the commune, 4/3/26: You'll learn to love it or die trying

White House Accidentally Misdirects Attention Back to Real Problem

June 6, 2005

Washington, D.C.

Ansel Evans

Charming little dumpling Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice engages in a little on-stage misdirection, and answers a reporter's request with her famous "Shit in one handâ€¦" response.

he White House faced embarrassment this week when their usual method of distracting the population with lesser problems backfired, leading them to unintentionally misdirect public attention back to the original problem. While the administration hoped to draw notice from earlier remarks misdirecting national awareness to the slave trade.

Popular theory is the White House misdirected media attention to the Middle Eastern slave trade to distract from the continuing aggression in "free" Iraq, and possibly some of the Nixon comparisons President Bush has endured over the course of the week; when Middle Eastern allies such as oil magnate/American investors Saudi Arabia took offense at the promise of sanctions, the White House sought to avert public outcry against the ally by launching a new attackâ€”this one, accidentally, drawing notice back to the failing economy and bleak financial prospects for most Americans.

"It's a shame in this country that men and women can work all their lives and having nothing to show for it," said Condoleezza Rice, as a few aides standing by gave each other quizzical looks. "Especially in America, a country recognized world wide for having so much prosperity. And yet, we're losing quality jobs everywhere but the service industry. The president is most definitely angered by this, and is sorry he's passed so many economic policies to keep it in place."

Failing to recognize that the disparate situations between the rich and poor in the United States was the same initial social ill so many wars were started to draw attention away from, Rice continued to assault the very structure of American finance.

"America continues to make advances in industry, medicine, and of course, commerceâ€”advantages only a handful of Americans will fully experience, since the system is built to allow only partial upward mobility, preserving a luxury status for a privileged few, who triple their earnings by sending skilled jobs overseas and cutting the bottom out from the working classes."

Concluded Rice: "That seems to me a much more devastating problem affecting this nation than the 800,000 slaves reportedly trafficked through the fine countries of our allies, right?"

It was a classic clusterfuck as only this administration could manage, doing potential damage to four and a half years worth of social reform rollback and securing the position of the upper classes. Realizing their mistake the Saturday after the statement was made, the White House had little choice but to keep the misdirection rolling.

"The War on Terror is at its worst," said Press Secretary Scott McClellan, rushing into the press room Saturday morning, while most of the reporters were still pretty hung over for a long night's/morning's drinking. "We have elevated the terror level to 'fantastic,' which is uhâ€¦ pretty bad. We've heard rumblings throughout the Middle East that Al Qaeda may be preparing for another strike on U.S. soil. And if intelligence hasn't picked up anything on that yet, they most certainly will within the next few hours."

Though the War on Terror is a subject that hasn't unified Americans with the same strength it originally did in late 2001, it seemed like the safest place to leave public scrutiny until everything had blown over, or at least until the next major summer blockbuster got everybody talking about Batman or alien monsters or something again.

the commune news loves a little misdirection, or actually Ms. Directions, the cutie centerfold in our latest edition of Playboy Atlas. White House correspondent Lil Duncan was so close to being that centerfold. Damn shame.

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December 30, 1999

Mr. Dingle

"I remember in my youth, I had made a mask out of rubber bands and construction paper. It was a beautiful thing, glittering with sparkles I had glued around the eye holes. I would wear it everywhere and would make people call me 'Mr. Dingle' and refer to myself in third person as in 'Mr. Dingle would like some mashed potatoes' and 'Mr. Dingle demands we watch cartoons.' One day, my father approached me with a sad look on his face. Great Aunt Mable had died of pneumonia and the family was in mourning. So my father says to me, in that gentle way of his, 'Son. We all like Mr. Dingle, but I'm afraid he's not invited to the funeral. Only you were invited.' I was stunned. I said, 'Dad! I'm 22 years old! I'll decide whether Mr. Dingle is invited or not!' Mr. Dingle enjoyed that funeral. I think Great Aunt Mable would have been...

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July 7, 2003

The Acting-Editor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea

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I open this column with a firm and hearty, "Thanks, dicks." This is not directed to you dicks reading at home, but to the dicks who neglected to inform me Red Bagel had returned and the commune staff was operating normally under his rule again. I was barricaded in that office since May, fearing swift and brutal retaliation, while at any time someone could have knocked on the door and said I was merely demoted again. True, I probably would have considered it an attempt to lure me out and not believed them, but it was worth a shot.

