My girl has a unique talent. Whenever she hits the pause button on the remote control, she invariably manages to lock onto a frame of film where the person on the screen appears to have some form of nerve damage or debilitating palsy.
It’s uncanny; with her eyes shut and the sound off, she can fire that button and make Johnny Depp look like he’s in the process of shitting his pants. And I have every confidence, based on the Inverse Square Law, that by May she’ll be able to make Charlie Sheen look like he’s busily redefining Pi.
It was a source for mild amusement between us until we recently noticed that whoever handles the graphics on The Soup and The Daily Show seems to have the same skill. Meaning that my girl’s minor wild talent has apparently become a legitimate occupational calling, albeit one currently without an official name. Being clever people, we mashed together the phrase for a talented technical craftsman and an Internet meme and called the person responsible for making public figures look like they’re T-Plus a quarter second into wailing over a withheld Hostess Sno-Bal a DERP TECHNICIAN.
Which has been a nice inside joke for us, if a little tame by our normal standards – our other most recent in-joke is finding as many non-sequitered uses as possible for the Louis CK throwaway line, “What? You don’t like rape?” – and a nice way to inject some levity into a Saturday morning’s otherwise routine thudding hangover.
So I’ve begun to take it for granted that, on those shows, I will see pictures that seem cherrypicked to make the subject look as dim as possible, to the point where during the late news last night I did a doubletake, thinking, “Wha… channel 7 hired the Derp Technician from The Soup?”
Nope. Turns out that Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker just looks that retarded naturally.
Go ahead, take a look. I defy you to find two pictures where he doesn’t look like he’s either about to shyly announce his love of “chokmit chippehs” or playing a rousing game of Duck Duck I Pissed My Pants. If not both simultaneously.
I’d believe that someone was doing a Photoshop hatchet job on Walker’s pictures, but after seeing so many where he looks like someone just chloroformed him, kicked him into a round room and told him to go sit in the corner, I have to conclude that the only reasonable alteration someone might make to his photo would be to clone tool out the runner of drool that my backbrain keeps insisting that a face like that should have trembling off its lower lip.
I mean, check this one out:
Just look at him: that droopy, dead-inside right eye that’s completely off plumb-and-level from his left… that cockeyed haircut that makes the right top part of his skull look like someone held him upside down in a toilet for a while before his cranial bones had a chance to knit… that rictus grin as if someone off camera were waving a cookie to get an emotionalish reaction for the camera like you would with a trained Pomeranian… and on top of it all, that American flag lapel pin that someone other than Walker obviously pinned on him like he couldn’t be trusted with a sharp object, and pinned too high, as if rather than being close to his heart, America was trying to stab him in the clavicle.
If you saw a guy with these features at a stoplight, you’d roll up your window and mentally brace for him to spit on your windshield and poorly squeegee it off while asking for a nickel, which he would mispronounce. Whoever took this picture clearly didn’t have the Governor’s best interests at heart, and any intelligent man would denounce the photographer as a, well, Derp Technician… and yet this picture is on the front page of SCOTT WALKER’S OWN FUCKING WEBSITE.
And the mind recoils in instinctive horror when you realize that this is not the picture of someone who was forcibly stripped out of Spider-Man Underoos and shoehorned into a suit and tie to accept a Special Olympic medal – this man is Governor of the state of Wisconsin. This is a position that means something… it would mean more if it weren’t, well, fucking Wisconsin, and at least it’s not some Pellagra-infested third world toilet like Arkansas or Brockton, but either way, fuck it; I don’t want to lose the point here.
In order to overcome the truly horrific disadvantage that looking like Corky from Life Goes On after a grevious head injury, you would think that Walker would have to be, you know, smart. Like, Charlie-Sheen-after-my-girl-pauses-him smart.
And God knows that Walker think’s he’s smart. I mean, check out the transcript of that prank call that the guy made to the Governor while he was in the throes of trying to ram through his bill to strip Wisconsin’s public unions of their right to collectively bargain:
I said this is about the budget… Hell, even FDR got it…
And I stood up and I pulled out a picture of Ronald Reagan, and I said, you know, this may seem a little melodramatic, but 30 years ago, Ronald Reagan… had one of the most defining moments of his political career, not just his presidency, when he fired the air-traffic controllers… to me that moment was more important than just for labor relations or even the federal budget, that was the first crack in the Berlin Wall and the fall of Communism…
Huh. Then again, Walker’s comparing himself to a cripple who married his cousin and a victim of catastrophic Alzheimer’s dementia, so maybe I’m off base on how smart he thinks he is. But I’m straying off point again…
Look: this is a guy who looks like he’d punt his SATs if the only questions were his name and the multiple choice “Shit? Or Go Blind?”, so he must have passed himself off as a deep thinker with a long term plan… and the first thing he does is immediately pay back his IOU to the wealthy Republicans who fronted the cash for those hideous campaign pictures and turn on the middle class union workers. Who then seize control of the fucking capital building with the help of the local cops.
Then he doubles down with a “fireside chat” – even though only a self-destructive lunatic would give someone who looks like Walker any matches – which had the result he wanted… provided what he wanted was even more dirty hippie protesters to BO up his office and for his ranking in opinion polls to sink lower than Michael Vick’s amongst contestants at the Westchester Dog Show.
And after all that, today he stripped the collective bargaining provisions out of his budget so he could ramfeed them through the legislature on their own after spending nearly a month telling anyone who would listen that the entire reason for eliminating collective bargaining was to balance the fucking budget… which just reminded me of the time I stood in line at the drugstore behind a motherfucker who spent ten minutes telling the counter girl how sick he was and how badly he needed Sudafed and how he refused to leave… right until the moment he realized he could just score meth in the fucking parking lot.
So yeah; turns out that Scott Walker overcame the crushing disadvantage of looking like his hobbies include recounting Clone Wars episodes while counting toothpicks on the short bus and won the Governorship, only to immediately tip his hand that he was nothing but a tool of the rich by alienating a huge percentage of the middle class and ignoring the will of his constituants (probably opening himself up for a recall vote once he’s been in office for a year), all while comparing himself to Ronald Reagan who, say what you will about him, understood that if you want to be President, it helps to stay governor for at least 366 days…
…and even that wasn’t the point. The point is that my girl and I obviously weren’t all that clever when we stuck our homegrown name on The Daily Show’s graphic people, because if anyone in the world is, it’s Scott Walker who’s a Derp Technician. And congratulation, Wisconsin; you’re stuck with the drooler for at least another eleven months!
…What? You don’t like rape?
[tags]Scott Walker, Wisconsin, unions, collective bargaining, dark humor, political humor, satire[/tags]
