Violently right-wing smears against the Democratic Presidential candidate and his distinguished running-mate have reached deluge proportions in a desperate attempt by the ultra Conservative Republican ‘Buffy’ Anne Summers to revive her faltering campaign.
Here we take a dispassionate look at recent media coverage and events across the USSA.
CNS interview with Cassie Uric.
Vice-Presidential candidate Don Vito Corleone refuted the barrage of racist attacks from unregulated and hence partisan foreign internet sources that suggest the Democratic presidential candidate is some kind of a monster. Here is an excerpt:
Senator Corleone: ‘Vlad Dracula is the finest presidential candidate there has ever been in any election apart from those of 2008 and 2012. The torrent of slander against him from conservative and reactionary sources is beyond disgraceful, and I pledge here and now to the whole American people, plus all the peoples and community organizers of our shared continent: from the Rocky Mountain Reparation Native American States to the State Palatinate of Washington DC; from Baja Azania and Nueva Mexico to the Michigan Caliphate; from the Kingdom of Hawaii to all our guests and neighbors in mainland Cuba from Georgia all the way down to everglades of Castro-Dade that these infamitas will be investigated after the election. The perpetrators will be prosecuted using the full powers of the Hate Speech Amendment. We shall reason with them.’
Uric: ‘Doesn’t this defamation hurt you, and hasn’t it damaged your campaign, as some unreliable and partisan straw polls have suggested?’
Senator Corleone; ‘Sure it hurts our feelings Cassie, but we go on. During the French and Indian Wars of Independence when the British Klansmen were burning and raping their way across Bel Air, President Lincoln didn’t just sit there on his hands twiddling his thumbs. No siree/or madam-Bob! He just got on his cell phone and called in an airstrike. We shall do the same.’
Uric: ‘Far out.’
From Washingrad Post.
Summers emerged earlier this year as the surprise front-runner for the Republicans, having overtaken even more notorious right-wing candidates such as the youthful-looking white trash shock-jock reporter Clark Kent and reclusive, authoritarian billionaire capitalist Bruce Wayne.
Back in the primaries she won the grudging approval of some parts of the concerned media, if only because of her longtime association with lesbian activist and former classroom assistant Willow Rosenberg. Since Super Tuesday however, new disclosures have tarnished the frail reputation of this unknown wannabe cheerleader and ex fast-food kitchen skivvy from remote and little-visited
Summers’ controversial claims to have saved numerous lives throughout her puberty by fighting vampires and demons and her defiant assertions that she repeatedly prevented Armageddon have been exposed as the exaggerations of a fantasist born in the ghost town of
From Fairness Doctrine Nation: Public Service Talk Radio for The People.
As veteran political analyst and respected independent commentator Dan Slightly pointed out in a live exclusive NBS interview from his retirement home in downtown Fidel City in the Quays:
‘She has the most reactionary reputation of all the far-right candidates the Republicans have ever tried to foist on the country. The disclosure on BBC’s Truth Channel that Summers destroyed not just one but two high schools plus her entire home town before age twenty can not be ignored. When it was discovered by investigative reporters from New York Community Times and officers of the Mortgage Equality Enforcement Directorate that both she and that her lifelong lesbian friend Willow Rosenberg were personally present at the fatal shooting of Rosenberg’s overweight gay lover and did nothing to prevent it, I think it was game over for a lonely, damaged bleach blonde who has never maintained a close relationship with any unrelated adult man for more than a few weeks.
She literally believes in fighting for something the Right still refers to as The Good. She believes that, despite its obvious emptiness, human life can actually have some meaning or worth.
And like the Nightly Lettuce pointed out, who truly believes that’s her own nose. Like, really? You couldn’t make this stuff up.
I mean that literally by the way Oprah; you couldn’t make it up, is all I’m saying.’
Revelations about Summers’ largely unexplained extremist activities with the notorious foreign-financed anti-immigrant vigilante militia known to the FBI as The Scooby Gang buried her fragile polling lead as the fall came. Her attempts to harm Democratic candidate Vlad Dracula by claiming he is not a native-born American and is also a blood-sucking mass-murder have been condemned by most commentators.
From Insanity Fair.
