Welcome to Stupid, Evil, Horny where each week we take one of each and clap our cheeks in appreciation. This week we have the book length list from the Iowa Caucus debacle, Rush Limbaugh being given the goody good boy medal for getting cancer, and a bad boss behavior giving Strippers an excellent reason to organize.
Stupid: Iowa Caucus
Awarded by: Krill
This week’s stupid really goes without saying. Anyone paying even the slightest bit of attention is already well aware of the shitshow that was the Iowa Democratic Party Caucus this year. A nearly perfect storm of brain dead idiocy.
The display of sheer incompetence has already been explored and explained in great detail by the press, but incredible volume is what really sets Iowa apart. So, I’m just going to list every stupid item I can think of rather than go into detail.
We’ve got:
–Mayor Pete spiking the traditionally important Iowa Register poll over his name being mispronounced
–Archaic electoral system from the 19th century
-Byzantine rules even the Iowa Democratic Party doesn’t understand and can’t agree on
-Reporting delays caused by the failure of an app
-Relying on an app to report results to begin with
-The app being developed by grifting loser consultant alumni from the Clinton campaign
-The grifting loser consultants naming their company Shadow
–Shadow being a for-profit company nested inside of a non-profit company
-Both Shadow and it’s parent company Acronym trying to disavow their obvious relationship
–Shadow/Acronym executive being married to a Mayor Pete staffer
-The IDP failing to fully test the app or train election officials on it’s use
-The IDP backup hotline being so poorly thoughtout it could supposedly be derailed by 4chan trolls
-The IDP reporting results after the initial debacle in bits and pieces
-Mayor Pete waiting till 97% of results were finally reported, and complaining to Tom Perez and the DNC in hopes of a recanvass
And all that’s probably leaving out another dozen or so absolutely absurd instances of pudding brained shenanigans. This is one of the most farcical moments in living political memory, and is already a strong front runner for stupid of the year.
Evil: Rush Limbaugh Get A Medal
Awarded by: Carl
If there’s an urtext for the red-faced hog American landscape we’re faced with, it’s the Rush Limbaugh Show. Many of you know of Rush Limbaugh as a concept, but you’re probably not very familiar with him as a radio commentator, especially if you were a kid during the Bush presidency. He is the George W Bush defender. If Trump is the rapist TV clown pretending to be a neocon evangelical psychopath to get attention and money, Limbaugh is the real thing. He’s the real deal: a true believer in the utter depravity of capitalist religious right and brutal American empire. An utter trash human with no redeeming qualities. But unlike Trump, Limbaugh is a disciplined ideologue who tapped into the grotesque vein of lawn dad totalitarianism long before Trump even gave a shit.
Bonus: Limbaugh was also a skeptic that secondhand smoke gives you cancer, a belief I am confident his enormous ego will prevent him from backtracking on even after his recent cancer diagnosis. He’s not long for this world most likely, but thanks to him, there’s a whole generation of YouTube fascists ready to take up his mantle. On his way out, with his last hacking breath, he’ll say, “You’re welcome.”
The real evil of Limbaugh is that he’s not been driven into the desert for his three decades of proto-white nationalist trash and sexual assault apologia. He found a willing audience in resentful whites and tweaked their racist fears to a fever pitch. And now in his decline, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom at the State of the Union, which might as well be made of chocolate considering who gets these things now. It’s very fitting: this is Limbaugh’s large son giving him the Proud Dad Medal.
Horny: Stripper Bowl 2
Awarded by: Krill
You’ve heard of the Puppy Bowl, and the Wing Bowl, and the Beer Bowl, and probably the dozens of other Big Game related Bowl themed entertainment events. Millions tuning in to the yearly football spectacle is the perfect opportunity for enterprising people to make a buck by throwing a novelty event tie-in by tacking bowl to the end.
Probably the most ingenious of these is the Stripper Bowl. Started just last year by Quality Control Music, the label behind Cardi B and Migos among others, it seems this extraordinarily hornt addendum to the NFL championship game went less than swimmingly this year.
Reports of fights breaking out, patrons stealing from the dancer’s heaps of singles, and Cardi B complaining people “didn’t want to throw money because y’all weren’t entertaining”
Somehow the horniest event of Big Game Sunday wasn’t horny enough. Which is what you’d think until you realize that Cardi B is management yelling about her workers not working hard enough, which I’m sure was more about her own ego and bottom line than it was concern for fairness.
At the end of the day, the mess that was the Stripper Bowl was a labor issue. Just ask the dancers, who only took home around $1000 of the one million dollars thrown during the event, but had to pay $350 to even be allowed to work. For each dancer to only take home $1k, assuming the money was evenly distributed, there’d have to be 1000 dancers. There were not. So unless security was so lax that patrons stole tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in ones, something doesn’t add up.
In fact, it sounds a lot like wage theft. What else would you expect from the boss?
That does it for this week’s SEH, but rest assured with election season just kicking off, and an endless supply of right wing grifters in poor health and devious bosses stealing from working people there’ll be plenty more where this came from. Check back in next week for a fresh batch of bullshit.
Jean Krill is is the co-editor and co-founder of Zero Balance. His writing navigates the many disparate visions of a radically better future.