Mea Maxima Culpa

The closure of another year gives us here at Joe Livernois Column an opportunity to reflect upon our performance, and we must humbly admit that we were not always "on the mark" with our blowhard opinions.

This end-of-the-year column gives the staff and management here at Joe Livernois Column a chance to come clean with some of our most egregious mistakes and to offer up a "mea culpa" while giving our reading consumers an opportunity to reinforce their suspicions that we are a bunch of "bumbling dunces."

For instance, we were just plain wrong to predict in a column earlier this year that a professor from CSU Monterey Bay would this year win a Nobel Peace Prize. Unfortunately, CSUMB was disqualified from any Nobel Prize consideration this year due to its insistent overuse of the word "collaboration."

The most glaring error, of course, was our stated belief that leaders from Monterey County would be able to unify diverse interests in a great Kumbaya moment and finally develop a general plan without caving in the various whining special interests. Sometimes, our naivite surprises even us.

And while we're thrilled to tears that aging and perpetually angry veterans of Vietnam were finally able to extract their measure of revenge, we were wrong in assuming that the American people would dismiss the Swift Boat Veterans for Venal Spite as just a bunch of old coots who have spent too much time stewing at the hall.

And we can't figure out, for the life of us, why the Dennis Miller show on MSNBC isn't a huge hit, what with the monkey and all.

The most surprising mistake we made this year was our Biblical prediction that unquenchable fire-and-brimstone wrath would rain down upon the heathens of San Francisco after the Mayor Gavin Newsom allowed Adam to marry Steve on the steps of City Hall.

By all accounts -- and despite continued insinuations in the Joe Livernois Column -- hell is still a raging inferno and did not become a frozen tundra after the Boston Red Sox won the World Series. As it turns out, hell can now be found in the San Francisco 49ers locker room.

And I suppose we must have been off in some dreamworld when we asserted that this year, once and for all, the greatest superpower in the galaxy would have been able to track down the solitary homicidal kook who masterminded the worst attack on the U.S. since Pearl Harbor. In fact, we errored to assume that finding Osama bin Laden was still a priority.

Also, we turned out to be amiss when we predicted at the start of the year that the collective citizens of California would slap their collective foreheads and wake up to the fact that they had just elected a collective groper for governor.

And who'd have thought that someone could possibly butcher a Hollywood production about Alexander the Great?

For the record, we would like to clarify that we seriously understated reality when we called Humvee owners a collection of "ignorant doofuses."

Finally, the Joe Livernois Column was completely off its rocker when it asserted that people in Salinas were willing to shake off its seething contempt for government by accepting a sales tax increase to keep its libraries open.

Also, we were remiss as journalists not to visit John Steinbeck's crypt to determine, once and for all, if he was indeed rolling in his grave.

We'll try to do better next year.

Xmas from Prunedale

Merry Christmas from all of us here at the Joe Livernois Column. It's that time of the year to chest some roastnuts, egg some sipnog, and join us for our annual sing-along:

O Little Salinas

O little town near Monterey
Your literacy's gone dry;
Above thy shallow, dreamless sleep
The silent bookshelves sigh.
Yet in thy dark streets shineth,
Embarrasment is huge;
The hopes and fears of all the years
Are dashed by voters -- Scrooged!

Where knowledge is true power,
And children gathered all --
Curmudgeons sleep, while misers keep
The city in a crawl.
O longing for the old days,
When learning, fundamental,
Was more important to us all
Than keeping taxes small.



I'll Build Homes for Christmas

I'll build homes for Christmas,
You can count on me!
Please have water
And suitable roads
And buyers right for me.

Christmas Eve will find me
Buying out the farmers!
I'll build homes for Christmas:
Custom little charmers.

Christmas Eve will find me
Promising the poor:
I'll build them homes for Christmas.
It worked for KB Homes.


Elrod, the Swift Boat Veteran

Elrod, the swift boat veteran
Had a very shiny nose
And if you ever saw it
You would think he's Pinnochio.
All of the other veterans,
Used to laugh and make up stuff.
They ran ads about John Kerry,
Said he was a mere cream-puff.
Then one froggy Veterans Day,
Elrod came to say:
"People, I demand respect
"And if you don't you should defect."
All of America's pinkos
Shouted out and said, post haste,
"Elrod, you gasbag veteran,
You're nothing but a pantywaist."


Do You Greed What I Greed

Said the CEO to the Congressman
Do you see what I see?
Way up in the sky, Congressman
Do you see what I see?
A break, a break, greater than the poor's
With no burdens to stanch my greed,
No burdens to stanch my greed.

Said the Congressman to the CEO
Do you hear what I hear?
A mandate from the people, CEO
Do you hear what I hear?
Blank check, blank check, voters support me
And tax breaks for the well-to-do,
Tax breaks for the well-to-do.