Senator Dracula, ‘D’ or ‘The Master’ as he is known to his cheerfully devoted followers (nobody here uses his middle name ‘Tepes’ in deference to his forthright and conclusive denial of any connection to the death penalty and also to protect the much-demonized impaling community from which his immigrant forebears sprang), laughed and joked at his Louisiana rally tonight. He brushed aside the tired smears coming from the Summers campaign, and then he made his serious point.
‘When pipeline disaster came to Barrow, Alaska, the Republicans just froze. After eight years out of office in the Wildlife Reserve Territory their new administration refused to send any help to the stricken town other than more and more heavily-armed National Guards with ever more powerful guns to brutalize the immigrant community. This divisive attempt to polarize the population and perpetuate the cycle of violence will surely fail. I plan to travel up there for a few days in December after the election to see what needs to be done to rebuild the shattered community, to prevent any further Neo-Conservative military adventures, and to protect the few surviving undocumented citizens from the vengeance of the white supremacist police department there.’
I’m Mad For Vlad T-shirts - some a little speckled about the necklines with chocolate or ketchup stains from canvassing and street-based fundraisers - can be seen all over New Orleans in this October of Hope and Reconstruction. ‘We must obey The Master’ sing the many, slim and lightly-lad campaign helpers from their shady kennels below the bleachers of a converted university football stadium.
‘D’ has come to see just exactly what the Democrats and their friends can achieve in two full terms of office. Vice President Biden’s Ecological Reconstruction Corps has re-roofed nearly a thousand homes over the last eight years with sustainable materials such as straw, ice blocks of compacted snow for the four month long winters enjoyed by the snow-shoed Cajuns, and also lint from the many abandoned clothing stores of America’s empty shopping malls. They have also built over nine hundred community organizing centers around the historic center of the Big Easy, which has still not fully recovered from years of Republican misgovernment and the racist US Corps of Engineers.
From the Award-winning documentary Transylvania 1476.
Humanitarian film-maker, center-leaning political sage and philanthropist Michael Moose gazes down on the Republican rally and smiles through a snack food-studded beard.
‘The Right’s finished this time. They’re led by someone who literally believes in God, for God’s sake! Their stranglehold on the country’s media has been partly dented by progressive legislation at long last. All their military buddies are stranded overseas in the Zionist enclave or the garage sale they call England and they can’t vote because no-one will sell our Navy any fuel to bring them home, Ins’Allah.
Look, here comes the VP candidate, the Great White Hope – the kid photojournalist who’s ‘galvanized' the conservative so-called base. Did you know that Mayor Parker actually spoke against the Plasma Obligation Bill? You can’t have a properly socialized health system and let the voluntary principle sabotage it. They just don’t think of the children at all. No doubt we’ll get some fascist whitenecks tearing up their donor quota cards and singing Wooden Heart again, or that stupid song about grapes and glory.
Look at that Nazi bastard crawl down that wall, willya?'
Other news in brief.
International.
President Obama returned to the USSA today from informal nuclear arms limitation talks in United Palistan’s Meccan province with President in Perpetuity Ahmadinejad, but few doubt that pleas for increased oil rations fro Amrican hospitals and schools and a lucrative retirement book deal are the true agenda.
Business.
Things are looking up in the world of information technology after an eight year downturn despite Fed effort to the contrary. Internet inventor and Public Responsibility Tsar Al Gore has finally allowed talks to begin for the long-awaited Microsoft/Cyberdyne Systems merger.
‘This is a great day for low-carbon technology,’ the Great Scientist announced from his eco-home in Relocation Hollywood. ‘What could possibly go wrong?’
Here’s the text of an email from someone whom I’ve been worried about for years. Perhaps there are others out there stricken with their conscience, and I’ll share her painful thoughts with you. Can we all please show her that she’s not alone?
“Dear Vlad”
I am in agony.
It’s the blood guilt. For decades I killed for my food. I murdered people on four continents for their blood and I laughed as I did it. I murdered men, women, and children, and I thought nothing of them, except as things to be used up, destroyed and then thrown away. Children, Mister Blackburn: children barely old enough to talk and I drank them dry while their mothers watched in horror, all helpless and utterly doomed.