It's all meaningless what-iffery by now, since I was forced to come out to use a regular rest room after my coffee can filled up, and noticed the staff laughing rather than lunging at me with swords and daggers. When I asked, someone even told me Bagel had annexed the floor above us for his own new office, and I could have the dank dungeon I had made my own since January, if the smell of human waste didn't nauseate me. It doesn't, so I thank Bagel's kindness and take it as a minor promotion for all my good work in his stead.

As you can tell by all this, I'm no longer a big deal around the commune offices. But from what I understand, if the door to the office had been open when Bagel returned I would have been castrated and choked with a frayed electrical cord, so waiting had its advantages as well. After enough time, and self-prescribed morphine, Bagel was back in a friendly mood and decided to merely demote me to King of Dinks, a title which Raoul Dunkin had to relinquish to me.

Some could see it as failure, but I look at it as an inverted success. Sometimes you have to fall back to the bottom of the ladder and start your career over to move ahead. And that's what I'm doing at the commune. Also, as you can see, I was mightily addicted to sharing my thoughts with the readers after months of filling in on Bagel's "Or So You Thought" column, so I decided to introduce my new rotating column "Poop of the Century." True, I wanted a regular semi-weekly feature like Finger or Bricks, but it was Bagel's suggestion I do a periodic column or sit on it and rotate, hence the idea. He was right, too; now that I'm freed of the duties of Acting-Editor I can return to my first love, masturbationâ€”I mean, reporting. Sitting in my smelly office writing columns all day isn't my style, at least Bagel says so.

Unfortunately, the call to write a column is muddled with the call to prove to the world I'm not dead, so that's mostly what this beginner's column is about. It's important I get my Social Security number reinstated so I can find a new apartment and re-open my bank account. Personally, I'd hoped someone at the commune might have mentioned I was in the office and hadn't been killed on the job as the death certificate said, but in fairness, as Lil Duncan said, everyone was extremely busy trying to bust the piÃ±ata when the investigators dropped by.

Don't expect this little corner of the commune to be another self-indulgent crybaby's story of the little things in life that piss him off. Let the other columnists engage in that ego-stroking. Ramrod Hurley is interested in tackling the bigger issues of the day, and blowing your mind in the process. That's a lot to do in one column, one particular edition might have more blowing and less issue-tackling, but in general I'll try to mix the two well enough.

I just hope you readers are into getting tackled and blown.

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Quote of the Day

“Yours is not to question why, yadda yadda yadda, just jump out of the goddamned plane already.”

-Corporal "D-Wipe" Heisenhouser

Fortune 500 Cookie

Let me be the first to say: Elastic Grandmacraps. You can run but you can't hide, and that's why you never got the Hide 'N Seek scholarship to Brown you had your hopes set on. Your character of Jasper the Friendly Goat will garner you the attention you've long desired this week, but will be much more of the legal variety than you had intended. This week's lucky animal cookies: dog, penguin, June bug, Oreo.

Try again later.

Top 5 Reasons You Won't Have to Kick Around the commune For Anymore

1.	Itâ€™s expensive to run state of the art website and Dippinâ€™ Dots franchise at the same time
2.	You assholes simply refused to spell our name appropriately in lowercase letters
3.	All of this was for date with girl at Blockbuster; she donâ€™t work there no more
4.	Less writing and online publishing leaves more time to hang out at coffee shop writing thinly veiled autobiographic novel
5.	You never loved us

North Korea Pissed Their Real-Life Hunger Games Nowhere Near as Popular as Movie

BY Roland McShyster

10/29/2001

Sweet Jesus America, are you back again already? It looks like Uncle Roland will have to dig deep into his bag of goodies for some tender morsels to keep you entertainment hounds happy! How about we start with everyone's favorite Quid Pro Bono, Ask Roland?

Q. I've been an avid fan of yours since back in your days of writing movie reviews for the Radio Shack employee newsletter, and even your brief stint as a film reviewer for Trucker Girls Magazine. Looking through my collection of your reviews recently, I was startled to discover that you gave "Cock-Gobbling Space Sluts" a four-star review when you were writing for TGM. Excuse me? Were we watching the same movie? Only a truly desperate fan of low-budget erotic science fiction comedies would find...