at Robertson, the American founder of the Christian Coalition who in the past has called for the bombing of the state department and the assassinations of Kim Jong Il and Saddam Hussein, announced this week that the democratically-elected president of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez, must be assassinated because of his potential to spread Marxism and Muslim extremism across South America.

"These violent religious fanatics cannot be tolerated," Robertson explained, ducking under a salvo of gunfire from supporters of this point of view. "And so God has told me he must be murdered."

"What the fuck?" responded Chávez, when reached in Cuba for his reaction.

In a later interview Chávez theorized that Robertson must be thinking of a different Hugo Chávez, since it he and his entire country are either Roman Catholic or Protestant, and Chávez is a very common name.

"I know for a man like Robertson, the entire non-white world must be very confusing," offered Chávez charitably.

After a week of being shit on by the press, and nearly killed in daily assassination attempts, Robertson announced that the world must have misunderstood his comments, or taken them out of context or something.

"When I said 'the United States of America should assassinate Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez,' some people unfortunately misinterpreted this comment to mean I thought the man should be taken out by American covert-ops assassins or something crazy like that," Robertson explained. "This couldn't be further from the truth. Anyone who was really watching The 700 Club that day knows what I really meant: that Jesus loves everybody. End of story."

When confronted with video of the show, Robertson changed his tune, begrudgingly revealing that the episode in question was filmed on the The 700 Club's annual "opposite day."

"You got me! The cat's out of the bag," admitted Robertson. "We were going to have a big contest for viewers and award all kinds of great faith-based prizes for the viewer who could figure out which of our shows had been on opposite day, but not any more. You blew it! Good job, dingus!"

However, this was not the first time Robertson has denied his own remarks in the face of damning VHS evidence.

Last year Robertson claimed that President Bush told him before the invasion of Iraq that there would be no casualties, but that Jesus thought it was going to be messy. This came a few years after the reverend claimed that God allowed 9/11 to happen because the American government allowed abortion and pornography, and because people stopped buying Pat Boone records.

In 2003 came Robertson's infamous 21-day "prayer offensive," when Robertson took a break from being his normal offensive self to beg God to kill three members of the Supreme Court so they could be replaced with justices who would re-criminalize sodomy, thereby ending homosexuality forever.

At the age of five, Robertson organized a kitchen-table meeting to call for the head of his own mother, for the crime of naming him Marion Gordon Robertson, and thereby necessitating the use of a gender-neutral nickname like "Pat" so as to avoid being traded for cigarettes in elementary school. Robertson would later regret not taking on a more masculine fake name, like Bruce, Lance or Barry.

Duke Prosecutor Disbarred, Accepts New Position as National Scapegoat

High Gas Prices Threaten Tradition of Setting Homeless People on Fire

Bob Barker Ceases to Exist After Retiring From Television

Tree Bark Face Turns Out to Be Likeness of Jesus Lookalike Vance Waxman

Good people, the most wondrous of wonderful, funderful, magical things has happened to me! I was hit in the side by a dirty van while crossing the street and gravely injured. That's not the good part, but I'm getting to that—let's take the long way, shall we?

Of course, you may know that we at the commune traded our insurance benefits options for Red Bagel's home-built soap box derby cars, so the shattered bones in my pelvis, my broken arm, multiple lacerations, bruised face, and bent pinky toe couldn't seek professional care. It turns out the man who hit me with his filthy van had no insurance either, but he's making it up to me in another way—again, more later. I did the only thing I could do, seek out an Indian friend to nurse me back to health, ala the legend of the Lone Ranger. So I asked Batu, a guy who works in the commune building on a different floor, to help me, and he agreed, even though he said he's an East Indian not a Native American, which I could give two cents about. Batu loaned me his Canadian Prescriptions card for all the free Vicodin I could ever want and his home body cast kit. Needless to say, I'm doing much better now, still some internal bleeding, but that may have been there before. Let's get on to the van-smashing wonderful thing.

The man with the van is Dan Lopez, or "Space Dan" to his friends, a legion amongst which I now count myself. And they call him Space Dan for a very sound reason, not simply because he's frequently stoned out of his gourd, although that's why some of his lesser friends think they call him that. No, the fact is, my friends, Space Dan is building himself an actual rocketship. You didn't read me wrong—an actual rocketship. Space Dan has circumvented the bloated government beast and the bureaucratic red-tape nonsense and created his own private company for space exploration.

