Poll Dancing – The Modern Age of Politics in America

It’s beginning to make sense to me why you have to be 18 to vote. Before you can make an informed decision about who gets impeached next, you have to understand the intricacies of your favorite candidate’s sexual proclivities. Not surprisingly, 18 is the age of consent (unless you live in the South or the Midwest, or your last name is Spears, or you are a teenager that attends high school with similar-aged teenagers of the opposite – or same – sex). You’re also supposed to be 18 before you are allowed to see an adult movie, unless you’re famous, in which case you’re allowed to star in pornographic “private” home videos solely created to meet contract obligations with mass online video distributors.

For my money, it’s a relief that nobody under the age of 18 has any idea that the internet is nothing more than an all-you-can-eat buffet of anything and everything remotely sexual. And I’m not talking Sizzler here. This is the real deal. Fortunately children and teens only navigate to safe sites like Wikipedia, where little information is correct, but it’s a useful resource to do vital school research about the history of important historical and cultural subjects like the Jonas Brothers. Of course, Facebook has caught on, but that’s really just a diversion created by the online porn industry to keep you nearby.

Speaking of websites, some prominent Politicians have made recent news after visits to an entirely other league of “social networking” sites. Politicians have a long history of getting caught having torrid affairs and raising the ‘political bar’ (if you know what I mean). Case in point: New York’s recent former Governor, the sanctimonious “steamroller” of New York, Eliot Spitzer. It seems that Spitzer, when not bringing down major prostitution rings, was keeping others in business. Client #9, as he was affectionately known by Albany insiders, had a “thing” for a girl named Kristen, Ashley or Silda, depending upon who you asked and when. The difference is in the cost of their company and the basis of their relationship. Let’s compare:

• Silda – Cost: Free. Relationship: Lawfully wedded wife.
• Kristen/Ashley – Cost: Four hour/$5,000 minimum. Relationship: Who cares? I don’t know what she did for $5,000, but whatever it was she must be awfully good at it.

Client #9 experienced a profound error in judgment when he asked his friend Kristen to come over and play. A brief analysis of the situation would lead anyone to the conclusion that if you don’t want anyone, including your lawfully wedded wife Silda, to find out about Kristen, this transaction is best handled with cash. It’s easy to fly under the radar with a random $30 charge on the old AmEx, but $5,000 is a bit of an eyebrow raiser – especially when the charge is for Ralph’s House of Escorts and Lawn Maintenance. Is it possible that New York’s former Attorney General and recent Governor was so sex-addled that he forgot he wasn’t supposed to tell his wife about the great hooker he just hired? “She looks just like our daughter, honey! She reminded me of home and how much I love my family.”

Spitzer resigned his post immediately after the media spit out his bones (Ha!). Lieutenant Governor David Paterson was immediately sworn in, declaring he had a “clear vision for the future.” Seemingly for comedic purpose, Paterson is legally blind. In any case, he almost beat himself to the podium when he declared, not ten seconds later, that he had cheated on his wife – at a Harlem Days Inn that charged by the hour. It wasn’t quite the Mayflower Hotel, like in Spitzer’s case, but then it probably doesn’t really matter to a guy who can’t see the room.

Nevertheless, sex scandals and politics have gone hand-in-hand since the dawn of time. Among the legions of political heroes involved in such scandalous activities, these few best illustrate the ones that rocked the world one bed at a time:

Bill Clinton, President of the United States
Clinton’s presidential ‘inkwell’ spilled over on an overzealous intern named Monica Lewinsky who had a thing for powerful guys who resemble W.C. Fields, blue dresses made from materials that would make Rosie from the Bounty commercials hang her head in shame, and Churchill length Cohibas that Fidel Castro himself later requested back in a hand-written letter to Clinton.

John F. Kennedy, President of the United States
Political analysts attribute Kennedy’s overwhelming 1960 victory to being widely recognized by people who passed through one of New York’s major air travel hubs. It’s a little-known fact that prior to entering politics Kennedy worked as a shoeshine boy at LaGuardia Airport, which back then was known as Fiorello’s Discount Air Strip and Vaudeville Palace. Kennedy became enthralled with a local Vaudevillian performer then known as Norma Rae, saw her skyrocket to worldwide fame and made it his life’s work to bed down with Marilyn Monroe.