I can’t not think of it. The memories of my crimes fill my waking hours, and the long sleepless days, as I see their dying faces. Screaming faces. Waxy-dead pale white faces from
I used to enjoy my evil. I revelled in it and thought myself lucky as year by year I killed and staked and decapitated my way around Europe and Africa, and around North America and the
Then you and your bitch wife ‘cured’ me; made me see the evil of my ways, and encouraged me to feed mercifully from that moment on. Damn you.
All was well at first. I felt that by leaving off killing I could move on and help to make the world better. I might learn to atone. I can’t atone. All I can do is recall the pleading and the weeping and the animal shrieks of my victims.
Every day and every night I wish for the true death; to go to Hell for my sins and there to take the suffering of those poor dead human souls into me forever. I can never quite pluck up the courage to wait for the sun or to swallow garlic, as I fear the pain of dying once more.
The Pledge is a curse that you and your wife have brought upon me. It must be lifted. I insist that we meet and that you do the right thing by me and by the souls of the dead that I have made.
JD
That’s better. Nearly.
We’ve been staying with Benny and Miriam in
Mim keeps him safe then in a special underground room below the Trafford branch of their dealership. The family that looks after their businesses on Saturdays and holidays made the attic room of their offices in
So I’ve been healing nicely and my ears and fingers are now mostly regenerated.
As I listened to the sounds of revelry at the Christian New Year on Tuesday morning it made me think of my experiences in 2007 and consider what I should do about them. These thoughts have coalesced into a number of resolutions which I intend to share with you just as soon as this awful itching goes away as my fingerprints have finished growing back and changing once more.
In the meantime, a Happy New Year again to you all from
Adonais and Lucy.
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And here they are...
1. Stay away from church.
It seems perhaps that some priests in the Church of England aren’t so wishy-washy that they’ll allow undead creatures to sup from the homeless once we’re found out . So much for the inclusive church! Got my fingers burned there. Ha.
2. Lose weight.
It’s not easy. Normally the lead up to Christmas and New Year is very fattening with the draught stuff full of high-calorific goodies and willing donors are all too eager to give generously. Since you can store the stuff for forty days or so, the six weeks after the festive season means that the bottled stuff is inclined to be a little on the rich side, too.
3. Do something really effective against the raptors. I’ve been reading the reports of their foul arctic excursion during my long painful days of healing, and I must say that the suffering of the victims and grief of the survivors burns out of the written page right into one’s soul. As for the illustrations... No wonder that the vicar was taking no chances with me. Stake first and ask questions afterwards seems like a sensible reaction to millennia of our predation. The peace movement has a long way to go, and I aim to be armed to the teeth in order to get there.
4. Give more to charity. We aren’t the only cause of suffering in the world, God knows, but I think a tithe of the contents of my would-be attacker’s pockets will be a good start. Obviously, in the light of recent developments cancer research is right off the list. Can you believe it? Some red-headed bird with a hatful of degrees thinks she’s got the answer to the Big C, and three years later there goes the neighbourhood. There goes every neighbourhood on Earth.
5. Pay more attention to politics.
There’s no end to the harm that clueless and high-minded politicians can do to this world, and I aim to see that 2008 is the year of the bleeding-heart. Literally.
6. Get out more.
There must be lots of my kind out there, utterly pissed-off at being hate figures for their tepid neighbours, but who can’t raise arguments against the predators’ manifest destiny bollocks. I think I’ll go and give them a few.
Looks like I’ve lost the Christmas Day lunch job in the Priory crypt.
Damn.
It happened like this. It was just after noon and the last of the worshippers upstairs had gone home. The homeless were all asleep or passed-out (we feed them as the Eucharist service begins at ten to keep them quiet, and so that any willing to take communion have time to eat, burp, and stagger upstairs to the communion rail.) The last of the other volunteers had wished me a merry Christmas and taken the remaining rubbish sacks out with them. I was left with the washing up which is frankly soothing after the rush and the bustle and trying to keep the crazies quiet during the service up above and the drinking sessions downstairs. I always cherish those moments of quiet as the Vicar and his curates put the communion stuff away, and it gives me time to work up the psychic oomf to waken the sleepers and urge them out of the great wooden doors and on their way to the homeless shelter across the city for the night.
Usually I put on my winter costume of ankle-length coat, wide-brimmed hat and sunglasses at that stage, potter out of the back door, and sprint around the corner to the service area of the teashop and souvenir kiosk and wait in one of the great stainless steel rubbish bins until sunset at about 3.50. This time, however, the Vicar came down with a brightly wrapped parcel as the homeless lads and lasses were shuffling up the stairs.
