Always Nice To Deal With A Better Class Of Screw Ball

"The quake that has devastated Haiti was clearly the work of the US Marines, which used one of its earthquake weapons."
- Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez

By Charley Brady

What can you add to that, really? I think it says it all.

A couple of years back I did some work in Venezuela and I think it's fair to say that their president is as mad as Mad Jack McMad trying to airlift a case of insanely p***ed-off rattle snakes out of Madville.

Still, we have our own nutters here...

Certain politicians, just like some Hollywood actors really, should be given a crash course in learning to think carefully before they open their stupid pampered mouths only to make utter planks of themselves.

I hope that readers are willing to give a few shekels to my sponsored walk around Fianna Fail Minister Martin Cullen's brain cells.

It shouldn't cost you more than a few cents as he doesn't seem to have too many brain cells to play with. In fact if two of them accidentally collided they would think that they were at a party.

I can't bear even to think of the horror that a human being goes through under the awful ordeal that is rape. I don't even want to think of it. But our whining Arts, Sports and Tourism Minister knows exactly what it feels like.

Well, he must do. After all, he told us yesterday that he felt "raped" on a daily basis by the horrible media.

Martin Cullen has described his ordeal very graphically. After all, the press called him, among other things " a buffoon". Yes, Martin, that's comparable to being raped, isn't it?

You're not a buffoon, Martin; you are simply as thick as pig s***.

How on earth do you equate having your body attacked and degraded to be on a par with your whinging nonsense?

It is ancient history now to most of us but you just had to dig it up again this week when you whined that that you felt that you were "waking up every day being raped."

This comes about because Independent Newspapers made a very, very mild insinuation against your hideously overpaid PR consultant, Monica Leech. You were then Minister for the Environment but who cares? You were as hopeless in that area as you've always been.

The case was that the "Evening Herald", she claimed, had made false allegations that she had received public contracts as she was having an extra-marital affair with you.

Well, Ms. Leech took out this case against the newspaper and won the utterly ridiculous amount of €1.9 million in damages last June.

People in this country who were infected with Hepatitis due to slovenly blood practises had to fight tooth and nail for decades against an unforgiving system in order to get anything even approaching justice; but then of course it's who you are and who you know, isn't it?

Think about that finding in Monica Leech's favour: savour the sound of it and say it out loud. It earned your PR consultant €1.9 million.

And you are still whinging about the press. I guess that it takes a fair bit to satisfy you lot.

Let's put it into context: the going rate (sorry to be so harsh, but that's the way that money grubbers reckon things) for a man who is hit by a truck in an accident that turns the poor sod into a quadriplegic is €300,000.

The person in the car with you, who loses both legs will get €180,000.

Kind of levels out, I don't think.

Monica has her feelings hurt by the nasty media and she gets set up for life by the weirdest court system on the planet and another person loses limbs and has to fight through the courts to even be bloody recognised?

Then again, this is Ireland, a country where morals went out of the window sometime around the Dark Ages.

"The despair you find yourself in is incredible", whined Cullen last week at a conference on defamation in Dublin.

"You want to run screaming down Kildare Street shouting: 'I'm innocent, I'm innocent'. [In a normal country - perhaps Wonderland - this guy would have been committed and locked up with the Mad Hatter, but hey, this is Ireland].

"'I'm innocent, I'm innocent'. You want peace. You want to be able to get a good night's sleep.

"You want to be able to wake up the following morning with some hope that the day will be different.

"It was like waking up every day and being raped, as a man - and that is how I felt and I use those words very carefully."

He then blabbers on about how he went to bed every night knowing that he would be raped again the following day, before he added that he never recovered from the experience "and probably never will."

May I just tentatively hold my hand up here and ask why you ever got into politics, since you are such a sensitive shrinking bloody violet?

Jeez, no wonder that the country is going down the tubes with cry-baby Nobody Loves Me wimps like you at the helm.

As to the lady that won the case, you can say what you like but I would swap places with her any day. The guts of €1.9 million would allow you to say any damned thing that you wanted to say about me.

The only difference is that I wouldn't be weeping buckets about what anybody thought. Just give me the loot.

Yesterday the Sports Minister defended his overuse of the word "rape", despite the disgust from the Rape Crisis Centre in Dublin who said: "Likening it to being raped is inappropriate, especially for a public representative. Rape is the second most serious crime on our statute books and it is a physical crime which violates a person to the core of their being."

