Golden Anal Pear for Asshole of the Year

The problem with this selection is that the field is so wide, it’s ridiculous. I’m halfway convinced that in order to become a politician, you must first sign a secret pledge to do everything in your power to fuck everyone you possibly can, and not in a good-touch way. However, once you include the Newtster in any of these categories, he kind of sucks all the air out of the room. No contest, really.

Good for Ol’ Bribery from Tiffany’s

No Ron Paul?

@Benedick: I really don’t see him as an Asshole. Yet.

Joe Arpaio, whose incessant begging for attention finally produced results from the Justice Department

“Results”? I wouldn’t call a report that does nothing more than state the obvious a result.

@nojo: Yeah. He’s a dick, but somehow avoids assholery.

It’s a fine line.

@nojo: Really? I thought the scene in Bruno told us all we needed to know about him: A self-aggrandizing homunculus who will do anything if he thinks it’ll raise money or get him on TV. I don’t think the contents of the ‘newsletters’ are as bad as the fact that he was making a handsome living peddling fantasies of the New World Order to crackers. But that’s just me.

BTW. Finishing The Swerve (ridiculous hi-concept title for an interesting book) the penultimate chapter of which kind of made me sit bolt upright, knocking pugs to the floor. It would seem that our famous ‘Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,’ is adapted from Lucretius, famous pagan author who proposed a universe composed of atoms and vast spaces, who proposed a mortal soul and decried the idea of an afterlife. In his case ‘happiness’ would have been ‘pleasure’ but the meaning is the same.

@Benedick: Atoms and void and nothing else.

@Mistress Cynica: I guess that’s void and more void then, since the basic subatomic particles seem to be shrinking into nothingness. I miss the good old days of high school physics class with nice hefty atoms depicted by plastic models of protons and neutrons and electrons. Presumably the elusive Higgs boson will turn out to be composed of some even more basic, and much smaller, particle like all the other subatomic building blocks have. It appears there may not be anything “solid” anywhere.

@Dave H: Solid remains solid. Subatomic structure explains solid.

This comment brought to you by a 1986 grad-school seminar.

@nojo: Solid is congealed energy. Nobody really knows what energy is, or why it exists. For further reading, see the Heart Sutra.

@Mistress Cynica: Atoms, void, and vodka.

Energy is the breath of God, darlings, the soul of the cosmos.

@Tommmcatt Be Fat, And That Be That: Energy. How the fuck does it work?