Diary of Fools Nut-Punch of the Week, April 21-25, 2008

By Merton Sussex, Demagogue-at-Large

It's 2008, and the world is a scary place. The economy is swirling the toilet main, the entire Middle East is a cesspool with a fuse, and the thought of enduring 273 more days of the lame-duck administration of Goober T. McButtocks has your old pal Merton tearing what's left of his hair out in big, bloody golf-course divots.

To that end, The Diary of Fools is introducing a new feature: Nut-Punch of the Week.

Each week, the Diary will "honor" a different recipient out of a field of worthy candidates to receive a swift and decisive virtual haymaker to the junk. After all, we've largely always fallen back upon one of the only systems of recourse left to any thinking 21st-Century Western mind: Regular bouts of snarky mockery. So why not name names, and start calling out the vacuum-skulled colostomy-sacks who are in some way responsible for the flying mudball we all call home being in the sorry state it's in?

So, without further adieu, here are the inaugural Nut-Punch nominees:

Pope Benedict XVI

Wherever "His Holiness" goes, a festival of bullshit surely follows. Who's more eligible for a shot to the just-for-decoration cherries than THIS asshole? It's bad enough when he's parked on his stupid chair with his stupid hat in his stupid little walled-off city with his stupid striped-pantaloon rent-a-knights, preaching that gays are bad, condoms cause AIDS, and overpopulation is better than sex education. But then he has to go and bring his intolerant, backward, stone-age-mindset circus HERE. As if we don't have enough shit to deal with at the moment; now we have to burn taxpayer dollars in a constitutionally-questionable government-supports-church ticker-tape parade, kissing the saggy, wrinkled ass of a useless figurehead of an obsolete institution, and doing our best to keep him from getting shot on top of it. Like THAT'S easy. At the very least, I'd imagine the scores of molestation victims touched by more than the Holy Spirit over the years might have a high-caliber, long-range bone or two to pick with the bloated sack of protoplasm who just keeps moving the molesters around to different parishes rather than actually punishing the disgusting fucks.

Think about this for a second...El Papa drives around in a gigantic, bulletproof bubble surrounded by scores of armed guards instructed to drop on sight anyone who even has their hands in their pockets. And...Why, exactly? Remember: We're talking about the guy who is supposedly Jehovah's personal concierge. A dude who has so completely dedicated his life to the service of his particular mythological best guess that he was voted by all of his friends to wear The Hat. The right-hand man of the supposed "Almighty."

News Flash: If THIS cat's afraid to die, then the rest of us are FUCKED.

Plus, lest we forget...Consider the fact that he was not only a junior brownshirt during the Third Reich, but that if he looked any more like The Emperor from "Return of the Jedi", George Lucas would have to call his lawyer. And while I'm hardly the first to point any of that out, it's not like we can really give that shit too much weight.

Ben Bernanke

The current head of the Federal Reserve WOULD be fiddling while the economy burns, but he had to sell the Stradivari to fill up his Hummer.

When Alan Greenspan retired in 2006, I was honestly sad to see him go. Regardless of the fact that I'm perpetually pissed there exists a Federal Reserve at ALL, Greenspan seemed to have the attitude of a sewage-plant grunt: Sure, I may be hip-deep in shit, but that's more reason than ever to keep shoveling. In the face of adversity (namely, the economic turd-flush that ALWAYS happens when there's a Republican in the Oval Office), he just kept standing over the bulging, red-hot boiler of the U.S. economy, and slapping duct tape on the seams whenever a new jet of steam would geyser up. He held his own with aplomb.

But now, we have the smirking douchebag above. As far as I can tell, his entire contribution to the Fed thus far has been to use the thumb that's not perpetually lodged up his dirt-star to jab the flashing red "CUT INTEREST RATES" button on his desk like a smack-addled chimp hammering the treat switch in a Skinner box. Meanwhile, half of the country is in foreclosure, banks are failing like Dom DeLuise on a diet, and I have to take out a payday loan if I want to buy a fucking pack of Juicy Fruit. But that's okay, because the gum wrappers are worth more than the dollars I bought them with.

His latest genius move is to start talking to the press (who are demanding some accountability), and grudgingly admitting that he's starting to maybe see the faint glimmer of the hint of a whisper of the potential possibility for the conditions necessary to create the right environment for a recession to perhaps start to occur. Well, no shit! Next you're going to tell me that The Beatles were a pretty decent band, or that Osama bin Laden is kind of a jerk.

I'm gonna go ahead and say it: Ben Bernanke has gotta be the only Jew in the country who can't handle cash. Too bad he's responsible for FUCKING ALL OF IT.

Michael Bay

Asshole emeritus Michael Bay started his "entertainment career" directing soft-core direct-to-DVD Playboy videos. If there's the merest drop of justice in the universe, he'll end it the same way, except without all the soul-affirming nudity. Or the paycheck. Or the eventual distribution.

Plain and simple, Mikey embodies everything that's wrong with Hollywood, wrapped up into a smug, greasy little stubble-covered ball and deposited on your doorstep like a flaming bag of Beagle shit on Halloween. His crap-fest flicks are so full of stilted dialogue, useless explosions, and ridiculous special effects that there's never room for anything else. With the arguable exception of Uwe Boll (who nobody takes seriously anyway), no Producer/Director in history has been responsible for more outright garbage. This guy has released more turkeys than PeTA's Thanksgiving Task Force.

For the uninitiated, here's a quick rundown of the "higher" points of Bay's résumé:

The Rock: Sean Connery and Nicolas Cage try to out-squint each other for the better part of two hours.

Armageddon: Bay commits the equally-egregious cardinal sins of making Bruce Willis look like a pansy, and forcing Aerosmith to sing a fucking Diane Warren song.

Pearl Harbor: Oh, JESUS CHRIST. Way to reduce a tragically epic historical event to a ham-fisted, anachronism-filled suck-fest.

The Island: Budget = $120,000,000. Domestic gross = $36,000,000. How does a movie with cloned Scarlett Johannsens lose money?!? Oh, yeah...It sucked more wind than Hurricane Katrina.

Transformers: Thanks for raping what's left of the corpse of my childhood, asshole. Wanna strap me into the "Clockwork Orange" chair and force me to watch while you donkey-punch my mom next?

So, what's next for Mr. Bay? Well, the next two or three years of his life will be spent producing re-makes of "Nightmare on Elm Street," "The Birds," and "Friday the 13th," while trying to squeeze in a "Transformers" sequel...Because apparently there's still more left of that empire to take a steaming, corn-flecked dump on. And no...I'm not making any of that up. For those of us who bemoan the death of original screenplays and ground-breaking filmmaking, here is your posterboy. Memorize his face, for it is the face of pure evil.

And, your winner:

Michael Fucking Bay.

And that kind of surprises even your humble narrator. When I started writing this, I had fully intended to hand the trophy to Pope Palpatine I. But that was before I decided to peep Bay's C.V. in the Internet Movie Database, and discovered his upcoming projects. I literally cannot believe that this jagoff has the huevos to assume that he's good enough to try to improve on Freddy, Jason, and the Almighty Hitchcock. And it's that staggering level of hubris that earns him the maiden yambag thump of the Diary's N.P.o.t.W.

Free movie tickets for a month to whomever can find this shithead, and bash him in the stones for real.