Albertans Sad to See Trudeau Go

By Frisk Nightingale▸ 

In mere hours, the Liberal Party of Canada will select its new leader and, with that, the new Prime Minister of Canada. This means that current Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who announced his resignation back in January, will be leaving the role of leader for good.

Alberta voters almost unanimously spewed vitriol at Trudeau throughout the majority of his time as Prime Minister. Surprisingly, though, as the end nears, many Albertans—Conservatives included—are sad to see him go.

"If I'm being honest," said Randy Scruggs, a rig-worker from Fort McMurray, "I don't exactly like my life. That was true during Trudeau's reign, but also before. It was kind of cathartic to kick Justin around on Facebook, but now I won't have that."

"Quite frankly," said Cammy Carlyle, a homemaker from Chestermere, "I feel stifled in my trad-wife role for my overbearing husband. Making fun of Justin Trudeau's masculinity was always a means of coping. It was the one thing that brought my husband and me together."

"Look," said Leonard Starkey, a pressurized safety valve repairman from Grande Prairie. "I've made some terrible decisions in my life, from intoxicant abuse to gambling debts to credit card over-usage. But Justin Trudeau always gave me a target towards which I could redirect my rage away from myself."

With Trudeau gone, the presumptive Liberal-leadership winner Mark Carney will take the reins as Prime Minister. Carney will likely call a spring election, in which Albertan-born Conservative candidate Pierre Poilievre would be a favorite to win, given his strong polling numbers.

 

So how do these Albertans feel about the possibility of not just one but two new Prime Ministers in 2025?

"I kind of envy Justin," Ms. Carlyle mused. "He gets to move on, but I'm going to stay right where I am and my life's going to be just as unfulfilling, whether it's Carney or Poilievre in power."

"Sure," Mr. Starkers added, "in a year I'll be blaming Poilievre for everything that's wrong with my life. But with Trudeau, it was just nice to be able to blame someone from Quebec."

"And since we're being honest," Mr. Scruggs finished, "I must confess that if I was allowed to make love to a man, it would be Justin Trudeau."

Image credit: Frank Schwichtenberg, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Vice President Vance: Turbocharged Hillbilly

By Frisk Nightingale ►

Around 6:05 p.m. EST on July 13, 2024, Donald Trump took the stage at a rally in Pennsylvania to address his loyal followers. At 6:11 p.m. EST, shots rang out, and the former president ducked for cover. Within seconds, the shooter was neutralized—that is, shot dead—by Secret Service personnel, and a blood-streaked Trump was whisked off the stage. This grisly and chaotic scene immediately raised the question of why?

J.D. Vance had the answer. Vance is, of course, a Republican senator who, before his political career, rose from a quaint upbringing in an Appalachian family and made his way through to Yale Law School. This provided the raw material for the narrative that he wove in his bestselling memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, which catapulted him to fame and political office. At the time of the shooting, Vance was the presumptive Vice Presidential running mate for Trump in the 2024 election. At 6:20 p.m. EST, less than ten minutes after the shots were fired, Vance tweeted (or rather Xed) the following: 

Today is not just some isolated incident. The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.

Drawing on the full horsepower of his Yale Law intellect, Vance arrived at some preternaturally decisive conclusions well before investigators could. Firstly, the shooter was a leftist. Secondly, Democrats have erroneously associated fascism with Trump. The implied corollary is that leftist Democrats, with their willingness to engage in violence and propound mistruths, are the real fascists. Thirdly, and most damningly, Democrats caused the shooting.

On July 14, 2024, the FBI reported that the shooter, one Thomas Matthew Crooks, was a registered Republican. Crooks had, however, also donated a small amount to progressive causes after Biden’s 2020 election win. Crooks’ politics, then, would appear to be ambivalent and inconclusive; if anything, the registered-Republican status would suggest he skewed rightward. Whatever the case, it seems difficult to say that anyone with that rare level of derangement that prompts them to attempt an assassination on a political figure could be representative of wide swaths of political opinions, either Republican or Democrat or whatever.

But Vance has made that leap and has decided that such deranged behavior is representative of, coincidentally, his diametric political opponents. His central premise deals in the kind of broad and polemical associations Vance has accused the Biden administration of promulgating. Moreover, Vance was able to tender this thesis in the face of a complete lack of evidence about the perpetrator of the attack against Trump. 

Thus, we must conclude that Vance’s intelligence is a chimera. True, he may possess the brain power and wherewithal to get into and graduate from Yale Law School, and he may have the charm and connections to publish a best-selling book. But outside of those domains, he is a moron. Vance is one among the staggeringly large number of brainy, well-educated people in America who choose to employ their cerebral powers not to come to equitable, evidence-based solutions, but rather to rationalize their own entrenched worldviews. And in Vance’s case, his personal worldview is corroded by conspiracy theories, religion, and polemical politics (all of these elements likely cross-pollinating into some vague eschatological possibility of religio-political deliverance in the near future). Evidently, Vance is still thinking in hillbilly terms, like a discouraging proportion of Americans—most notably, the Republicans. His intellect ultimately functions as little more than a turbocharger for his inveterate hillbilly sensibilities.

Ergo, J.D. Vance has established himself as a hillbilly of the highest and most demented order. And now, as of around 3 p.m. EST today, Vance has been named Trump’s vice presidential nominee. Given the fact that Trump’s ability to stand up from a bullet wound will likely cement his bid for the presidency, this Uber-hillbilly Vice President Vance will be just a heartbeat away from leading the free world.

Obi Wan Kenobi Outed as Slave Owner

By Frisk Nightingale► 

A series of holographic recordings saved to the memory system of a decommissioned astromech droid stored in the databanks of the Tatooine archives has revealed that Benjamin Kenobi, a.k.a. Obi Wan Kenobi, was a slave owner. The messages feature Kenobi personally addressing slaves of near-Human Kiffu background, two female and one male. 

Reaction throughout the Star Wars fandom has been mixed.

"It's just devastating," said Kaley Worthington of Albany, New York, "to know that someone you respected so much participated in a system that deprived people of their most basic right—their very freedom. It's almost as bad as The Last Jedi."

In this spirit, concerned fans have demanded the removal of Obi Wan statuettes and action figures from store shelves. Previous movements for a life size statue of Obi Wan at the summit of Scotland's tallest mountain, Ben Nevis, have been retracted and/or cancelled indefinitely.

Others have been outraged for alternative reasons.

"This is history," said Scott Harkowski, a fan from St. Louis, Missouri. "You can't just cover it up or knock it down or ban it from stores. Slavery was real. So was Obi Wan Kenobi. It's unfortunate the two combined, but we can't just erase them from the past, present, and future."

"It was a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away," said Chris Hanover, an Obi Wan cosplayer from Harlan, Kentucky. "A different time and a different place. We can't judge Ben Kenobi by our present standards. Love the Jedi for what he did, even if you can't love the man."

"Personally, I don't see what's so bad about what he did," said Jebediah Crenshaw of Tupelo, Mississippi. "The real injustice is that a man can't own another man anymore. A man's got a right to his property. Many great rebels fought for that right, and Jedis too. If we forget about Obi Wan, we forget about a greater rebellion and a greater cause."