Merry Xmas From the Bushisms

Dear (fill in the blanks):

Yes, it's that time of year again. Time to receive these generic, mass produced letters from family and friends, telling you about stuff that happened.

Suffice to say, this year has been a challenging but easy year.

As you've probably heard, George got elected again, so we won't be changing our address for another four years.

George was real thrilled, and he celebrated by locking himself in the den so he could watch a football game without being distracted by freedoms and consequences. He promised he would not attempt to eat pretzels while he was in there (ha-ha!).

The family spent a lot of time "on the road" this year. We had a good time, for the most part, and met many nice freedom-principled people along the way. Unfortunately, George's business schedule placed us in Ohio much of the time and if we ever see Cleveland and Toledo again it
will not be too soon enough.

Because of this busy schedule, we have not vacationed our work down to the ranch as often as we would like. With everything that has been unraveling in the world of international lately, George is wrapped up in a lot of hard work. Some people who watch him on the job see his jaunty demeanor and get the mistaken impression that his job is easy. But it is hard work and he works real hard.

Still, there is a lot of detractioners who say mean and untrue things about George. They got his comeuppance this year.

Nevertheless, George is an optimistic person. As he always says, if you want to find something to be pessimistic about, you can find it, no matter how hard you look.

In this trying times, George wants to be a unificator. As you know, our enemies are innovative and resourceful and they never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither does George.

George has been thinking about the future we have in store for us and he wants his dear friends to know that life could be lousy, life could be OK or life could be better. But then, he was just guessing as to what the conditions might be like.

Jenna managed to get through the University of Texas without embarrassing the family too profoundly, and she got a job teaching at a public school not far from our home. We are so pleased that Jenna decided to get into teaching because we believe the illiteracy level of
our children are so appalling.

Little Barbara is not yet sure what she is going to do with her Yale degree in humanities, though George has suggested she get a job in a humanities field, since agriculture will soon be the wave of the future.

We are grateful their sexual persuasions has not become an issue. The poor Cheneys!

But we lead a blessed existence and we look forward to restoring order and chaos during the coming years.

In closing, we would like to extend our best wishes during the holiday season. And George would like to remind everyone of the saying they have in Tennessee, that everyone should love their neighbors, just like they would like to love themselves.

Sincerely,
The Bushisms

Give Me Liberty or Give Me Another Camel!

The great thing about the current international situation is that we get to experience the thrill of democracy all over again.

Elections in Iraq! Who'd've thought?

According to the Independent Higher Commission on Iraqi Elections, all systems are go to hold elections on Jan. 30.

U.S. officials have vowed they will not attempt to influence the outcome of the election. Instead, all election-influencing responsibilities have been privatized on a no-contract bid to Halliburton.

Even as we speak, freedom fighters are flocking to Iraq to make certain that those Wacky Iraqis don't take their newfound democracy for granted, that they won't miss out on all the wonderfulness that modern American elections can offer.

The Swift Boat Captains for Abundant Lunacy are already cutting commercials that cruelly criticize candidate Massawi al-Gori's war record, providing concrete evidence that he was never on the camel that stepped on a land mine during Operation Desert Storm.

Election officials are busily splitting the country of Iraq into "electoral states" so that the "favored candidate" might legally win the election even if he doesn't win the most votes.

Leaders of the recent John Kerry campaign have been summoned to coach candidate Foussad al-Query so that he can effectively convey the message that he stands four-square against the United States incursion, while leaving a strong impression that he supports the United States completely.

Dozens of Iraqi candidates have been studying George Bush's facial expression to learn how a guy can win an important election despite looking like a frat-house goofball.

Al-Jazeera has been broadcasting American radio talk shows, thereby introducing the Iraqi people to the reasonable political discourse that can only be expertly presented by the greatest blathering blowhards in all of Allah's creation.

Several Iraqi candidates are lobbying Bruce Springsteen and Barbra Streisand for their key endorsements, while clonish "country and western" stars wearing macho white cowboy hats have already recorded weepy patriotic ballads on behalf of their favorite Iraqi candidate.

An anxious Iraqi citizenry is still waiting to learn who Boston Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling is endorsing.

The Republicans have invited San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom to Iraq so that he can make moral pronouncements guaranteed to whip up religious hysteria.

Dan Rather has agreed to anchor his final news broadcast in Baghdad so that, for old time's sake, he can unleash more election night homespun metaphors that have delighted the viewers at home for years.

Ahmad Shantani, leader of the militant Kurds en-Whey sect, has agreed to postpone a local insurrection long enough so that he can place his name on the ballot.

In the end, we will all agree that the Iraqis are fortunate to have had the opportunity. Because, as all of us who are fortunate enough to live in the United States recognize, a bad election is better than no election at all.

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