The American Spectator

August wobbles off stage and on comes September, leaving Tampa, Florida, empty and forlorn. The Republicans met there for their national convention, and do you recall the Liberals’ proud boasts many months ago that the Occupier movement would have, by the spring of 2012, become a vast human wave heroically sweeping across the land of the free? In their magazines and their asylums they proclaimed the ennobling phenomenon, and they did so as late as last winter. The Progressive magazine proclaims it still, though by now all the Republicans have gone home. As for reality, Tampa officials were expecting 15,000 protesters. Alas, six showed up at “Romney-ville,” the Occupiers’ lonely encampment. “It might be the heat,” asseverated veteran Occupier Mr. Harry Hoffman, in explaining the missing 14,994 lunkheads. There were only three arrests and an estimated $200 in damages. No Masturbators for Peace were spotted or pickpockets or rapists, and no police vehicles were defecated upon, not even by birds! The whole thing was a flop, but then it was on to Charlotte, North Carolina, where the saps will try again. The Republicans nominated the Mitt Romney-Paul Ryan ticket and began a campaign that, as we have been predicting for months, will win in a rout. The reason is Liberalism is Dead. As further evidence consider the Republicans’ roster of speakers in Tampa: the Hons. Chris Christie, Nikki Haley, Bob McDonnell, Susanna Martinez, Marco Rubio, Paul Ryan, Scott Walker, Rand Paul, and a dozen or so more. In Charlotte, the ghostly Mr. Bill Clinton, once impeached, will keynote! Need we say more? 

In the Beautiful People Department, former South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford confirmed to a CNN report that he is, indeed, engaged to the Argentine Firecracker, Miss Maria Belén Chapur. She is the nubile cutie whom he surreptitiously left the state for while still governor (and a potential Republican presidential contender), claiming an unexplained commune with nature somewhere along the Appalachian Trail. Now he may be heading back to the wilds, having told CNN cryptically that “I’d love to talk but we’re going to end up in no man’s land.” Va, va, va, voom! In other outdoors news famed naturalist Mr. Luke Chrisco, 31, was arrested on suspicion of spying on women from the waste tank of a portable toilet. And it gets better. The locale was a yoga festival near Boulder, Colorado. And better still: Mr. Chrisco’s arrest was reported in the local newspaper, the Camera! According to the felicitously named newspaper, a woman saw Mr. Chrisco moving in the tank and then witnessed his feces-stained escape. The oaf is being held on $250,000 bond. On a more serious note, a NATO air strike in eastern Afghanistan has eliminated Pakistan’s senior Taliban commander and the one with the most musical name. He is—or perhaps it would be more accurate to say was—Mullah Dadullah, bop shee wop, bop shee wop; and how those dirty-necked galoots who fought alongside him relished going into battle jiving and doo-wopping his name, singing: “Mullah Dadullah, Mullah Dadullah, Razzamatazz and All That Jazz,” as they slaughtered women and children and stole their chickens and an occasional sheep. Now the commander with the melodious name is a little pile of dust, and the fighters will have to settle for his successor, one Mr. Maulana Abu Bakar. What kind of tune is that? 

It was a big month for obituaries. Mr. Gore Vidal turned up his toes at age 86. His nephew, the esoterically named Mr. Burr Steers, said he had been sick for “quite a while.” That is an understatement. Mr. Vidal fancied himself an artiste of sexual engagement, claiming 1,000 “sexual encounters,” many of them anonymous and in public lavatories, during which he boasted of taking pleasure but never of giving any pleasure except “inadvertently.” He was a lavatorian of the top chop, and seemed to view sexual pleasure as a bathroom pursuit. Had he lived a few more months he might have been interviewed for Bathroom Beautiful. As to the quality of his mind, here he is on his friend Mr. Timothy McVeigh, the mastermind behind the Oklahoma bombings: “He’s very intelligent. He’s not insane.” What Mr. Vidal might have thought of the late Messrs. Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin is unrecorded. Also in the obituaries were the editor of Cosmopolitan, Miss Helen Gurley Brown, and Mr. Martin Fleischmann, the founder of “cold fusion,” which he discovered while “sipping whiskey” with a colleague. Cold fusion’s qualities have never been duplicated, but over 200 scientists worldwide are still panhandling from their governments in pursuit of the Holy Grail. Finally, Mr. Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon, passed away on August 25, one day after the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) stripped Mr. Lance Armstrong of his record seven Tour de France victories. The stories caused a lot of confusion among the Democrats’ moron vote, though the two Armstrongs are unrelated.

While on the subject of the Democrats’ moron vote, Vice President Joe Biden was in Danville, Virginia, and speaking to a mixed-race audience when he inexplicably broke into a Southern accent and, referring to the Republicans, said: “They’re gonna put y’all back in chains.” Of course, that would be highly irregular even by the Democrats’ conception of Big Government, and so Our President leaped to Mr. Biden’s defense, telling People magazine, itself a staunch organ of the moron vote, that “In no sense was he trying to connote something other than that.” Than what, Mr. President? That the morons in his audience were just two months from being put in chains? It is all of a piece with the Democratic demagogues’ efforts to persuade their demented electorate to get off their garbage trucks and vote against Mr. Romney for murdering some wretch’s wife and paying no income taxes for years. But AmSpec has a response for them. Early in the month in a column entitled “Harry Reid’s Cow and Joe Biden’s Parrot,” we asked Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to answer the query as to whether he is or is not having sexual relations with a cow. This he owes to the American people and conceivably to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Thus far he has remained mum, but the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) ought to be mobilizing, and before the election we expect them to march on the Capitol and demand that Harry answer the question. In the Indian village of Patkhal, thousands of Hindu progressives gathered to observe a frog groom named Punarvasu take the foot of his bride Pushala in holy Hindu matrimony. Five priests officiated and a fabulous wedding banquet followed. It is hoped that the ancient custom will induce monsoon rains to revive their parched province. As we go to press, no rain has been reported. 

Apparently that turtle that was duct-taped to helium balloons and sent aloft near Oceanside, California, was not part of the Obama administration’s new “green” initiative at NASA.Authorities now suspect that some miscreant with “a cruel sense of humor” perpetrated the stunt for no scientific purpose whatsoever. Officials in Oceanside can be expected to send their apologies to the White House forthwith. No one knows what will happen to the turtle or even if it belongs to Mr. Obama.