Clear Channel to Replace Stern with Pro-Bush Shock Jock

espite claims that they suspended shock jock Howard Stern's syndicated morning show for vulgarity, and not for his recent anti-Bush statements, radio behemoth Clear Channel Communications replaced the controversial on-air personality this week with Ramblin' Dick Walker, a pro-Bush shock jock popular among the wealthy and humorless.

Walker, known nationwide for his offensively conservative views and on-air skits that include humorous vocal impressions of the poor, calls the allegations against Clear Channel "abnanmious."

"Look, if Clear Channel wanted to get some sycophantic Bush-booster in here, I'm the last person they would have called," claimed Walker. "Check the record, I've called Bush to task on everything from his over-generosity to his weak game of horseshoes. I take Georgie to the mat at horseshoes. To the mat!"

Others disagree, calling Walker "a soulless shill for big business" and "human dogshit." Walker is no stranger to controversy, coming under fire from the FCC in 1998 for his on-air campaign to bait listeners into bombing welfare offices, and again in 2000 when the United Nations heard a complaint from the island of Cuba that they considered being within radio range of Walker's show to be an act of war.

"Hey man, free speech," Walker explained, when asked to defend his record of FCC fines and history of inspiring Amnesty International protests. "If Howard Stern can talk about masturbation on-air, it's hypocrisy that I catch so much flack for talking about sterilizing the indigent."

Though Clear Channel's official reasoning behind dropping Stern's show has been that the program was "vulgar, offensive and insulting," the company was using those exact same terms to promote the show only weeks ago. And many find the timing to be curious, as Stern had begun criticizing the president only days before the announcement, while the rest of his show's content remained unchanged. Some point to the "Janet Jackson Superbowl Half-Tit Show" debacle as either the justifiable impetus or lame-assed excuse for Clear Channel's house cleaning, which also included canceling several other programs that had criticized Bush and America's war on Iraq.

Meanwhile, in the last week Stern has embarked on his own campaign to raise public awareness of his masturbation habits and the close ties between the Bush Administration and Clear Channel's CEO Lowry Mays and vice chairman Tom Hicks, not to mention FCC chairman Michael Powell. Political pundits fear that if Stern's crusade should ever evolve beyond the "What a bunch of assholes!" phase, with popular Republican ballast Rush Limbaugh working at only half-power while learning to propagandize sober, it could tip the upcoming election in favor of Kerry in November.

Ramblin' Dick Walker, however, finds this scenario unlikely. "No way the poor people vote in this election. You ever try to take a bus somewhere? Forget about it. You might as well stay home and smoke crack. Bush in a landslide."

merica awoke this week to find itself trapped in a shitty Groundhog Day nightmare, thanks to a recent AP poll showing that if the election were held today, President Bush and Democratic candidate John Kerry would tie, with human Muppet Ralph Nader playing the spoiler once again by garnering 6 percent of the vote. These results were eerily and shittily similar to the 2000 Presidential election, when Bush won despite losing the popular vote, thanks in part to Nader siphoning off liberal voters and Bush’s brother Jeb taking a big, wet crap on the Constitution to ensure his brother would carry the crucial state of Florida.

Within moments of the Associated Press poll results being made public, Americans everywhere were comparing their feelings of nauseating year-2000 déjà vu to the 1993 Harold Ramis film Groundhog Day, in which Bill Murray plays a news weatherman doomed to repeat the same day over and over again until he gets it right. How this phenomenon might be possible for an entire nation on a four-year scale is not yet understood, though faerie magic has yet to be completely disproved. Regardless of the cause, non-Republicans everywhere agree that America needs to make some kind of major soul-searching change to prevent waking up in 2005 to hear “I Got You Babe� playing on clock radios across the country.

“Fuck! FUCK! FUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK!!� fumed an epileptically frustrated Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe upon hearing the results of the poll, a replay of the 2000 election searing his brain stem like a cattle brand. Similar sentiments echoed across the nation this week as Democrats and the non-rich envisioned a bizarre replay of the last presidential election, with Gore being swapped out for Democratic nominee John Kerry like some kind of bad Hollywood script for a time-traveling comedy.

