These days you’re nobody if you don’t go into rehab a couple of
dozen times. Judge Garson gets convicted of accepting bribes to
decide divorce cases, he demands rehab. Mel Gibson gets caught
screaming “Fuck The Jews” in the middle of the Pacific Coast Highway
like a coyote baying at the moon, rehab. Lindsay Lohan, Paris
Hilton, Robert Downey – rehab. It’s a revolving door.

Rehab for drug addiction, rehab for sex addition (it used to be called
“horny”). What the world needs now is a rehab for rehab addition. I
had to go into rehab for gambling addiction. I bet my house on an
NBA point spread and lost it to my bookie. It was bought on one of
those sub-prime mortgages, and the day after I signed it over to him
they doubled the interest rate. Now he’s stuck with the payments and I
still have a great credit rating, even though I’m living in a shelter.

These days you can’t trust anybody in sports. They caught Michael
Vick fixing a dog fight. “Rover, if you throw the fight there’s an extra
can of Alpo in it for you.”

A few years ago I got caught in my own point shaving scandal. I was a
judge for the Betty Crocker Bake-Off and these mob guys forced
me to fix the Pineapple Upside-Down Cake Olympics. The security
camera caught me squeezing a tube of Chinese toothpaste in Mrs.
Schwartz’s cake batter before it went into the oven. For punishment
they made me eat the whole cake, and I came down with a severe
case of dropsy. Food is a vicious racket.

So what if the NBA is nasty and the NFL is nasty. At least we got
bicycle racing, right? A bunch of fruity French guys in tights riding
bicycles. Yeah, right! Over in the Tour de France they threw out the
top guy for doping and then, the very next day they had to throw out
the new top guy because he had somebody else’s blood in him, like
Dracula. So many players and teams have been disqualified that the
race organizers seriously considered canceling the whole thing
because there was nobody clean left. It sort of makes you nostalgic
for Floyd Landis, the champion who got thrown out last year.

In this environment, Lindsay Lohan makes perfect sense for trying to
run over her personal assistant on the streets of Santa Monica with
her SUV and getting busted for drunk driving and coke possession,
and Britney Spears cleaning up after her dog using a $6,000 dress
and trying to run out after her photo shoot wearing a million bucks
worth of borrowed jewelry. Whatever happened to Mahatma Gandhi’
s philosophy of forsaking all personal possessions and spinning cloth
in a straw hut wearing just his underpants? Oh yeah, he got
assassinated by one of his own people. Nice going there, man!

Lindsay Lohan said she didn’t know she was being arrested. She
couldn’t hear the police sirens because her ankle booze detector was
making such a racket that she thought it was her iPhone, and when
she answered the iPhone she pushed the wrong button and a rubber
snake flew out and hit her in the face. That’s when she saw the
flashing lights, but she thought it was a coke flashback to the VIP
Room in the Tao Club.

Hey, it could happen to anybody! All of those years of playing witless
suburban teenagers in dopey Disney movies at the behest of the
eternal summer camp kid Michael Eisner finally took their toll and,
as the laws of Newtonian physical science instructs, for every action
there’s an appropriate reaction.

At least she heard the sirens and flashing lights, which is more than
the Mickey Mouse Club at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue can say. When
George W. Bush pushed the wrong button on his iPhone a boxing
glove popped out and punched him in the head, rendering him
senseless. Bush is feeling no pain, though the rest of us are waking
up with a headache. Thoughtless, arrogant leadership has brought a
nation to its knees many times in history. The examples are too
numerous to site here. Bush insists the Iraq war is going great, and I
guess beauty is in the eyes of the beholder. Picasso filled a whole
museum in Paris with art that he nailed together from junk he
garnered at the garbage dump. Maybe Bush is a great artist.

An artist of disaster. And I don’t even mean Iraq, which is to the
American body politic what a herpes sore is to a person shot through
with disease. I’m talking about the economy, which is doing a perfect
swan dive into an empty swimming pool. Bush’s tax cuts and
borrowing of hundreds of billions and trillions of dollars to fund Iraq
have reversed the surpluses of the Clinton years with a bottomless
black hole of deficits. He tried to loot Social Security too, but they
stopped him. This business of selling sub-prime floating rate
mortgages to people who were already broke and then using the
worthless mortgages to float worthless bonds to suck in yet more
idiots, which also comes to us compliments of the Bush gang, is now
sinking the entire bond market and spreading to the stock market.
Seven years ago a dollar bought 1.2 euros. Now a euro buys 1.4
dollars, a fifty percent appreciation of European currency against ours.

We haven’t even come close to hitting bottom. An additional $500
billion in sub-prime mortgages are due to get hit with higher rates, and
these people, by definition, can't even afford what they’re paying now!
One guy I read about saw his monthly payment jump from $2,000 to
$4,000, and then they foreclosed. The foreclosure offices are already
working overtime, and the way things are going, the only secure jobs
in town will be evicting people from their homes. The black hole is
even sucking in people with previously good credit. The chairman of
Countrywide Financial, America’s largest mortgage lender, said in a
three-hour conference call to analysts that the only time things were
worse than this in the mortgage market was during the Great
Depression of the 1930’s.

If this estimation is accurate, then we are sinking into a world of deep
shit. Whole communities thrown out and forced to live in their cars.
Food riots and revolution. A worthless dollar. Bush figures he can do
whatever he wants because he’s like a little count or duke like in one
of those Russian novels by Tolstoy. A million peasants get killed in a
war because the generals were drunk? Tough, somebody’s got to be
in charge.

Against a backdrop like this, what do I care what freakin’ Lindsay
Lohan drank for lunch or if Britney Spears is wearing her panties?
Get th’ fuck outta here!
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