s allegations and evidence continue to mount that Iraqi prisoners were subject to abuse and humiliation in U.S. military custody, the administration promised a change would come to the way prisoners were held, and that every dollar at their disposal would be used to fix or hush up the problem.

"This is a disgrace to America and all it stands for," said a current U.S. president, speaking on the condition of anonymity. "This is not the way we do things in this country—torturing prisoners, committing sexual acts with those in captivity, and getting caught in the act. It is against all we believe in. It makes a mockery of America and takes away our moral high ground. What's worse, they took pictures of it, hard evidence. What are we teaching our soldiers today?"

The president assured the media money would be thrown at the problem until it went away or was solved, and that the budget would not rest until enough green stemmed the tide of outrage.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, under fire and pressured to resign in the wake of the scandal, laid out a more specific plan of monetary problem-solving.

"Here's a fifty-dollar bill," said Rumsfeld, holding the currency up for media scrutiny. "As reparations, the U.S. government plans to give each and every victim of prison abuse one of these. That's a lot of money for an alleged terrorist or Baghdad bagman. It's in dollars, too, not drachmas or anything. And if you can prove you were sodomized, actually sodomized, not pretend, we'll make it a hundred."

Rumsfeld also said monetary reparations would be made to any prisoners who didn't survive incarceration, if their deaths could be proven with pictures. Another method of solving the problem proposed by Rumsfeld is increasing the number of military troops sent to Iraq—with more troops to supervise, it makes perfect sense less abuse would occur within the prisons.
Some critics charge the U.S. is trying to buy its way out of a bad press situation, which is something the critics say is completely unlike the United States. Kim Meducci of the Washington, D.C.-area chapter of Amnesty International, called the offer of money an insult to human rights.

"This is the kind of thing other countries do to their prisoners, not America," said Meducci. "Surely if a prisoner had ever been abused in the entire history of the United States we would have heard about it. It's a shame a few bad apples, a few rogue Americans who snuck around abusing prisoners, got caught. Which is to say, shouldn't have been doing such things in the first place. It's clearly not the way a military force occupying a hostile country behaves. And the administration should be ashamed of itself, more so, for trying to buy its way out of a scandal."

the commune only managed to end the quote by agreeing to take several pamphlets and provide a tax-deductible donation to the organization.

Some sources inside the Pentagon defended U.S. interrogation tactics, which critics have said created an atmosphere of secrecy and implied consent which tolerated and even encouraged the abuse documented in thousands of photos, video clips, and even some popular barracks songs. An anonymous Pentagon source, Col. Gerald Fetchen, spoke to the commune.

"American forces, especially the special ones, need a free hand to move as they want in protecting American concerns. If we start having to charge prisoners, to show evidence of terrorist involvement, if we have to start accounting for who we put behind bars and why they're there, we'll never get justice done."

Bush’s MySpace Page Traffic Way Down

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Entwistle Pleads Not Guilty of Murder, Last Several Who Albums

Condi Rice Hates the Way She Smiles in Pictures

No decade since the 1950's has so boldly established itself as a fad juggernaut as did the 1980's. In comparison, the 1990's were a sad decade for fads indeed, making one wonder where the will for conspicuous time wasting had gone. Probably the best explanation can be found in looking at each decade's drug of choice, and the resultant effect this had on American culture.

In the 1960's, Americans were dropping acid and grooving to the beautiful swirling colors of the traffic accident they'd just caused. The fads of the 60's were accordingly colorful and bizarre. The 70's were all about stinking up your jeans jacket with reefer smoke in the back of some sociopath's panel van, leading to fads as ugly and alienating as the decade itself. In the 80's, the hip and squares alike were pulling lines of expensive coke and joking about the five or six dead South Americans who had made their high possible. Ambitious and overeager, if not megalomaniacal, were the keywords in 80's faddom as well. America spent the 90's slouched over between the sofa and the bathroom door with a heroin needle dangling from its arm, and as a result not a whole lot of fadding, nor much else, got done in that decade.

The 80's, however, were another story entirely. The story of neon-colored spandex encrusted with hair gel, and the story of a nation kissing its own ass. In keeping with the 80's own hyper-incongruent vibe, the most fun fad from the decade didn't even originate in the 80's. Exploiting the poor had been around for eons, but not since pirate times had it been as cool to openly flaunt this practice or write songs about it. If the pendulum had swung any further in the opposite direction from the 60's, it might have knocked America's dick right out of the anus of the disenfranchised.

This isn't to say that all of the 80's fads were mean-spirited. Sure, Cabbage Patch Kids were pretty disgusting, but there was a certain poetic justice in watching deranged materialist parents fighting each other tooth and nail for the right to give their kids some shitty cloth doll.

On the contrary, many of the 80's best fads were quite fun. Well, not the Smurfs, those little communist bastards were pretty creepy. Nobody ever really explained if they were supposed to be aliens or some kind of apocalyptic cult or what. Personally, I've always leaned in the "cult" direction, since questions of "What's a Smurf?" and "Why do they all wear the same color pants?" were always answered with the cultish doublespeak "They're Smurfs" from the bigwigs at Hanna Barbera.

