Clear Channel to Replace Stern with Pro-Bush Shock Jock

espite claims that they suspended shock jock Howard Stern's syndicated morning show for vulgarity, and not for his recent anti-Bush statements, radio behemoth Clear Channel Communications replaced the controversial on-air personality this week with Ramblin' Dick Walker, a pro-Bush shock jock popular among the wealthy and humorless.

Walker, known nationwide for his offensively conservative views and on-air skits that include humorous vocal impressions of the poor, calls the allegations against Clear Channel "abnanmious."

"Look, if Clear Channel wanted to get some sycophantic Bush-booster in here, I'm the last person they would have called," claimed Walker. "Check the record, I've called Bush to task on everything from his over-generosity to his weak game of horseshoes. I take Georgie to the mat at horseshoes. To the mat!"

Others disagree, calling Walker "a soulless shill for big business" and "human dogshit." Walker is no stranger to controversy, coming under fire from the FCC in 1998 for his on-air campaign to bait listeners into bombing welfare offices, and again in 2000 when the United Nations heard a complaint from the island of Cuba that they considered being within radio range of Walker's show to be an act of war.

"Hey man, free speech," Walker explained, when asked to defend his record of FCC fines and history of inspiring Amnesty International protests. "If Howard Stern can talk about masturbation on-air, it's hypocrisy that I catch so much flack for talking about sterilizing the indigent."

Though Clear Channel's official reasoning behind dropping Stern's show has been that the program was "vulgar, offensive and insulting," the company was using those exact same terms to promote the show only weeks ago. And many find the timing to be curious, as Stern had begun criticizing the president only days before the announcement, while the rest of his show's content remained unchanged. Some point to the "Janet Jackson Superbowl Half-Tit Show" debacle as either the justifiable impetus or lame-assed excuse for Clear Channel's house cleaning, which also included canceling several other programs that had criticized Bush and America's war on Iraq.

Meanwhile, in the last week Stern has embarked on his own campaign to raise public awareness of his masturbation habits and the close ties between the Bush Administration and Clear Channel's CEO Lowry Mays and vice chairman Tom Hicks, not to mention FCC chairman Michael Powell. Political pundits fear that if Stern's crusade should ever evolve beyond the "What a bunch of assholes!" phase, with popular Republican ballast Rush Limbaugh working at only half-power while learning to propagandize sober, it could tip the upcoming election in favor of Kerry in November.

Ramblin' Dick Walker, however, finds this scenario unlikely. "No way the poor people vote in this election. You ever try to take a bus somewhere? Forget about it. You might as well stay home and smoke crack. Bush in a landslide."

merica awoke this week to find itself trapped in a shitty Groundhog Day nightmare, thanks to a recent AP poll showing that if the election were held today, President Bush and Democratic candidate John Kerry would tie, with human Muppet Ralph Nader playing the spoiler once again by garnering 6 percent of the vote. These results were eerily and shittily similar to the 2000 Presidential election, when Bush won despite losing the popular vote, thanks in part to Nader siphoning off liberal voters and Bush’s brother Jeb taking a big, wet crap on the Constitution to ensure his brother would carry the crucial state of Florida.

Within moments of the Associated Press poll results being made public, Americans everywhere were comparing their feelings of nauseating year-2000 déjà vu to the 1993 Harold Ramis film Groundhog Day, in which Bill Murray plays a news weatherman doomed to repeat the same day over and over again until he gets it right. How this phenomenon might be possible for an entire nation on a four-year scale is not yet understood, though faerie magic has yet to be completely disproved. Regardless of the cause, non-Republicans everywhere agree that America needs to make some kind of major soul-searching change to prevent waking up in 2005 to hear “I Got You Babe� playing on clock radios across the country.

“Fuck! FUCK! FUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK!!� fumed an epileptically frustrated Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe upon hearing the results of the poll, a replay of the 2000 election searing his brain stem like a cattle brand. Similar sentiments echoed across the nation this week as Democrats and the non-rich envisioned a bizarre replay of the last presidential election, with Gore being swapped out for Democratic nominee John Kerry like some kind of bad Hollywood script for a time-traveling comedy.

