Former President George W. Bush was given the coveted Heavy Irony Award today for telling friends that Sarah Palin is "unqualified" to be President.
Asked to explain the decision, irony expert John Dillard Sincere said, "Isn't it obvious? George W. calling anyone unqualified is like a mangled platypus calling a donkey 'funny looking.'
"It's like Mike Tyson telling Rasheed Wallace he needs to calm down and act right. Who the hell was ever more unqualified to run the country than George W. Bush? This is a grinning frat boy who nearly destroyed the economy forever! A smug cokehead whose only qualification was owning a baseball team! The Texas Rangers at that! A guy who couldn't move his head without Dick Cheney's hand up his ass to turn him!
"Sure, Sarah Palin is dumb, but she's made a name for herself, by herself, without a President daddy or a super nerd like Karl Rove to help her. I mean, did you ever see a Bush press conference? I've seen retarded chimpanzees who could put a sentence together better than this smug asshole! I mean the irony is so obvious it sort of hits you in the face. Come to think, he probably should have been given the Award for Obvious Irony instead.
"I mean, the man's a complete buffoon. And yet…the thing of it is, he's absolutely right. I mean, she really is completely unfit to be President. That's why Bush is held in such awe by America's ironic community. They're all a bunch of guarded, uptight intellectuals, yet they are completely in awe of uncouth morons like Bush and Palin, who continually create irony in its highest forms without even seeming to realize it."
Sincere explained that Heavy Irony is considered the most impressive form. "A simple irony would be like, if somebody says 'Today is going to be a great day' and then immediately falls on a banana peel and breaks their hip. Or if Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize, something like that. It's obvious but not so obvious that you jump out of your chair and say, 'Goddamn, that's obvious!" It's more of a head shaker, a 'See, I knew it would happen.' That's not my favorite form of irony, to be honest. Oh, they give out awards for that stuff but next year no one can remember who won."
The award was given by the American Society for Irony, yet the ceremony was not held at their office in Burbank. Sincere attended the event as part of the Irony Committee, in spite of the animosity that has greeted him there in the past. In 1994 Sincere stirred controversy when he was interviewed by the New York Times and stated that a book of poetry by Jimmy Carter was "almost as stimulating and intellectually challenging as Gravity's Rainbow." Outraged ironists accused Sincere of trying to sneak sarcasm into the public forum by disguising it as irony, and he came close to being banned from the society, even though they have no actual policy or rules and claim to endorse free speech. The controversy only highlighted the tensions between America's ironists, who tend to be low key and brimming with dry, sometimes bitter wit, and members of the sarcastic community, who are basically just assholes.
One such sarcastic citizen is Albert Daley, a former member of Yeah Right, the largest sarcasm society in the U.S. and incidentally a former member of the same fraternity as Bush. Asked about the Bush award, Daley replied: "Sure, really great award. Like anyone gives a shit."
The award is considered one of the nation's most important, yet few people care about it. Perhaps the strangest part of this story is that the award was not accepted by Bush himself, but by Hugo Chavez, one of the ex-President's worst enemies.
