Darren Young

The Week’s Most Scurrilous, Querulous, and Perilous Headlines

SPORTS: WHERE POLE VAULTING MEETS POLE SMOKING
Simply because the issue of whether or not an athlete enjoys the taste and texture of genitals similar to their own is the most pressing issue facing modern sports and global culture, we start this week’s news at the corner of Gay Street and Olympic Avenue.

Although the spangled headband should have already been a dead giveaway, WWF fake-wrestling superstar Darren Young declared to one of the inquisitive human tapeworms at TMZ that he is a proud and happy homosexual with pectoral muscles to die for. Bob Witeck, a “marketing expert who specializes in LGBT issues,” was wetting himself with excitement over the news, enthusing that pro wrestling’s audience “couldn’t be more macho, more male and more middle America” and that this recalcitrant virgin turf had finally been penetrated. Witeck speculated that perhaps NASCAR would be the next sport to go gay.

At Moscow’s World Championships in Athletics, a pair of Swedish athletes painted their fingernails in rainbow colors to protest Russia’s anti-gay-propaganda law and its generally homo-hostile cultural climate. Mincing in lockstep with them was American runner Nick Symmonds, who dedicated his silver medal in the 800-meter race to his gay and lesbian friends in America.

On the other side of the transcontinental gay divide stood gold-medal-winning Russian pole vaulter Yelena Isinbayeva, who won a third world title on Tuesday while tut-tutting the gay activists. “[W]e are very afraid about our nation because we consider ourselves like normal, standard people,” the two-time Olympic champion said. “We just live with boys with woman, woman with boys.”

INTELLIGENCE DRAGNETS AND WHISTLEBLOWERS IN DRAG
The National Security Administration has been overstepping its surveillance authority and violating its own internal privacy rules thousands of times yearly, the Washington Post reported, undermining Barack Obama’s recent claim that “the program currently is not being abused.”

During a question-and-answer session from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange likely infuriated millions of his progressive, Tea Party-bashing acolytes by stating that he is “a big admirer of Ron Paul and Rand Paul for their very principled positions in the US Congress on a number of issues.” Assange added that “the Libertarian aspect of the Republican Party is presently the only useful political voice in the US Congress….The only hope as far as electoral politics…presently, is the libertarian section of the Republican Party.”

US Army Private Bradley Manning, convicted on 20 out of 21 counts for providing WikiLeaks with over 700,000 classified documents, apologized at his sentencing hearing on Wednesday, saying “I’m sorry that I hurt the US.” The same day, the Army released a photo of Manning wearing a wig and makeup. Court testimony portrayed Manning as someone who felt he was a woman trapped inside a man’s body and finally snapped due to the Army’s “hyper-masculine” environment.