But surely, not every aspect of the 80's was overrun by creepy materialistic crap. Who could forget the Rubik's Cube? Inventor and Belgian weirdo Erno Rubik created his famous cube in 1974 as a way to drive his dog insane. Though the toy failed in its intended use (the dog just tried to eat the cube), it eventually found millions of fans among Americans who thought solving some kind of chintzy plastic puzzle proved they were smart. The truly smart soon learned that you could just "solve" the puzzle by peeling all the colored stickers off the squares and putting them back on in the right order. Less-inventive children soon developed a pastime known as "Rubik's Baseball," a one-time game where the cube was hit with a bat and exploded into a million plastic pieces that went everywhere.

So maybe the Rubik's Cube was a piece of shit, too. But no one could muster such harsh words for the most expressive of 80's fads, breakdancing. Originating as a way for especially cowardly street gangs to mediate their differences through dance battles rather than actual fighting, breakdancing first came to national attention in 1975 when two Harlem street gangs, the Soft Touches and the Big Pussies, danced the shit out of each other in a bloodless gangland melee that left dozens thoroughly exhausted. By the early 80's, breakin' had become a national obsession, with white kids everywhere flopping around on the floor like they had any idea what they were doing. Despite an utter lack of coordination or soul whatsoever, Caucasian interest in breakdancing kept the fad alive for several years, eventually cementing it as the most fun source of self-inflicted spinal injuries since the invention of the skateboard.

Concerned parents who didn't want kids hurting themselves breakdancing did their children no favors by sending them to school to play tetherball instead, perhaps one of the cruelest 80's fads since it was condoned by the school board. Like dodge ball without the principle of safety in numbers, tetherball involved chaining a rock-hard leather "ball" to a pole and mandating that children use it to pummel each other into submission. Tetherball was eventually banned in 1989 after President Bush attempted the game for a photo op at a Washington elementary school, which ended in the president being escorted away by the Secret Service after a shameful episode of crying and broken glasses.

Perhaps the true salvation of 80's fads was the rise of video games, which rarely resulted in injury or public humiliation. Though as a metaphor for the 80's themselves, early videogames could hardly be more apt: gobbling up quarters while presenting basically the same rip-off level over and over again, only more hopelessly difficult each time. Perhaps video games did more to prepare children for the real world than parents realized at the time, filling kids with nervous dread while cleaning out their allowances. Personally I wouldn't know, since I never had any money and just had to stand there pretending I was controlling the little guy in the demo.

On second thought, maybe the 80's did suck a big nut.

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I've got "hot property" written all over me at the moment, and I know what you're thinking, but I'm not talking about a drunken trip to the tattoo parlor this time. I mean, I've still got "hot property" from that, but this time I'm talking Hollywood talk, meaning that people suddenly remember my phone numbers. And it's all because of Ho's!

My new WB sitcom is getting hot buzz around it, thanks in part to all those phone calls where I pretended to be the TV Guide Couch Critic, and when your show's hot, you're hot, it's Hollywood science. Some people are calling this my big comeback, and not just me. I distinctly heard my agent Dusty say it, too, before he passed out and the 9-1-1 guys had to resuscitate him.

The real clue I was hot was when they called me to do a roast for my fellow actor and good friend Pockets O'Shannon. What a kick-ass child star. And Pockets was fortunate enough to have one of those weird health problems that kept him looking like a kid well after most of us grew facial hair or tits. The V.F.W. Hall was holding a roast for good ol' Pockets, turns out he's a Vietnam Vet, and guess who they picked for their keynote speaker? Guess again, asshole. Beloved child star Clarissa Coleman.

If you don't know, a roast is where you get up and just crack on people until they're pissed off enough to fight you in the parking lot. I've tried hosting a lot of them, but nobody really shows up unless the person's done something to make 'em famous. And Pockets barely qualifies, having starred as the precocious, wise-cracking kid in about two dozen movies between 1969 and 1996. I did two of them with him, Li'l Poachers and The U.F.O. Boy.

I spent weeks thinking up real digs that would totally devastate Pockets, make him turn bright red, even piss himself with fury. All in good fun, of course, except for a few things about his grandmother's diabetes that really cross the line. But Pockets is a good sport, just don't ever say we lost the 'Nam, that grinds his nads.

Now you've got the backstory, so I show up for the gig (I never do rehearsals, I told 'em) and find out, no joking, they only wanted me to introduce all his 'Nam buddies, they were supposed to be the only ones actually roasting him. Sure, I told them I would just stick to the scripted introduction, like I've told a ton of know-it-all directors, then I got up there and threw out my script—no way I was going to waste gold material because these dopes lacked vision.

So you can bet I stung him. I started off simple, just how he smells really bad and hasn't worked in years, since losing all his hair in that chemotherapy, but then I got to the really hard stuff. Making fun of his Members' Only jacket ("Does your calendar say 1986 at home?" I really said that) and how his two sons are clearly fathered by some black guy. Then, I got a little more cerebral and all—and this was hard, because by this time these two old guys were trying to walk me off the stage, but I overpowered them—and I did this whole skit about him buying this really awful pot off some Mexican guy (I brought a mustache from home) for us to smoke, and then talked about that time he tried to grab my just-starting-to-form breasts while we were doing that Poachers movie. The best part was I closed on stuff I just made up on the spot, when his wife was calling out his name as he left, covering his face—his name was Lindsey O'Shannon the whole time, not Pockets. For real. Lindsey's a total girl's name.

I know they taped it, but they may have stopped the tape after they told me to get off the stage for the fifth time. The show was just too hot for the V.F.W., I'm pretty sure. But if I can get a copy of that tape and get it to the right people in Vegas, I know I could get side gigs lined up for years to come. Just to cover me when Ho's! gets canceled. Always good to have a Plan B.

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