I’m gonna go start my own Wikipedia with blackjack and hookers

So I been paying all sorts of attention to the whole American healthcare debate, by which I mean MGK pays attention to it and when we go out for beers he is all “healthcare this Republicans that” and I am all “dude drink your beer” and he is all “but this affects our own healthcare policy you know” and I am all “does that mean we have to get the swine flu?” And then he looked at me for a long time and sighed. Later it turned out that we don’t have to get the swine flu, we just are encouraged to get the swine flu shot. Which is different! But that’s why our healthcare system is the best, I guess. You poor Americans have to go line up and get the swine flu. We get a shot. We have eliminated the middleman.

(How do they do that? Do they have, like, a sick guy who coughs in your face? I bet I could make it more efficient. Like, maybe you shake pepper on the sick guy’s face and he starts sneezing. I bet he could infect maybe ten or twenty people at a time if they did that. I should be an efficiency expert.)

Anyway so far as I know what the problem is, is that Republicans have problems with the government making people line up to get the swine flu because they are all “well people could die” and the Democrats are all “not if we limit the role of government to a very small amount so you like us better!” and the Republicans are all “banana muffins to you, buddy, we ain’t getting no swine flu.” Anyway there was a vote tonight and the Democrats passed a bill in Congress, which I guess is the Swine Flu For All (And Highway Reconstruction) Act of 2009. But one Republican voted! Joseph Cao, of Louisiana. You’d think his name sounds like “cow,” but Vietnamese people pronounce it like it’s a G instead. I know that because I went to Wikipedia.

Now here is the thing about Wikipedia. After the vote everybody was editing Joseph Cao’s Wikipedia page. Like, the Republicans were saying he was Satan and the Democrats were saying he was Santa. And I wanted to edit his page because I thought the page didn’t make it clear enough that his name doesn’t sound like “cow.”

So I wrote

Anh “Joseph” Quang Cao is a New Orleans lawyer and the current U.S. Representative from Louisiana’s 2nd congressional district. He is a member of the Republican Party. His name does not rhyme with “cow.” Well, it does, but it sounds like “gow” instead.

And I felt I had contributed. And then they changed it back! I figured they thought I hadn’t been clear. So I wrote

Anh “Joseph” Quang Cao is a New Orleans lawyer and the current U.S. Representative from Louisiana’s 2nd congressional district. He is a member of the Republican Party. He does not like cows. In fact he has nothing to do with cows. If cows can read Wikipedia, you should go read some other article. Like, one about milk. That would make sense.

And they changed it back again. I was starting to get a bit ticked off, so I wrote

Anh “Joseph” Quang Cao is a New Orleans lawyer and the current U.S. Representative from Louisiana’s 2nd congressional district. He is a member of the Republican Party and is a lifelong member of the “Just Say No To Cows” campaign. He is lactose intolerant. Do you get that, cows? Do you feel the thunder?

Of course they change it back, because Wikipedia is clearly biased in favour of cows. Maybe those folks at Conservapedia had it right after all! But I didn’t want to give up. So I wrote

Anh “Joseph” Quang Cao is a New Orleans lawyer and the current U.S. Representative from Louisiana’s 2nd congressional district. He is a member of the Republican Party. He hates cows so much he once stabbed a cow to death with a letter opener. In cow language, he is known as “Great Savage Fury From Above.” He has never met a cud he would willingly chew.

I’m sure you can guess what happened next. So I went to Conservapedia but they don’t just let anybody edit their open-source-coded online encyclopedia, apparently. So I grudgingly went back to Wikipedia and tried one more time.

Anh “Joseph” Quang Cao is a New Orleans lawyer and the current U.S. Representative from Louisiana’s 2nd congressional district (cow population: 0). He is a member of the Cow-Murdering Party. In his secret lair beneath the catacombs of Washington, he works relentlessly to protect us all from the menace of the cow. He may have adopted a secret identity to do this more effectively. Beware, cows! Your doom is at hand!

Then Wikipedia sent me a polite email suggesting that maybe I should start a Wikia page if I had such strong feelings about cows but I sent one back saying “no, it’s not me, it’s the Congress guy who hates the cows,” and they haven’t gotten back to me but my editing privileges seem to have been temporarily suspended. Stupid Wikipedia!

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