Uncle Oscar, Oliver North and Other Penises

Let me just say for the record that I am not in favor of fair elections to the extent that Brazilian law takes it. My opinion is that if you want to arrest someone on Election Day, then by God you should be legally allowed to do it.

I’m referring, of course, to a recent Reuters article about 23-year-old law student Adriano Saddi Lima Oliveira, who reportedly confessed to Brazilian police that he had hired hitpersons to kill his mother. Because a Brazilian law states that no one may be arrested during the five days leading up to an election and the two days following, Adriano got to run around scot-free for an extra week, by my calculations.

The law was created so that people in positions of power—sheriffs, political bosses, like that—could not have their opponents arrested and locked up willy-nilly.

The thing is, it sounds an awful lot like something the Republican Congresspersons might be pushing for soon; for many, the only people who will vote for them anymore are precisely the sort of people who are likely to be locked up during the five days preceding and the two days following an election, quite possibly on the same charges as the Congressperson.

It reminds me of when my Uncle Oscar, the one who was always up on the latest stock prices and was surprisingly prescient when it came to knowing who was going to merge with whom, would declaim “Oliver North is an American hero,” a fiction he alas maintained even after he (Oscar, I mean; I'm not sure about North) was arrested, in Kate Smith drag and singing “God Bless America,” standing at a shredder and claiming to be Fawn Hall’s older sister.

As much as it pains me that Uncle Oscar had to serve jail time, it occurs to me that a relative’s rap sheet is no longer necessarily a blot on one’s family record. Some of your finer families are getting them now, and it probably won’t be too long before you won’t even be able to get into a good political fundraiser without a certain minimum amount of time in “stir” on your resume. (“Roomed with Jeffrey Skilling, 2007-2008,” for instance. “Mr. Skilling imparted to me the great wisdom of snuffing your partners before the Feds come knocking.”)

[Ed. Note: Iggy is not trying to imply that Mr. Skilling had his late partner, Kenneth Lay, killed. He is simply saying that Mr. Skilling almost certainly thought about it, at least while Mr. Lay was “testifying” by insulting pretty much everyone in the room. That’s our story and we’re sticking to it.]

If nothing else, a little jail time might instill a sense of responsibility in some of the people currently in charge of running this country, most of whom apparently feel no compunction whatsoever about passing the back, lying about passing the buck and then protesting when caught, naturally enough, passing the buck—sometimes this happens in mere hours, as it did the other day with Dennis Hastert who, incidentally, would probably make a swell cellmate for Jeffrey Skilling—, much like a small child blaming his sister for the broken vase his mother watched him push off the window sill.

And it would certainly help their memories. I can’t imagine that you want to forget the names of your fellow convicts, there in “stir,” what with tempers, I suspect, being always about to flare and shivs stored by and in every murderer, rapist, thief—former lobbyists, in other words—you meet. God knows these people need help in that department. Condoleeza Rice, for instance, who reportedly has an IQ of about a zillion-six, can’t seem to remember having ever met anybody in her office, ever, and the President was seen, a few months ago, slapping his forehead while reading the White House guest log, “Oh, that Jack Abramoff. I thought you were talking about the president of Israel.”

Ahem. Not gonna give that Ed Note guy a chance to butt in here, so let me finish by saying that I have found another enforcer for my upcoming administration, to help out Santiago Montoya. Her name is Andree Rene, and she set her boyfriend’s penis on fire by pouring boiling fondue oil on it while he slept.

I plan to have Andree use the example of the village of Ranpur, India.

Lemme ‘splain:

See, what happened was this: Somebody stole food from a school. Now anyone who would steal food from a school deserves anything bad that happens to him, inasmuch as he would also steal Tiny Tim’s crutch and sell his grandmother’s medication on the streets for money to feed a gambling habit. In other words—and this is important—, Republicans.

When the police failed to do anything about the crime, the villagers took things into their own hands, quite literally. They rounded up 150 men and ordered them to pick a copper ring out of a vat of boiling oil. Those who refused were declared guilty, and Lord alone knows what happened to them.

One of the innocent guys, an unidentified 45-year-old man, pictured,

said, “We would have been ostracized had we refused.” The guilty, it seems, care not one whit about being ostracized, much like—doncha love foreshadowing?—Tom DeLay.

I will arrest him on Election Day. Just because I can.