George Washington, President of the United States
Now this guy had a reputation for sleeping around. Anyone who has visited a location on the continent of North America has come across a sign bearing the words “George Washington slept here.” One natural question that has been asked a thousand times is, “Where are all the ‘James Buchanan Slept Here’ signs?” Well, my investigation is over. I’m happy to report that Buchanan, who was the only president that was single, has shingles hanging all over San Francisco, Miami and the East Village. Draw your own conclusions.

Carmen Kontur-Gronquist, Mayor of Arlington, Washington
When your mayoral duties involve updating your Myspace profile, you’re likely to get young voters to the polls. Turning to the internet for information, male voters far and wide came across photos of the candidate on her Myspace profile page wearing nothing but her bra and panties. Debate tickets sold out faster than a Beatles reunion concert, although there is no record of exactly what was debated, where she stood on the issues or whether or not her opponent even showed up.

Richard Nixon, President of the United States
Surprisingly, Nixon – who was involved in the biggest hotel-related political scandal in history – somehow couldn’t manage to shoehorn sex into the story.

In an effort to be as fair as possible, I’d like to offer this list of politicians who have never had anything to do with sex scandals:

Scott Just Posted This Article

I just discovered I have OCD. Not in the traditional sense like normal abnormal people. I don’t feel the urge to straighten out the disaster on my desk and I don’t wash my hands every three minutes. I do, however, have a crystal meth-like addiction to updating my status on Facebook. My recently acquired iPhone (status: Scott is phoning it in – hahaha) is the technological Purell that makes it all possible no matter where I am.

When I’m not updating my own status, I find myself consumed with checking up on everyone else’s. In fact, when I poked (more on that term later) around, I noticed that more messages are being transmitted on this website than the sum total of communications that happened between when the Phoenicians’ developed the first alphabet (pretty much our current alphabet with the exception of the letter P for reasons nobody understands, which led directly to the First Russian Uprising of 1242 – later renamed the Prussian Uprising, just to stick it in the face of the Teutonic Knights, who defiantly added a silent K to the beginning of their titles because they thought Teutonic Nights sounded too much like a Jenna Jameson movie they had recently rented) – and Al Gore’s invention of greenhouse gas. As an aside, Jack Ray Tompkins, a carnation farmer from Gretna, NE would argue that when his wife Bobbie Anne moved out, he was truly the first to realize the damage that could be done by greenhouse gas (his status: Jack Ray’s greenhouse only seems to fill with gas after he eats broccoli). While Jack Ray considers legal action against Mr. Gore, I’ll get back to my story.

For eons, which are classified as ‘three month increments’ in internet terms, Facebook’s primary users were high school and college students. That has all changed. In fact, while I’m not old by any stretch, a younger coworker of mine named Dayna recently assured me that unless I do something immediate and drastic, I will be the proud owner of a one-way ticket for the short bus to Squaresville. That moment marked my crossing over the social networking event horizon and into a black hole where my parents both registered for Facebook accounts before I did.

As I updated my status for the 11th time today (Scott is writing again), it occurred to me that things have changed a lot since I was in high school. We didn’t have email, text messaging, instant messages, Facebook or Twitter, but our communication methods, while rudimentary, suited us well.

These handy comparison charts illustrate the fundamental differences between today’s popular communication technologies and the caveman-like ways by which we communicated:

Another interesting thing pointed out to me by Dayna is that the popular Facebook ‘poke’ isn’t nearly as innocent as it seems. This discovery has the potential to lead to serious trouble if you go around randomly poking people. Judging strictly by the dozens of people who have poked me, male and female, I’m a pretty popular guy in Facebook territory. By Dayna’s definition, I’m getting more action than Linda Lovelace at Studio 54 in 1977.

I really have grown attached to Facebook, but I think I need to detox. At least until I wake up in the morning. Scott is finally done with this article and is off to bed.

A Revolution in New York

New York governor Eliot "The Hooker Booker" Spitzer has resigned his post amid a scandal that involves him paying thousands of dollars to several prostitutes for their services. Spitzer claims he didn't inhale.

Lieutenant governor David Paterson will become the state's first black governor and only the third in the nation since Reconstruction. He is legally blind. So much for a vision for the future.

More to come...

How I Bought My Ticket to Hell

I have a few theories about exactly when and where I actually bought my ticket to Hell. Any reasonable and sound person who believes in the supernatural could point to a wide array of things I’ve done in my life to explain my eventual, assured, eternal damnation.