‘Let’s check everything is switched off properly down here, Mister Dublin,’ he said, glancing at the tramps as they mumbled and bumbled and ‘Bless you Vicared’ past. Was he staring at their recently scarved necks? Lucy always spends the period between Halloween and Longest Night knitting warm winter scarves for these folk, and their bright colours are often visible for weeks into the New Year; in doorways and on park benches about the town. Hide the alcohol-swabbed clean patches a treat, my Lucy’s scarves do, in addition to keeping the cold out for the poor lambs.
I listened to the doors closing behind the last of the tramps, and the huge iron key in its lock squeaked and clunked. There was some scraping and dragging about going on in the church, and finally the two curates came down into to the crypt, standing between us and the stairs. The curates had some communion kit with them; wafers, cup, and heavy brass cross.
Oh-oh.
‘You know, Mister Dublin,’ the vicar went on, ‘You’ve been with us exactly ten years now, doing these Christmas lunches for the homeless, and you’ve been a tireless worker. You really are very dedicated, and I’ve always admired your hard work and early morning starts every year. And do you know, in all this time you haven’t aged a bit. Not by a single day. I wonder how that is?’
Oh, bollocks. I smiled. ‘I’ve discovered a really effective moisturiser, Vicar,’ I said, hoping to ploy my way out.
‘So I have come to believe. We’ve been discussing it this past week or so, and come to the conclusion that you ought to have your service and dedication recognised, and so we bought you a little keepsake. Go on, Mister Dublin. Open it.’
What could I do? Play the farce out, and hope for a nonviolent solution of sorts, I supposed.
The box contained a shiny disc of glass framed in white metal - not silver, thank goodness - that showed me a sequence of moving pictures of the crypt’s vaulted ceiling and then of the walls as I turned it slowly in my hands and then it showed the fear-blanched faces of the clerics as I held it vertical to face them. Of course it didn’t reflect me. I put it back in its box. I said. ‘I don’t know what to say.’
‘Don’t say anything, said the vicar grimly. ‘Drink?’ He gestured to the younger of the curates; a shivering, pallid-faced child of thirty. He held a silver communion cup.
‘I don’t drink. Wine,’ I said. Well, it was true and absolutely the right thing to say, and could you have resisted saying it; scared to death or not?
‘Technically, it’s not wine, Mister Dublin, because we have blessed it for Holy Communion, as we have blessed these wafers. Technically it’s blood. Do you want some of it?’
‘The Reformation doesn’t seem to have stuck with you, Vicar, if you truly believe it’s blood. I thought that’s what the other lot believed. Isn’t it just still wine to you Church Of England types?’
‘“The other lot” is represented by Father Butler here,’ said the Vicar, nodding to the unfamiliar – and hard-eyed – face of a cleric I did not recognise from previous years.
‘Were you responsible for those terrible deaths at the Catholic Cathedral, Mister Dublin?’ the stranger asked; his voice hoarse with anger. ‘I saw you come in from the churchyard when it all started.’
‘No. I was as surprised as you were. I just carried a few lame ones out of the broken window. I saved their lives, Father Butler.’
‘And drank their blood!’
‘The blood of the dead people which something nasty that a human being had conjured up spilled. It couldn’t be used for transfusions and all I did was clean up for a few moments whilst I picked through the ruins and pulled fallen beams and suchlike off the injured. I saved a good few lives that night, Father Butler, and all the rest of them when I tracked the perpetrator down and took the book from him.’
‘Produce him, then. Let us hear him complain about you. Perhaps we’ll believe him, and think you innocent.’ This from the quivering curate.
‘I can’t. He attacked me. I didn’t have time to be gentle.’
‘Produce the body, then, and his summoning gear.’
‘I can’t do either. The body was destroyed. I burned it on the moors. He was a mad bastard when tepid. He’d be a real disaster if I made him tepes. As for the book; well, Father Butler’s people have a third, and some bald chaps I met on the station platform have taken their part to
‘What will happen to the bitten ones?’ asked the Vicar, raising the heavy cross to block my way.
