives in D.C who their Representative in Congress is.

So liberals, conservatives, whatever the hell you are, you all discriminate. So go ahead and call me an elitist, discriminating, apple-pie-hating bastard of a person. Congratulations, so are you. Deal with it.

The test would not be difficult. However, I contend that there are a substantial number of people who were convinced to go out and vote this year without being able to give an answer to these three things:

1) Who are the current president and vice president?
2) Who are at least two people considered "Founding Fathers?"
3) What is the name of any one of the following people: your representative in Congress, your senator, your governor?

And what scares me the most is that my granola-munching, Abercrombie-wearing, hormone-driven, beer-chugging monkey classmates were the ones out there pretending they knew what they were talking about, convincing people to vote - morons getting other morons to vote for their respective moron.

If you don't give a shit enough during the non-election period to at least know what the fuck is going on, you don't deserve the right to mete out your judgment with the same force as everyone else. Here is my solution. If you can answer all three of these black-and-white, right or wrong questions, you get your vote to count three times. If you get one wrong because, for example, you took your daily smoke break during high school history class and don't remember any of the founding fathers (and don't have any dollar bills with you on the day of the test), your vote counts twice. Let's say you're a moron and don't know either of the first two, but you watched the news last night and saw your governor get indicted or something (this won't seem weird if you come from Connecticut) and remember his name. Congratulations, you get your vote to count once. And if you get zero correct, you have earned my eternal disdain and deserve to be sterilized and forcibly confined to a single state with all your fellow monkeys. I suggest New Jersey, because that place sucks anyway, and people who live there would gladly be moved to better states. Then we will be free to populate New Jersey with all the morons so they can't make any of the rest of us stupider. And as either a cruel joke, out of pity, or just to make them feel better about themselves (because we're a compassionate nation), we will give them one electoral vote or free tofu or something (cause nobody likes that shit anyway).

[This needed to go somewhere, so here it is]