“I don’t know if Kerry will be able to pull off what Gore did,� mused confident-sounding political pundit Prance Nancley. “Al Gore could have won that election in his sleep, after all he was running against a Mr. Potato Head doll. But Gore still somehow managed to drop the ball and kick it all the way down the street, allowing so-called adult George W. to sneak into the White House while the door was ajar and Gore was off looking for his ball. I don’t think Kerry has that kind of comedy in him. He is rather dull.�

Still, the possible scenario of an election repeat has haunted more than a few Democrat dreams this week, with Kerry taking the place of Gore as the respectable, though thoroughly boring democratic hopeful who somehow loses to Bush on a technicality, after Florida’s governor declares that blacks don’t have the right to vote in his state any more.

The lone encouraging note in all this is that according to the same AP poll, politics aren’t the only area in which America is trapped in a loop of déjà vu, as the AP cites “current� top-grossing films The Grinch, Cast Away and Mission Impossible 2, and has ‘N Sync, Santana and Eminem topping the album charts, which clearly isn’t true.

Is it?

Guilt is a pretty super thing.

Fortune has taken an upturn since the last column. Actually, it took a swift downturn, plummeted into a crash, then whatever remained took an upturn. Which is usually how things go in my life. But it all started with my dad getting beat into a coma in that rumble last month.

Dad's in the hospital, head injury and all, and the only way he can communicate is to do Dave Letterman's Uma-Oprah bit from the Oscars years back. Put there by Steve, my sister's life partner, during the lesbian-old fogey turf war they had. But check it out, even though Steve clearly put a beating on dad, she's still suing him for punitive damages with the shit he called her. And on top of that, she filed a lawsuit against me for calling her Steve all the time instead of "Stephan," which she alleges is her name. I thought it was a compromise, since I stopped calling her "Marcy" when she asked me. But no. Some lesbians are pretty touchy about name issues.

See? I said some lesbians. My sister is teaching me not to make generalizations about people. Lawyers are always trigger-happy with lawsuits on about generalizations like that.

But none of this sounds good, of course, and it wasn't. Isn't, since the lawsuits are still pending—I guess they have to get in line behind my other libel suit. For about two weeks, though, I'm on whatever cloud is below cloud 9 and gets their plumbing overflow. Dad is in the hospital, but his gang is mending their wounds in my living room, mom is still sharing the same bed, and I'm having trouble making the rent since lawsuit # 1 Jayme Kristofson stole my Metallichick job. Just when things look their bleakest, I manage to pull it out of the fire again.

How I managed to pull it out of the fire was, my sister Cassandra felt so guilty about her old lady suing me and the mom and pop, so she took me out to lunch (her treat, natch). She said she was sorry it was turning out like this, and she was trying to talk Butch out of the lawsuit and whatever, but in the meantime, she was going to help me by cutting me a check to pay the legal bills. And sis hit me with this big-time check, like four zeroes, and said she'd slip me another one if I needed it, until the lawsuit thing passes. Siblings can be beautiful things, dudes.

She had plenty of suggestions on how to spend the money, of course, like telling me the name of this big fancy-pants lawyer in downtown Manhattan, apparently he's the last word in civil litigation. But I don't need to be told how to spend money, just how to come up with it. So I dipped into the lawyer fundage and rented me a place out in L.A. right near the action, so close to Warner Brothers you can hear them making the director's DVD commentaries. It's quality real estate. Pricey, yeah, but I'm not footing the bill.

Needless to say, it doesn't help my New Jersey apartment rent problem none, and mom and the gang might be kicked out on their asses, but I've prepared for that as well—I didn't give them the address of my new apartment. No midnight visits to Clarissa when the eviction notice comes.

I even had enough money left over to get a lawyer, too. He's not top-of-the-line like the Winston Price guy my sister told me to get, he doesn't own a suit or anything, but he's got to be good. His name is Jerry Nascar and he has an office as the same building as the commune, so you know he's legit. He's got a law degree from somewhere on the wall right next to the picture of this huge fish he caught, so the guy's no joke. And now, best of all, I only have to make one trip when picking up my commune paycheck and sorting out my legal issues. Life is sweet.

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