Duke, Duke, Duke, Duke of Oil

I couldn't help it.

I was getting some lunchtime blood-pressure therapy over at The Smirking Chimp, when my eyes lit on a piece from The Guardian about a damned fishy-looking inquiry launched by the egregious Joe Barton, chair of the HR Committee on Energy and Commerce, into three of the US's most senior climate specialists -- looking for all the world like a McCarthyite witch-hunt out to intimidate scientists who'd annoyed the petroleum industry by establishing actual, objective links between fossil fuels and global warming.

I was, naturally, outraged, but just as I began to compose a blithering blistering response, a firm hand rested on my shoulder, and a greasy voice murmured in my ear, "Trixie's waiting for you in Room Two, Neddie. I'll handle this one."

Al's Back

I've got to hand it to you, Barton.

I've got to bestow credit where it's fuckin' due.

You must have a lackey, some sort of Exxon-Mobil pissboy who precedes you like Puss in Boots, pushing around the wheelbarrow necessary to transport your gigantic fuckin' swollen balls, all the while crying out, "Make way for my master, the Duke of Oil!" You certainly can't keep a pair like that in an ordinary mortal pair of trousers. I'd hate to be your fuckin' tailor.

Tell me something, Representative Joe, and tell me true, because I know a thing or two about the world of men: How do you do it? Every rational bone I have shrieks to me that a cocksucker who's as bought as you are, as hip-deep in casual graft, compulsive corruption, and Pharisiacal pipelaying as your every cocksucking act declares you to be, might have some tiny qualms about appearing in public covered with your masters' slimy exudations, whipping some hapless climatologists before you.

But plainly I underestimate the frozen brass balls that a comfortable quantity of boodle can endow a United States Congressman on the fuckin' take.

Obviously, I've got a thing or two to learn.

Out my way, even the dirt-worshippers had the presence of mind to raise something that at least looked like anger, like resistance, when everything they owned and everywhere they lived were methodically stripped away from them by men very, very like you, Representative Joe. Fella named Custer comes to mind. But your hoopleheads apparently don't give much of a rat's cunt -- steal 'em blind, paint their sky black with greasy dust, piss polysyllables into their water, charge 'em a week's wage to fill their wheeled boxes with your masters' precious ichor so they can wallow their way back to the Halls of Commerce, eructing more polysyllables as they go.

And they smile while you do it. They absolutely smile like seraphim while they get their ass-fucking. I simply don't understand it.

And this day of all days, when the proud cities of Mobile and New Orleans reel like glassjawed pugs after fifteen rounds with some weather named Katrina -- weather that those piss-stained scientists you're persecuting tried to tell you to expect more of, hosannas to your masters -- you awoke from your slumber, stumbled into the bathroom, looked at your bleary reflection in the mirror, looked deep into the black fucking abyss that is your bought-and-sold soul, and thought of another way to grease the skids of Armageddon.

And then you brushed your teeth.

I wish I had your balls, Representative Joe. But I'm not even in your league.