I profess I was a little skeptical myself when I heard, but when I drove to his home in Littleton, a neighboring community of freaks and weirdoes to Flatbush, New Jersey, I saw quite the impressive sign hanging over his garage. He dissuaded me from seeing his state-of-the-art rocketship within, not because he didn't trust me, but the main stockholders in Space Dan's Rocket Travel Ltd.—Mom and Dad Lopez—refused to let him show anyone due to the possibility of industrial espionage. I can understand that completely, ever since I got blitzed on Southern Comfort that one night last February and offered to sell Crotchet! Magazine all of the commune's trade secrets. Lucky for us they weren't interested in buying.

Oh, in my excitement, I haven't even told you the best part—I myself am going into space, and I'm going there for a price that's practically nothing! $350, a price which my wife describes as practically insane, but she's got a mouth on her that, that one. I have been given that special price because of my great injuries sustained when he hit me—and he wasn't drunk, he was just trying to grab some candy bars from the back of the van when I was struck, so he technically wasn't even at the wheel. Space Dan waived the greater fees of space gas, gantry-fixin', reupholstering the space vehicle, and the comeback fee. All that was left was the $350 local space license, which of course he couldn't do anything about. It's a price I'll gladly pay, as soon as my wife goes to sleep later this evening and leaves her purse unguarded.

Just think—as soon as I'm fully recovered from my crippling injuries, I, Rok Finger, will be blasted into the cosmos by a professional private sector space-faring company. It's a dream I've had since I was a small child, but hopefully everyone at Mission Control won't be talking chipmunks. Come to think of it, what was that dream about? Maybe I'll be hit by an analyst next week and can get that worked out for free, too.

º Last Column: I Can't Get Up
º more columns

At every turn someone is yelling at me, "Take responsibility for your life!" Or something clever like, "If you're looking for someone to blame, look in the mirror." That's very fine if you're a rock song writer or something, Mr. Smart Guy, but what about Nick At Nite? No, nobody ever blames Nick At Nite.

I, for one, put the blame squarely on Nick At Nite. It's quite obvious their weekly marathons of old classic TV shows are blatant attempts to get me to sit and stay tuned for the entire weekend.

When I was younger, I used to do things. I would go out on the weekends with boys, I would visit places, I would often leave the house in doing so. I had activities to do. One time I read a book. It was more of a magazine, I guess, but I read it. From front to back, even the ad on the last page. No kidding. I read the whole damned thing. Not anymore.

I was married for a time. My husband was one of those "active" people I met back when I left the house a lot. I married him, we got jobs, bought a house, and then got cable. And down the pooper it all went, let me tell you. The first marathon I remember was All in the Family, and I don't know about you, but when Archie Bunker talks, I listen. Just like that commercial says, remember that? Ha ha.

That was my first, but not my last. Some of them blur together, but I'm pretty sure it was a Mork & Mindy marathon when my husband was yelling and screaming something about potatoes and couches and whatever and then he disappeared. Some lawyer brought me something to sign sometime later and I think it means we're divorced, all I know is nobody's sat in his spot on the couch in quite a while. And I always thought he liked Mork & Mindy.

After a while, one of my friends—alright, the cable guy—set me up on a blind date with some guy named Murdock. No, wait, Murdock was the name of the guy on The A-Team, and that's what I was watching that weekend when I was supposed to go out with him. Anyway, every once in a while I've answered a personal ad or two but they always want to get together on the weekend. Or at night, which is when Nick At Nite starts, duh—it's called Nick At Nite, stupid!

And I sure don't deliver pizzas like I used to. On the days I actually show up to work I always end up making a delivery to some house with cable. And everybody there's watching Nick At Nite! Or maybe they aren't, but while they aren't looking they usually don't hear me turn on the TV with the volume low and watch for a little while. A lot of times Taxi will be on, that's pretty weird, I think. And after a while they ask what I'm doing there, didn't they pay me and all, and I have to go. I hurry home so I can watch the rest of Taxi on my own TV.

I ask you now, how is any of this my fault? I didn't start a cable channel with America's most beloved sitcoms and action dramas airing all night. I didn't choose to run those adored shows all weekend from hour to hour. I'm perfectly willing to accept responsibility for any mistake on my part, but surely I'm only a human being, I'm not a god. I have the same weaknesses as anybody—

Ooo. Can't talk. The Wonder Years is starting!

º Last Column: We Have Quite a Lot to Fear, Actually
º more columns