I wasn’t the kind of kid that pulled the legs off spiders or burned ants with magnifying glasses. And I’m not the kind of adult who practices patently criminal pastimes outside the occasional traffic infraction, as evidenced by the summons recently found in my mailbox which featured a few snapshots of my Toyota Prius driving through what was seemingly a red traffic signal. The evidence, including close-ups of my license plate and an actual DNA sample left at the scene, made it difficult for me to argue it wasn’t me driving. Damn revolutionary imaging technology. But the $70 I spent to make that indiscretion go away is nothing compared to what I have to look forward to.

It’s not that I really went out of my way to assure myself a blistering infinity. My life has simply been filled with decisions that needed to be made and hunger that needed to be addressed. Who could blame someone for being decisive and sticking to their guns?

The first such instance was when I became newly-minted intern for iconic local rock station WBAB on Long Island – the youngest on the roster, in fact. I was proud of my unpaid position and saw it as the perfect excuse to leave my family behind on Rosh Hashana, the biggest of the varied Jewish holidays where families gather to feast on bland food and celebrate collective self-loathing and misery.

As it happened, legendary Bon Jovi guitarist Richie Sambora was scheduled to visit WBAB that very day. It’s not so much that I wanted to meet Sambora, but he was my meal ticket to teenage popularity and possible sex with a really hot girl.

Weeks prior to the Sambora Incident, after years of what can only be classified as passive stalking, I finally summoned the courage to convince my friend Brian Clermont to ask out the hot girl from the music booth at the Commack Flea Market for me. When she said yes, I knew I needed to impress. This was, after all, the most sought after girl in all of Commack. Her mane of tall, stiff 80s hair represented the Holy Grail for all male flea market shoppers within a 10-mile radius. Long story short, I told her I was a bigwig with a local music outfit known as the biggest rock radio station on Long Island and promised I’d bring her to meet then next rock star that came through the doors. How can I help it if Sambora was a Goy with no respect for my predicament or my religion? What choice did I have?

More recently, I’ve become acutely aware of my religious heritage. I’m relatively certain that in my beloved town of Loganville, there are more people who have ridden in an actual space shuttle than have drawn a shamus across a line of Hebrew text in a Torah. Now, I define this next issue more as self-preservation than denial of heritage, but eight months into my Bible Belt residency none of my neighbors knows that I’m Jewish yet. Not that I’ve given them any real clues.

For instance, I would bet the house (the one I risked my life to wrap in Christmas lights) that I was the only Jew in town climbing across the roof to ensure that Santa could easily locate us when it came time to pony up with the presents. But that was only after I went with the family to a tree farm, saw in hand, to physically cut down the perfect pine tree so we could put it in our living room and decorate it with all sorts of non-Jewish bric-a-brac.

But the worst of all offenses may be when I attended a pig roast one Yom Kippur, the holiest of all High days in the Jewish faith. Yom Kippur is the Jewish equivalent of confession, only you don’t actually confess your sins to anyone; instead you atone through the majesty of starvation while sitting in a crowded temple all day with a bunch of other starving Semites. When the hunger hallucinations begin, the Rabbi might begin to take the shape of a raw porterhouse steak with legs, like on Tom and Jerry. In the hours before sundown, when you are legally allowed to eat again, delirium has set in, making matzo seem like a viable food option. But I digress….

One fateful year, when I was about 20 years old, my friend Tony was attending college and invited me to the aforementioned pig roast at a frat house. Being a passive zealot, I failed to realize that the day of that particular non-kosher pig’s reckoning happened to be the holiest day on the Jewish calendar. Considering I had already paid my $20 (non-refundable for those of you keeping score), there was no way I wasn’t going to attend. So as my family wallowed in self-loathing after paying ten times as much for temple tickets, I ate pork directly off a swine carcass on a spit.

At this point it’s all academic for me. If sex, drugs and rock and roll aren’t enough to make me Mr. Applegate’s new Lola, turning a blind eye toward my religion is sure to do the trick.

But religion has a funny way of getting even. Case in point: the flea market girl never answered my calls again after Richie Sambora outed me as an unpaid member of the hangers-on club of Long Island; it wasn’t until after the Christmas lights were hung that I realized only about half the strands worked; and I got food poisoning from the undercooked fraternity pig.

So maybe Hell is really delivered in small doses immediately following religious infractions. Not that it matters. In my eight months here the only religious practice I’ve followed is yelling “Jesus Christ” and flipping the bird to what have to collectively be the worst drivers in the world.