‘Short term, they’ll be a little less prone to bacterial infections for a week or two, but slightly more vulnerable to viruses for the same time. They won’t feel the cold much. Dogs will avoid them, and the local thugs will think twice before beating them up. They’ve got a temporary dark aura. Good insurance; like Redibrek with attitude.’
‘And when they finally die?’ pressed the Vicar.
‘That’s for you to answer; not me. They aren’t drained and they only drank hock and port today. There’s no chance of them turning.’
The Vicar wasn’t buying it, and stood foursquare between me and the steps. Father Butler looked a little less firm; thinking, perhaps, of why a vampire would hand a deadly grimoire over to the
Time to attack. ‘Is this really your thing, Father Butler? Luring a vampire to his death? Can you really wield the cricket stumps or pool queue or whatever it is you’ve got under your vestments? Slam it through my chest and hear me scream as the blood flies all over you? Or are you just pleased to see me?’
That got a smile; he was no brainless fanatic. ‘A colleague of mine did okay in New Mexico a few years back,’ he said, ‘and I think as a rugby man I’m better than a mere soccer player any day.’ Tough bastard.
More pressure, Adonais, or you’ll have to really hurt one of them. ‘Do you know what the important point about your internal organs is?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ he shot back, anger growing.
‘I’ll tell you then Father. It’s “internal.” That’s what you need to keep in mind about them, and just the way you ought to keep them, Father.’ But I wasn’t talking to him or the stony-faced vicar. The curate thought about the alternative to internal, dropped his box of Hosts, and ran up the stairs whilst the vicar and
The main door was blocked to me by a large standard crucifix that had been dragged in front of it. The vestry door was covered in dotted communion wafers, and in any case looked to be soaking wet. I guessed the font would be empty. I never saw the fleeing curate again that day, and I think he must have been cowering amongst the pews. I ran back towards the rear of the church and through the back to the souvenir shop door. It too was barred; this time by widely splashed holy water and a couple of smaller old crosses. How rood. However, there was a stained-glass window between the arch above that door and the Lady Chapel on the left hand side of the nave, and a four-seater oaken pew smashed it open beautifully. It has not been my month to respect church architecture and fittings, I’m afraid, but needs must when the slayers drive. I leaped through and ran into the night.
‘And with a single bound, he was free,’ right?
Remember the time of day it was? Emphasis on day?
I’m thinking of lying low for a few weeks, or maybe months or decades. At least until the scars heal and my ears and fingers regenerate. I’m going to have to be extra polite to Lucy, (who is typing this with her slender, deft digits of unsurpassed loveliness and grace), if I want to continue my blog.
So there you have it, vampire fans. A handful of amateurs led by the one solitary witness of my unthanked heroism at the Cathedral almost had me staked. I’m suffering massive burns and lots of acute things, and Lucy and I will have to avoid public appearances into the New Year. A good deed never goes unpunished, they say.
Perhaps we’ll stay with Benny the Zebra in
A Happy New Year to you all, dead readers, and see you in it.
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Adonais and Lucy.
A Merry Christmas to all our readers and friends from Adonais and Lucy.
We’re not at home today and a friend is posting this for us from our home - slayers please note! - as we’re doing our usual Christmas Day good deeds. We like to spend this day each year in the company of people who are less fortunate and slower-moving than we are.
The Priory church in town has a very large crypt which the Vicar uses as a dining-hall, kitchen, and dormitory over Christmas Eve and until Christmas Day evening when other charities take over. I join him and, as there is no direct sunlight down there, I can stay all day long in complete safety. There are other helpers, usually, but none who sticks as close to the kitchen as eagerly as I do, or who take no breaks. I like to keep the festive fare traditionally English for this meal, and no fancy foreign muck spoils the roast geese I bring, nor the potatoes, vegetables,
It’s a really enjoyable day out as we get a few homeless coming down for a feed and a step out of the weather. There’s a great feeling of bonhomie and companionship and, if I can’t join the services in the church above (the Vicar’s bit over-generous with the cross-waving) I can surely echo his seasonal sentiments from the shady place below. And shadow part of the ritual. Besides, the homeless have a tendency to pass out by about noon anyway.
Then they can totter safely (or be carried) to the shelter at the other end of town to sleep Christmas night in warm and security. Nobody attacks my town’s tramps over Christmas; it’s as if they have a guardian angel keeping watch over them. In fact, they attain a dark and foreboding aura for a day or two which the local toughs shy away from.
