Imagine a year where there was enough time to list all the crummy things that went on and it got to the point that the astronomical society added an extra second just so you could put in something like Clay Aiken came out of the closet or Joe the Plumber has morphed into Joe the foreign correspondent, corresponding from Harrisburg or that Senator McCain has suspended his campaign in order to try and find Sarah Palin who was out trying to find Europe but Putin kept eclipsing Paris Hilton who it turns out is not a hotel after all. Well that's what 2008 was like. No, that's what 1/365th of 2008 was like. Then add to that that, if you had anything good or bad to say (out loud), there would be people so mad at you that, even if you won the Pull Its Surprise or Nathan's Hot Dog Eating contest, they would never agree with your opinion again and never give you credit for real facts no matter how erroneous they were. That was 2008!
Every day was like pulling a bandage off a scab while deep down you were glad about some things but you couldn't smile because you still had to wean your wife and kids off Hannity or Limbaugh or Olbermann or Rachael Ray, but were secretly hoping they were paying more attention to Oprah's weight than politics so you could enjoy it all by yourself. But by the end of the year, your mouth was so contorted from trying to frown and smile at the same time, you looked like Quasimodo right after he got an earful of Notra Dame's biggest bell only to find out that that was just Larry King trying to explain the national debt.
But you never did trust Larry because he was kinda like Paul Harvey without the rest of the story, and wasn't even bright enough to invest with Bernie Madoff because he kept getting Bernie confused with Rachael Maddow, and you kept confusing Maddow with Rae because she was on 271 shows on 175 channels opposite Guy Fieri who had eaten in one dive too many, and even that one was in Minneapolis. And we hadn't even gotten into the sad parts yet where Joe the Electrician lost the licence he didn't have and was turned down for unemployment because he would have won the award for being the 12 millionth person laid off in a single month, and there was a group of dissidents who wanted that to be a Democrat.
Meanwhile, the Democrats were all turned into women who were given a supply of tools so that they could accomplish all jobs that were gavel-ready and didn't require any facial muscles. Those who might be able to smile were considered for Secretary of State, but the one who could actually smile was elected First Lady and swept her husband into office because he was the only person left in the country who didn't need a dictionary while disagreeing with George Will.
And so we come to February 5th which Mrs. Clinton's husband declared would be Super Tuesday and the end of the search for a nominee to the convention in ... where the hell was that? ... Hey, Martha, where'd the Dems have their convention? Minneapolis or Boston? Ah, doesn't matter, because February 5th was the beginning of victory after victory by Hillary which ended in her defeat somewhere about Chicago. Chicago! That's it. Chicago.
To counter the 900,000 who turned out in Chicago to crown Barack Obama as the winner by default over Hannity and the other guy with a high school diploma, McCain saluted someone, clicked his heels together three times, ended up in Kansas and chose Sarah Palin as his running mate provided she would never leave any of her family behind for interviews. Sarah boosted the Republican's chances of winning by 1,000 percent until McCain said there was something wrong with his makeup for the Catie Courric Show and halted his campaign just in time to save the economy for a generation in a galaxy far, far away and when the dust had cleared, only Bank of America and Chase Manhattan were considered solvent enough to lend McCain enough money to continue on to Virginia in a cavalcade of PT Cruisers, at the end of which they christened the USS George Herbert Walker Bush, "41" because we didn't have enough money for painting the whole name.
A stroke of genius was declared by Bills O'Reilly, Crystol, Kristol, and Will when with the drop in mortgage rates, "41" could not only be had for a song at a foreclosure sale, but came with 800 planes with decals of Osama bin Laden already on them.
It wasn't all good news. The tree sitters in Berkeley were finally hauled out of their perches and sent to Guantanomo for some R&R while the mayor of San Francisco found another position to run for while not appearing to be running anywhere, declaring that he was as conservative as anyone else in Hollywood and the Beltway which he'd always taken to be part of the Men's Warehouse.
Michael Phelps who won 14 gold medals damn near drown while trying to swim back from the Sydney Olympics in Hong Kong, but made it back just in time for the grand opening of Mama Mia, starring the Olsen Twins, ABBA and BABA.
In other news, Barry Bonds hit his 912th home run, but it didn't count because his contract was signed with some sort of liquid that doesn't exist, and he was being pitched to by O. J. Simpson, Bart's brother. Joe the Writer was hired to spiffy up the program, but unfortunately, his writer's card to NAFTA expired just before he finished, so he was looking for another profession through Orbit, which brings us back to the fact that when he lost his luggage, AIG refused to reimburse him. AIG ended the year as the largest insurance company with no assets and had to sell off their three divisions, Freddy, Fannie, and the senate seats from Illinois and Minnesota.
By December, the only ones who had made any money were drug dealers from Ecuador who took their drug money and bought crude oil at $148.00 a barrel and sold it the next day for $24, thereby winning TV's top new show, "The Biggest Loser" which has a grand prize of $3 million. As of 12:01:01AM Jan. 1 2009, it was the largest of all the world's liquid assets.
All Rights Reserved. Copyright 2009. Ethan A. Winning