Our Destruction Seeds Sown: A Final "Fuck-Off" to This Awful Decade (Part 3):
Shit, we got a lot of ground to cover here. And the Rude Pundit's running out of steam as quickly as the Aughts are ending. Let's make these fast. (Check out Part 1 and Part 2.)

Part 3: The Extent of the Awfulness Is Clear:
1. Fuck off, Roger Ailes. After allowing George W. Bush's cousin to call the 2000 election for his relative on Fox "news," after destroying television news as we used to know it, after infecting the airwaves with the herpes sores known as Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity, not to mention E.D. Hill (remember her?) and her increasingly less-evolved blonde clones, the tumor-shaped Ailes capped the decade by foisting on us all Glenn Beck, a man who will one day lead a group of brain dead followers down to Guyana.

2. Fuck off, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The man with the smallest penis in the non-Western world, a Holocaust denier who cavalierly kills his own people, refuses to allow inspections of his nuclear facilities, and keeps his wife entombed in a head-to-toe veil. And this pussy's not even really in charge of Iran. (Note: Why not Osama bin Laden? Too obvious, but, sure, he can fuck off, too.)

3. Fuck off, Bernie Madoff. The Rude Pundit is against capital punishment, but Madoff should have been set on fire on the steps of New York Stock Exchange. (Concomitant fuck-off: Alan Greenspan, et al.)

4. Fuck off, Republicans in Congress. You spent most of the decade sucking the syphilitic cocks of Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld, turning yourselves into accessories to the crimes that have wrecked the country, and now you actually have the balls to think you're right in roadblocking even minor corrections in our self-destructive course? (Concomitant fuck-off: every pundit who supported the Iraq "war" and who mocked the idea that the housing bubble would burst.)

5. Fuck off, God, Allah, Death, or whoever or nobody. In the last ten years, you took out out just about every single living writer who influenced the Rude Pundit: Arthur Miller, Molly Ivins, Kurt Vonnegut, Richard Pryor, Hunter S. Thompson, Spaulding Gray. And then you wasted his favorite city with a combination of Hurricane Katrina and a refusal to smite the incompetent assholes who helped wreck it. Yeah, fuck you hard.

Jesus, this has gotten too depressing. There's more to say, always, about just how greedy and stupid and selfish a people we Americans are under the guise of "liberty," a word so few of us understand. But let's end on a positive note, eh?

Things That Brought the Rude Pundit Unrestrained Joy in 2009:
1. The film Fantastic Mr. Fox, a mostly plot-free wandering about in a world where every animal is a clever talker. And the HBO show Bored to Death, a mostly plot-free wandering about in a New York City where every human is a clever talker.

2. The fried chicken at Prince's Hot Chicken Shack in Nashville, Tennessee. In an ugly strip mall in a shitty area of town, the Rude Pundit asked the woman behind the counter if she thought he should order "medium" heat, not just "mild" (it goes up to "super hot"). She looked at him and said, "You can handle it." It was like biting electricity, juicy electricity.

3. Lady Gaga's performances at the MTV Video Music Awards and at the American Music Awards. Bleeding and hanging like a corpse at the end of a song? Singing in a nude unitard while sitting at a flaming piano and smashing champagne bottles on the edge? That shit's art, Madonna crossed with Diamanda Galas.

4. The book Wanting by Richard Flanagan. Cathartic sorrow in a novel about Charles Dickens, Sir John Franklin, and the way desire engulfs us.

5. Public Enemy performing the entire It Takes a Nation of Millions... album live at midnight in a crowded tent at the Bonnaroo Music Festival. Sure, at Bonnaroo, Bruce Springsteen turning the E Street Band into a jam band was amazing, and Dirty Projectors were a blast. But the Rude Pundit just didn't expect PE to be so goddamn tight and for the songs, from the end of the Reagan presidency, to be so goddamn relevant.

There. Now breathe the end of this decade. And get ready for the next one.