hursday night’s presidential debate between John Kerry and George W. Bush had a strong ratings showing, and allowed the candidates to outline their future platforms, especially regarding foreign policy and Iraq. However, no candidate clearly fumbled the ball and shot himself in the foot with his big mouth, meaning the disappointing debate ended without a clear loser.

With a month left to go before the election, the debate provided one of the most visible opportunities for either of the two leading candidates to piss the election down his leg, whether through a verbal slip-up, a glaring faux pas, or farting directly into the microphone. Some election-watchers speculate the senior Bush performed just such a metaphorical gas outburst in 1992, when during a debate with future president Bill Clinton, he resignedly checked his watch to see if it was over. In Thursday’s debate, though he made some gas-appropriate faces, the second Bush, nor his opponent, did anything to completely obliterate their chances of election.

Most watchers generally felt the debate favored Kerry, who went on the offensive early and avoided appearing dead through much of it. The president, though being on the offensive, even managed to show a passing familiarity with the language long enough to fend off Kerry’s attacks and reiterated his platform that Iraq is safer today, unless you’re an Iraqi, since his administration got rid of Saddam Hussein. The word "beheading" somehow managed to stay out of the conversation.

While Kerry did not outline an escape plan for Iraq, he guaranteed he would bring in more European countries who hate Bush to help shoulder the responsibility for rebuilding the country and setting up its new puppet government. Not stated, but implied, was Kerry’s continuing the Democratic plan to not invade countries just for their resources. At least not overtly.

Recent polls exhibit Kerry’s apparent dominance in the debate. The numbers have again turned for the Democrat, showing he now holds a smidgen of a lead over the president among those polled, whoever the hell they are, showing 49% of them were more likely t vote for Kerry in a two-way race, versus 46% for Bush; in a three-way race with Ralph Nader, 47% favored Kerry, 45% favoring Bush, and whatever’s left over going for Nader or some weird-ass third-party candidate. In a three-way race with a well-dressed monkey, the president fared much worse, with 49% holding for Kerry, 40% preferring Bush, and 11% wanting to hear the monkey’s plans for improving the economy.

The same polls endorsed Kerry’s debate showing, as 61% feeling Kerry had won the debate, as opposed to a deluded 19% who believed the president had dominated. The remaining 20% thought C.S.I. really went to shit this week.

Still, the lack of a clear loser means, according to some, we’re still in the midst of one of the tightest presidential races in history, and time is running out for a candidate to win over the confidence of a large majority of the public.

"On one hand," said Professor Norm Chauncey of Newark University, some guy who watched the debate at the bus station with this reporter, "President Bush has failed to credibly justify his overextended military actions in the Middle East, as well as an economy that doesn’t seem to be improving. And on the other side of the table, you have John Kerry—a guy somehow failing to convince the entire nation he would not be a worse president than George W. Bush. We’re looking at a couple of real losers here."

The professor outlined his plan for America, if he were to become president, as we awaited the arrival of the 11:05 to Flatbush.

he charmingly sleepy, stagnant, racist, hellishly unlivable, economically depressed backwater town of Pensacola, Florida was rocked by controversy this week when one of its native sons was nearly euthanized by his own shepherd-mix puppy, a development that locals are calling “tragically hilarious� and “fuckin’ weird.�

The man, local sad sack Jerry Allen Bradford, 37, was teaching his litter of puppies about gun safety when the most devious of the brood, an impish pup known as “Chuckles,� wrestled control of the revolver and shot Bradford in the wrist. Neighbors took Bradford to a nearby hospital after calling everyone they knew to share the funny story.

While those who know Bradford were not surprised, and many related a common story about Bradford being pushed off a cliff by chipmunks at the age of seven, the event has renewed a heated debate about euthanasia and humane relations between Americans and our 139 million pets nationwide.

“It’s the simple sad fact of the matter, there are just way more prospective puppy owners out there than there are puppies, and it’s a hard goddamned fact of life that sometimes the owners have to be put down,� explained Humane Society spokesperson Walter Egan, who warns the commune that he’s currently in therapy for inappropriate swearing. “That’s really hard to explain to kids, especially the children of puppy owners whom we’ve had to destroy. It’s a real kick in the tits.�

Though controversial, pet-owner euthanasia has been a part of American life since frontier times, when horse owners often had to be shot after a broken leg rendered them incapable of feeding or caring for their horses appropriately. Many cite this fact as Henry Ford’s prime motivation for inventing the automobile, as a young Ford was driven by memories of his own father being put to sleep after spraining his ankle during a backyard game of touch football.

In 2002, a Minnesota man named Michael Murray made national news after being shotgunned to death by his English Setter while on a hunting trip. While many criticized the dog’s actions and called for legal recourse, a grand jury found the dog’s actions to be humane due to Murray’s declining health and lackluster outlook on life in the years before he was put down. Though the dog was fined for failing to provide a valid gun license, no further legal action was pursued.

