Saturday, February 5, 2011

Winging it with a Prayer

Did your Mom ever tell you that “If you keep acting like that, you’re not going to have a friend left in the world.”? It seems as though Big Guy’s Mom never taught him about the tenuous nature of friendship.

In the interest of Big Guy’s future popularity contests, let me be perfectly clear: if you plot behind your best friend’s back to replace him with a new best friend,

june 09 Big Guy with his best bud, Mubarak, June ‘09

or when you promise to tell you best friend’s secrets to a mutual enemy in order to curry favor with said enemy, soon You’ll find yourself without a friend left in the world. Except for France. They may be the only country who understands our new brand of “friendship.”

While I can’t think of any way to put a good spin on this (indeed, not even the Democratic Underground seemed to be reacting to this news very positively). It does at least explains this image of U.S. Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, from earlier this week:

clapper prays He appears to be praying. And this wasn’t even the National Prayer Breakfast.

Speaking of the NPB: you can tell that no matter who started the “unrest” in  Egypt, it’s not going as expected. How can you tell? Well for one thing, Big Guy actually prayed at the prayer breakfast. Unclear to whom, butt it definitely passed as a prayer. I can’t say for sure that it was the first time, since he did tell everyone at the head bagel table on Thursday that his life was somehow “informed by the scriptures.” On the other hand, he proceeded to explain how he was essentially raised by godless parents and grandparents who were too busy to take him to church except on Christmas and Easter. Some years. Or at least once.

Not that Big Guy hasn’t been around prayers before: for example, back when he was living as Barry Soetoro in Indonesia with Mom and Lolo. That’s when, as Big Guy himself told told the New York Times, he found the Muslim call to prayer  “one of the prettiest sounds on earth.” and even recited parts of it in Arabic!

The second closest thing to prayer that BO experienced was the Reverend Wright’s exhortations to God to damn America by sending our chickens home to roost. Butt back in those days, Big Guy was still a little tooted up from the night before. So, when he and Lady M and the rest of the folk went to the Reverend’s temple on Sunday mornings, he never actually heard a word that the man - who was like an uncle to him - said.

Butt like I told you, he was praying up a storm yesterday! He has begun to lose faith in his earth-bound prognosticators (and I’m not talking about Punxsutawney Phil) who have been so wrong as of late.

hillary, the clapper and Big Sis walk into a bar Hillary, Clapper and Big Sis walk into a bar…

He was told that after he proclaimed that Mubarak had to go, that would be the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal. And how’s that working out for him?

Next time he’s going to check on his advisors’ track record before listening. Turns out these were the same guys who thought Iran would transform to a secular democracy after the Shah’s removal, and that Chavez would help us fight the war on drugs. They also advised Al Gore that global warming would relegate snow to an anomaly available only in frozen treats in Hawaii and state fairs across America, and in the fanny-packs of Mexican mules streaming into Arizona.

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So now we have this big old gnarly mess on our hands and all his advisors can tell him at this point is to pray. How is that helpful? Big Guy doesn’t even know for sure which Supreme Being to pray to: the one his mother introduced him to on Christmas one year when they went to church, or the one that his adoptive father introduced him to when he misbehaved in Jakarta, or the one that he’s always relied on in the past:

 

where'd that halo go Get me my halo back! Now!

haloThat’s better.