“I don’t know if Kerry will be able to pull off what Gore did,� mused confident-sounding political pundit Prance Nancley. “Al Gore could have won that election in his sleep, after all he was running against a Mr. Potato Head doll. But Gore still somehow managed to drop the ball and kick it all the way down the street, allowing so-called adult George W. to sneak into the White House while the door was ajar and Gore was off looking for his ball. I don’t think Kerry has that kind of comedy in him. He is rather dull.�

Still, the possible scenario of an election repeat has haunted more than a few Democrat dreams this week, with Kerry taking the place of Gore as the respectable, though thoroughly boring democratic hopeful who somehow loses to Bush on a technicality, after Florida’s governor declares that blacks don’t have the right to vote in his state any more.

The lone encouraging note in all this is that according to the same AP poll, politics aren’t the only area in which America is trapped in a loop of déjà vu, as the AP cites “current� top-grossing films The Grinch, Cast Away and Mission Impossible 2, and has ‘N Sync, Santana and Eminem topping the album charts, which clearly isn’t true.

Is it?

Good people, if there are any of you left, I am outraged. Old school outraged, the way I used to get before Rokwell T. Finger jumped the shark and started involving myself with pro-wrestling and the Russian mob. For some reason, domestic annoyances bother me more than all the lost-at-sea pirate trials and tribulations I've ever experienced. I'm telling everyone, no matter what the realtor says, I have a two-car garage.

I hardly think it's the right of some tubby woman named Sandy to decide how many cars I can fit in my garage. Yet when she sold me this house, Sandy got all high-and-mighty telling me what I could do with it. Three bedrooms, one and a half bath, a basement, and a one-car garage. Well, needless to say, I was offended. It's a big garage. What official garage-judging organization ruled mine could only hold one car? I threw her out of the house immediately, and regretted having already signed the papers to buy it. I can't help that. I don't feel right stepping into an unowned house.

Ever since then I've been fighting the one-car garage demon. There's got to be a way around this tyranny. You can store five motorcycles, side by side, pretty comfortable, and up to 29 non-motorized bikes if you lay them on their side and stack them. Not very convenient, but I still take pride in knowing the ultimate capabilities of my garage. Not that it helps in the matter of cars.

Now, my car is a Lincoln with some homemade fins on each side, so it hardly makes for a good test subject for maximizing garage efficiency. I had to find a way to get my hands on at least two cars, preferably compacts. But who knows, I could have fit three in with enough resources at hand.

I first approached my friends at the commune and asked to borrow their cars for my experiment. They weren't very willing to oblige me. Omar Bricks threatened to throttle me and implied I was making fun of him. But I had no luck borrowing any cars, so I had to rent some from one of these new-fangled car-renting places. I would rather have had the Knight Rider and the Dukes of Hazzard car, but all they had left were boring ones. Still, I got enough for the experiment.

I will grant Sandy, filthy, conspiring Sandy, that it is quite difficult to fit two cars into my garage, but it's far from impossible. Inconvenient, I'll grant. Perhaps even dangerous and a foolhardy gesture. But I did it, damn you, Sandy. I could not park two cars parallel, either facing the back wall or the sides, and there was no success in parking them perpendicular. Sure, technically you're in the garage, but since the door wouldn't close I doubt it counts. I was ready to give up, to park Camembert's wheelchair next to the single car and call it a one-and-a-half car garage. Then inspiration struck, when I recalled my failure to get the Duke boys' car at the rental place. Surely some clever stunt driving could put one extra car in a garage with so much headroom.

Trying to simply jump the car into the garage failed. I flattened the bottom car on the one occasion I didn't hit the garage itself. Perhaps if I had landed the top on the bottom perfectly, I could have gotten the door closed, but I found it impossible to do. My success came, instead, when I set up some half-ramps and got the second car on two wheels—I practically glided right into that garage. It scuffed, scratched, maybe even crushed the bottom car's side, some could say, but I think I've proven my point, Sandy. Your one-car garage is a limited concept whose time has come. My garage is a two car garage, for the seasoned driver. Not that those two cars can ever be returned to the rental agency, and I may need expensive repairs to the garage. But as I've stated time and again, nothing is more important than being right.

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