“Sometimes you’ve got to be fuckin’ cruel to be kind,� explained Egan, wincing as he realized there were children present. “Sure, it would be great if we could all live happy lives until we grew old and went to run around on a farm somewhere, and that’s what we tell kids, but the reality is that if you’ve got three kids and only two puppies, somebody’s got to go. Life’s a real cunt-licker that way.�

Bradford is currently recovering in a Pensacola-area hospital, after which he will likely be placed with a more suitable pet by the Humane Society. Speaking from his hospital bed, Bradford expressed an interest in finding a pet that can’t operate firearms, possibly a goldfish or a picture of a canary. Meanwhile, Bradford’s six shepherd-mix puppies have already been placed with various local families, saving the lives of five children and an elderly woman who had been scheduled for disposal.

Throughout all of history, human beings have gone to excessive lengths in an effort to not be so damned ugly. Few have succeeded, but we humans have kept bravely banging our ugly heads against that wall in vain hopes of fooling others into letting us be near them for purposes of a brief, sweaty sexual encounter. Has it all been worth it? The human race has survived, sure, but at what cost to our personal dignity?

Early prehistoric attempts at plastic surgery involved smashing in an ugly person's face with a rock, in the hopes that they would either stop being so ugly, or else go die somewhere. Problem solved either way. Modern plastic surgery involves the same basic principals, only due to inflation, the face-bashing is no longer provided free of charge to the afflicted.

Uglies unwilling to go to such radical extremes for the sake of modest downgrades in their retch factor have faced any number of bizarre alternatives throughout history, depending on what part of the world they'd been uglying up.

In Borneo, unattractive natives would stretch their earlobes down to shoulder level in an attempt to draw attention away from their unfortunate natural physiologies, preferring a lifetime of hearing "Holy shit! Look at them earlobes!" to cries of "I'm gonna sick up my monkey meat!" As an added benefit, the elongated earlobes could be tied behind the head for carry extra food, or let loose to give the impression that the wearer was running really, really fast.

Anyone who has ever scanned though a National Geographic magazine in search of library-sanctioned pornography is likely familiar with the Padaung of Burma, a small tribe that spices up the rather lackluster appearance of their women though the application of brass neck-rings, which elongate the neck dramatically and give the impression that the women are actually very expensive giraffes. Though the Padaung insist that the neck rings are used to prevent tiger bites, a quick blow to the throat of a Padaung woman proves that the brass rings provide little in the way of protective function. Politically-correct anthropologists have suggested that the rings were originally instituted to make the women less likely to be taken by slave traders, but any honest appraisal of the Padaung has to conclude that these uglies would have been flattered by the attention.

In Vietnam, the practice of teeth-blackening has fascinated anthropologists for years, or at least those anthropologists too dim to recognize this as the Vietnamese equivalent of the pre-emptive baldness technique of head-shaving popular among Western males. If your teeth are ugly and fucked up, you might as well make it look like you did that on purpose, right? Accordingly, the practice of chewing Betel nuts and brushing with off-brand convenience store toothpaste has provided the Vietnamese with beautiful black smiles for generations.

The same strategy has applied to cultures around the world that value fatness as a beauty ideal, perhaps wisely deciding that keeping thin was just a whole lot of work. Experts have argued that obesity was valued in 17th century Europe and China because it proved the person in question could afford plenty of food, but these are just the kind of experts with too much educational prestige on the line to call a lard-ass a lard-ass. Similar is the western reaction to the Tibetan tradition of considering excessive flatulence to be beautiful, which was supposed to prove that the flatulator could afford rich, gassy foods. Not true. Unfortunately for the revisionist historians, the Tibetans are just a naturally farty people.

The ancient Mayans and Egyptians both practiced the strange art form of binding infants' skulls to produce elongated, pointy-headed babies. Though many explanations for this odd practice have been offered, most available evidence suggests that the Maya and Egyptians just thought it was funny. And after all, what's a helpless little infant going to do to you? If the pointy-headed freak ever makes it to adulthood, providing the entire village with years of entertainment along the way, they're still not going to remember what you did to them when they were just a baby. It's a little surprising this practice ever died out in the first place.

Likewise with the tradition of foot-binding in China, where women's feet were kept unnaturally small by restricting their growth throughout childhood. While women were convinced the tiny feet would land them the most desirable husband, men just enjoyed getting drunk and watching their wives totter around and fall down like stilt-walkers on their useless, tiny little toy feet.

Modern attempts at marginal beauty have proved no less desperate, only more expensive. The plastic surgery industry has made millions off the idea that moving fat around to different parts of the body will somehow confuse the viewer into finding someone beautiful, like a mesmerizing shell game.

But the true benefactor of our collective ugliness has been the cosmetics industry. The idea that blondes have more fun, or at the very least get laid more in the back of convertibles, has fueled the sale of millions of bottles of hair coloring in the West, enriching the cosmetics corporations and fooling countless men into thinking their dates were going to end better than they actually would. Thanks to the blush and lipstick used to simulate sexual arousal in females wearing them, the cosmetics industry has made a fortune landing women dates and confusing Western males into a state of perpetual blueballs from which they may never emerge.

But hey, have you seen the alternative? Yeech.

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