Daily Briefs: Anyone know any good pirate chanties?

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• So now everybody who has any kind of a small problem is going and begging President Obama to fix it, including Merchant Marines, who are supposed to be brave and manly, like Ice Road Truckers. A headline at the Dunhills-smoking, barrister-retaining BBC News reads, “American crew members of a ship that was at the centre of a hostage drama have urged US President Barack Obama to end the ‘crisis’ of Somali piracy.” I like how “centre” immediately snaps the internal narrator inside my brain into a British accent. Anyway, even though some perfectly capable naval snipers killed the pirates holding Captain Richard Phillips hostage, piracy now rises to an executive branch level, like “war” and “agriculture.” Also, think about how funny it would have been if Obama had run his campaign last year on a platform of DESTROY THE PIRATES.

• Over the weekend, I saw a performance by my favorite transgressive punk performer, G.G. Liddy. Basically, he takes the mic, defends the Watergate break-in, urges the assassination of ATF agents, shits all over the stage and gets arrested. The percentage of readers who won’t understand the human portmanteau I just created is really tempting me to jump in and over-explain it, but instead, I’ll refer them to the radio program of conservative pundit and former Nixon administration plumber G. Gordon Allin, who usually urges listeners to stockpile guns because of Democrats, plots to bomb the Brookings institute, shits all over the studio and gets arrested. I think they carry it on KMBZ. At any rate, whatever the reason, gun sales are surging in the United States — maybe because of Democrats, maybe because of talk radio and antisocial punk performers — which is really going to increase the number of dumbasses who accidentally put bullets through the bedroom wall while doing their Travis Bickle impressions in front of a full-length mirror. In conclusion, here is a video of you out at the firing range:

• I’m just going to point out that for the first few sentences, reading this article will make you feel like you’ve traveled backward in time, to a simpler era in which local news was dominated by carriage accidents and tuberculosis deaths. Then you get to the part about the medical helicopter, and you realize that we’re living in a DYSTOPIC SCIENCE FICTION FUTURE like some kind of Bladerunner in which Democrats go all Fahrenheit 451 on your guns.