Lucy spends the day in the hospital. She’s an illustrator for children’s books and so gets a free pass to the pediatric ward to read them stories and generally be all cheerful and Mary Poppins for them, poor scraps. It’s right next to Haematology, so she never has to leave the second storey for refreshments, either, though there’s usually a tipsy nurse or a porter or two to be tapped, and consultants tend to alcoholic excess at the best of times.
It’s handy for the mortuary, too, which is good because Lucy likes plans that save life in more than one way. Christmas Day is about three days after the Longest Night.
Amongst out kind, this is a big celebration, of course; the triumph of the darkness over the light and so on. Some idiot always has too much to drink and takes no precautions at all. So three days later there’s often some weeping assistant pathologist describing what’s scared him to policemen who tactfully cease to take notes after the first couple of sentences, or who begin to wonder whether to breathalyze him or check him for narcotics. Then some bright spark in the local fortean club gets to post online about another Christmas Day case of spontaneous human combustion and Lucy weeps until New Year’s Eve when we provide first aid and clean up after drunk-drivers.
So Lucy always checks up on the pathologist and his cooling charges in case there’s a happy event, and she can bring the newborn home to ours in the shade.
Otherwise we meet up again after our shifts, and then we do our annual prison visit.
The castle in town has been converted to a prison where the convicts spend the last few months and years of their all-too-short sentences. Murderers, rapists, armed robbers and gangsters all; they used to believe that they and their crimes were forgotten by all but the victims’ and their grieving relatives.
Lucy and I are able to put them right on this matter each Christmas, and it is easy as the prison can hardly be described as a home, barred by the protective aura of property and familiarity, and the skylights on the roof are poorly secured. I think those old felons really look forward to our visit every year. I’ve heard the Vicar saying that all the Christmas services are packed out in the prison chaplaincy: morning, noon and night, and no-one ever wants to return to their cells, bless them.
I truly think we’re making a difference there.
And so to those who, as Lucy and I do, make your livings by earning and buying or persuading others to give you the wherewithal of survival, a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you all. Whatever your species or faith, your race or station in life or your vital signs, we hope you enjoy the festive season, and that next year we can find even more ways to get along without actually killing each other.
Next day.
Typical.
There’s always some idiot who’s prepared to spoil everything, isn’t there?
It was all going so well; grand baroque music and charming flickering candles in the cathedral; I had a pew not too close to any crucifixes; lovely new roof and an impressive new green and gilt rood-screen.
Come half-time and the mulled wine is going down a treat and young Deidre and I had just popped out behind the Social Centre for a quick nip when some total bastard decides to open up a temporary interdimensional rift. For ten or fifteen tentacled seconds of claw-slashing, crimson-spattered chitinous horror, the cathedral became a chthudral.
The authorities will probably put it down to a gas explosion, now that terrorism is no longer a safe excuse to explain away supernatural slaughter. After all, who would ever slaughter a churchful of worshippers and their friends whose only offence was to listen to some Christian music? Who could possibly be offended by such innocuous behaviour? It just never happens. Anywhere. Too much trouble asking such questions.
Nope, a gas explosion is what it’ll be, and the job’s finished. Dignified services for the dozen or so dead, a news blackout about the strange lights in the sky, and a quick, misleading, and above all accurate account in the weirdoes’ news magazines. No-one but a few witnesses will remember a black-clad figure leaping like a flea through the shattered east window and hopping out again with the wheelchair-bound and Zimmer-framed survivors. Government-appointed ‘Stress Councillors’ will treat and discredit with any such false memories.
Not that I want the attention. There was a lot of claret about last night whose owners no longer needed it, and ‘waste not, want not’ is a
But now I learn that there’s an eschatological nutcase hanging around my hometown. That should add to the fun over Christmas; finding him/her/it/them, and dealing. As if I didn’t have enough to do this month already, what with staff parties and the Homeless Shelter work on Christmas day itself…Busy, busy, busy.
It’s two-thirty GMT and it really is time I got some sleep. Got people coming round tonight for my wake, and I still haven’t sorted out the catering.
Sainsbury’s deliver food right to your door now, they say.
Sleep well, friends.
