Sadly, No!

I knew it was her standing by the baggage pickup before she even turned around. The woman had baggage all right, and some of it was me.

“Hi Amber,” I smiled. “How are you this fine morning?”

“You…” she explained.

Miss Pawlik looked as stauesque as ever — if the statue was the one the dame dumped down the airshaft in The Fountainhead. She looked like she’d been crying, and her blouse was stained with Miracle Whip. She was carrying a copy of that new Clinton book with the rape stuff in it, and it looked like it had already seen some use, if you know what I’m saying.

“Relax, baby,” I said. “I know things are tough. We shared some wild times all right, but it’s all different now. I’m just a guy passing through on business.”

Amber looked meaner than a sack of weasels. “My boyfriend will be here any second,” she said. “And if I say the word, you’ll be leaving this town like Michael Jackson in a 9-11 Islam. Do I make myself perfectly clear?”

“You’re always talking like that. No, I never can make sense of it actually, Amber.”

A giant goon of a gorilla was muscling his way toward the baggage carousel. It seemed like time to stop hanging around like a bunch of bananas.

“Maybe we’ll have lunch this week,” I said, adjusting my bag. My luggage, that is. “We’ll see how you feel once you’ve had some time to think it over,” I said, walking away.

“I doubt I’ll be doing much thinking,” she called after me. I gave her a “Sadly, No” and thought about old times as I walked through the exit and into the parking lot. I had to admit I missed her.

There are lots of billboards for get-rich-quick schemes and Matt Furey products around Bush Multinational Airport. That’s just one of the things you notice. In fact, it was the last thing I noticed before my head exploded in a nimbus of pain-stars and the world went pitch black.

When I awoke, the next thing I noticed was that I was crammed into a car trunk, and that the car was pulling slowly to a stop on a gravel road. And the thing after that was the unmistakable smell of rubber cement.

***

I debarked the plane at Bush Airport in Wingnutopolis, in the great state of Wingnuttia.

At 6AM on a hot, off-season morning, the terminal had only a few travelers on the move: middle-aged men cracker-walking in short-sleeved polyester dress shirts; younger men galumphing around in backwards baseball caps and Toby Keith concert T’s, or in Jr. Attorney suits; frumpy women… And of course the occasional leather-clad hot-cha girlie with a crazy look in her eye.

The terminal was well-swept but seedy — the windows were blurry with dirt, and it smelled like old resentment and boiled carpet. The book shop was pure Regnery, the restaurants deregulated and poorly-run. Wingnutopolis, my old family demesne. I was back.

But this time, I was on a secret mission.

***

According to SZ, we have a winner in our contest to guess who would be the first Townhall columnist to blame Michael Jackson’s acquittal on the decline of traditional values (or Clinton’s penis).

And the winner is… TG, who correctly guessed Cal Thomas! Congratulations, TG, you’ve won a DVD of the first episode of Bugtime Adventures, the exciting new cartoon that “blends the ‘giant’ world of humans with the tiny world of insects to deliver a captivating and entertaining message of biblical truth.”

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Last week, Gavin (or as I call him, “G-Spot”) and I were talking about how darn funny our readers are.

It’s true- you guys are the most hilarious group of commenters of any blog out there (excepting World O’ Crap, which is basically Sadly, No!’s regulars plus Antichrist S. Coulter).

So in tribute to our readers, I’m posting the best material you guys have sent us over the last week. Enjoy!
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Sadly, No! has a long, proud history of trashing columnists at The Rant (see: here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here).

Because of this fine tradition, Alan Teitleman should feel honored that we have selected his very first Rant column for derision. Alan’s column is filled with all the elements of classic Rantery: crappy writing, John Birch-style paranoia, and long, pointless anecdotes. Seriously, this is the most promising debut from a Rant columnist we’ve seen since Justin Darr.

So without further ado… ladies and gentlemen, making his first-ever appearance at Sadly, No!, Mr. Alan Teitleman!
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From David Limbaugh’s latest big shoe dance at Town Hall:

Even liberal columnist Michael Kinsley doesn’t seem to buy that the memo is a smoking gun.

(Everything Limbaugh writes somehow recalls Joe E. Ross, the actor in ‘Car 54, Where Are You’ whose trademark “Ooh! Ooh!” was imitated by cartoon animals and sitcom characters well into the 1970s.)

And in other news, even a conservative Orange County audience thought that David Limbaugh was nothing but a cheap knock-off of his brother.

Breaking: Even black columnist Thomas Sowell says that blocking the President’s judicial nominees is ‘bigotry.’

Who will be the first Townhall columnist to blame the Michael Jackson acquittal on either the decline of traditional values or Bill Clinton’s penis?

I call Ben Shapiro.

UPDATE: My dad writes, “Now he can spend his life searching for ‘the real molester.'”

My friend Kristin points us to this charming article:

Marcia Thompson Eldreth sees in the United States a Christian nation, inspired by Scripture and dedicated to propositions conveyed in biblical prophesy. She asks: Why not a U.S. national Christian flag?

Uh, probably because of the First Amendment. You know, the one that reads, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.”

“Our nation was based on Judeo-Christian principles,” Eldreth said. “Blessed is the country whose God is Lord.”

Hey, I’ve got an idea! Let’s compare Marcia’s Christian flag to the flag of another religious country, like, oh, I don’t know, Iran’s.
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Has anyone thought, apropos the Bankruptcy Bill, that the credit industry might be foreseeing a large wave of personal bankruptcies in the future?

Similarly, is the real motive behind aggressively pushing Social Security privatization — to the continuing political harm of the GOP — that funneling tons of government money into selected stocks and funds will help to indemnify financial firms against…

You can see where I’m going here. ‘Default on Treasury obligations’ and a currency crisis. The so-called ‘worthless IOUs’ in the SS Trust Fund, etc.

I can’t say I have a head for these things unless I squint and think so hard that I get a headache, but I remembered this morning that during the Bush/Gore debates in 2000, Candidate Bush kept referring to a coming “economic crisis” that seemed surpassingly weird at the time, in the context of the 2000 economy, yet very familiar in terms of the Reagan-era scheme of ‘shrinking the size of government’ by forcing a budget meltdown, crippling the ability of the Federal Government to fund social programs.

There are other factors too, but there isn’t much of teh funny in it.

Morning thoughtlet. It begins to seem like tanks rumbling into position, on the near-horizon.

Brad’s got a picture of a truly evil cat, whom he might send to attack some miscreant, if such is Brad’s will.

His iPod set on random play,
Its alphanumeric display,
Read, “Pull down your pants,
Do a hoop-de-hoo dance,
And scream, ‘One day, you traitors will pay!'”