Oh, by the way: Minister Cullen has declined to comment any further on the fact that he is a thick, insensitive gobshite and tells us - tells us, mind you - that this is the end of the matter.

Not for me it isn't, Cullen.

You were elected by and work for us so do me a favour and don't tell us that you are not willing to talk to us, creep.

Explain how you can possibly equate a digging from the Press that you so despise (well, except for your tame journalists and there's plenty of them roaming the fields and looking for truffles) with a woman or man who has suffered because of this terrible crime.

Then I might listen to your solipsistic, self-serving bulls****.

Mind you, we can all be hypocrites at times...

As someone who can't bear the bloody sight of the Brand Beckhams: OK, at least David Beckham has gotten to where he his on his talent but I can't stand that perpetually scowling wife of his who sets herself up as an inspiration to sour faced stick insects everywhere.

And I bloody hate her fashion range.

I wouldn't wear one of those little pencil skirts anywhere, not even if the nurse let me out of the ward for an afternoon tea-dance.

Same goes for the skinny jeans. Well, skinny I ain't so that's a moot point.

So I had to laugh at the blonde Italian television presenter Elena Di Cioccio who, wearing bright yellow rubber gloves, grabbed his famous digitally enhanced package as he walked out on to the street after an Adidas event (what else) and yelled: "It's small!

"David - you have conned us all. What did you use - cotton wool?"

Yeah, I did laugh. We probably all did.

But then I thought about how I would feel if a male presenter had done something similar to a female celebrity.

That kind of killed the laughter.

Also killing the laughter in the past week has been the terrible events in Haiti. What, truly, can be said at this point?

To see thousands upon thousands of survivors living in hope that they will, by some miracle, find loved ones who have been lost in the chaos and yet knowing how impossible that will be, would bring an ache to the hardest of us.

It leads one again to question how such suffering can be visited on the very poorest.

I'm reminded again of how terrible this world can treat its creatures, just as we treat it the world so badly in return.

But this is the wrong way to look at it, of course.

The world is not something that is sentient, not in the way that we understand sentience. It is cold and unfeeling, even though that is to give a minor planet on the far reaches of whatever is out there far to much credence.

To say words like "Mother Earth" seems to me to debase something, although in light of pure tragedies like Haiti, who can say what they believe.

I wish I could see this fabled "Mother Earth" but I can't. All I see is giant mud ball rolling pointlessly through an equally pointless universe.

And yet... there's always that "and yet", isn't there?

I think of 80-year-old Frank Carroll up in Dublin, a man who has more energy and zest for life than I will ever know. He really WANTS more life since he is so curious about what is around the corner. Mind you, judging by the way he looks and the vitality of the man - I swear, the words "force of Nature" were coined for Frank - the old bastard will probably live to be a hundred and just to be even more annoying will have every one of his faculties about him.

Of course, he's not without his faults: for instance he's a big Mario Lanza fan. Does it get any weirder than that?

Well, perhaps.

Looking at the horror of Haiti and the pure randomness of it, it's certainly a strange old world.

I thought of a passage from Ernest Becker's meditation on mortality, 'The Denial of Death':

"What are we to make of a creation in which the routine activity is for organisms to be tearing apart with teeth of all types - biting, grinding flesh, bones between molars, pushing the pulp greedily down the gullet.... The mosquitoes bloating themselves on blood, the maggots... sharks continuing to tear and swallow while their own innards are being torn out - not to mention the daily dismemberment and slaughter in 'natural' accidents of all types: an earthquake buries alive 70,000 bodies in Peru, a tidal wave washes over a quarter million in the Indian Ocean. Creation is a nightmare spectacular taking place on a planet that has been soaked for hundreds of millions of years in the blood of all its creatures."

And I think to myself: "What a Wonderful World..."

This is why I laugh when I hear the Veggies and the Vegans and whatever your having yourself coming on and denouncing we savage meat eaters.

Hell, we're all meat eaters of one kind or another.

If you want to go out and hug trees in order to get the shock of that plain fact then off with you.

I trust that this glimpse into your death and mine has cheered you up!

Hope to see those of you who are still in the Land of the Living here next week...

Same bat-time!

Same bat-channel!

You can reach Charley at chasbrady7@eircom.net