Lest We Forget, Mitt Romney is Still a Crazy Son of a Bitch
Amid meaningless debates in which candidates are busy arguing over whose version of the same version of healthcare reform is the best version, it’s easy for the American public to lose sight of what really matters. No, it’s not the fact that Mitt Romney is the physical embodiment of the very class of people who just four years ago pilfered the United States’ treasury like so many lusty Vikings alighting upon a defenseless Britannic coastal village. Nor is it the fact that Barack Obama is busy arguing about a few millions and billions of dollars to better the welfare of the American people, when it seems it was just yesterday that the President helped move untold trillions of dollars via low to zero interest loans for the betterment of the welfare of the U.S.’s banks.
What really matters at a time like this when the political season at hand means nothing more than partisan crucifixions over who spoke louder and longer during debate (and thus, The IR is informed—won) and media analysis of each candidate’s necktie— yes, what really matters as the American economy circles the drain is neckties, abortions, guns, and most important of all, religion. Not just any religion, either. Despite the “alleged” “separation” of church and state that this country has at times been rather proud of, The IR would like to focus your attention on an issue of the utmost concern (no, not toxic fallout of the world’s greatest economic collapse since…ever), the fact is, Mitt Romney is a Mormon.
Mitt Romney has made no effort to hide it and even more shamefully, the American people have made almost no effort to care about the GOP candidate’s religious beliefs. Thus far the American people have been more concerned about the one-percenter candidate’s tax returns. As a matter of course, The IR is more concerned about what sort of underwear the candidate is wearing. Thus in an attempt to de-trivialize the trivial, The IR presents:
A Rife with Trivia Timeline of the History of Mormonism
- 600 BC (According to The Book of Mormon) An Israelite named Lehi leaves Israel and sets sail for a new promised land—Mexico as it turns out. When he disembarks, Lehi is pleased to find no other peoples whatsoever to spoil this untouched land (Mexico) in what is such a highly hospitable region.
- 590 BC (According to the Book of Mormon) Lehi’s two sons Nephi and Laman begin an internecine feud. The descendants of Nephi (Nephites) and Laman (Lamanites) continue said feud for the next half dozen or so centuries, or about 600 pages, either/or, really. For future reference, the Nephites are virtuous and devout (also white), the Lamanites on the other hand are corrupt and violent (also they’re black).
- 33 AD (According to the BOM) Jesus appears. In Mexico. He begs the Nephites and Lamanites to do anything (seriously, anything, please, people are reading this thing for god’s sake) besides make war and migrate for a few pages.
- 400 AD (According to the BOM) All the Nephites are dead thanks to the dastardly Lamanites, who forgot about the long-haired shining ball of light with his whole “Love one another” schtick a few centuries ago. God curses the Lamanites with red skin for winning their thousand years war. Also, the Lamanites are Indians now. Thankfully, General Mormon recorded this epic tale with literary panache befitting a dishwasher instruction manual and gave it to his son Moroni to hide in a hill in New York.
- 1805 Future founder of Mormonism, Joseph Smith, is born to loving parents in rural New York. His mother’s hobbies include: folk-magic, viewing invisible objects via the use of magical rocks, hunting for buried treasure, and reading the Bible.
- 1820, no, 1823, no 1818, no 1823 The Angel Moroni visits Joseph Smith for the first time. Tells Joseph that one day he will find some golden plates buried in a hill in upstate New York. The angel tells Smith this three times that evening on account of Joseph Smith having a shit memory and all. Just to be sure, Moroni pops in to see Smith every year and remind him about the plates he’s supposed to be digging up. “You know, those golden ones I tell you about every year.”
- 1826 Joseph Smith is convicted of fraud in New York after being hired to locate a buried treasure (he couldn’t). An eyewitness reports, “Joseph wept and acknowledged he could not see in a stone now nor ever could and that his former pretension in that respect was false.”
- 1827 Joseph Smith marries a woman of some means, Emma Hale. That same year Smith finds some golden plates. Also, a breastplate and some spectacles made out of magic rocks called Umimm and Thumimm. Of the golden Bible (it’s a 3-ring binder now), he says, “No man can see it with the naked eye and live.” Lots of people who wish to continue living do not see the golden plates.
- 1828 Joseph Smith dictates 116 pages of The Book of Mormon to a friend who can actually write, his wife takes the pages from her husband-scribe and says to Smith, “Prove it.” An angel takes the plates back before he can “prove it.”
- 1829 Smith dictates a new Book of Mormon to Oliver Cowdery, whose wife isn’t such a bitch.
- 1830 Book of Mormon published. Smith is arrested, but acquitted. Also, an angel comes back for the plates. Again. Smith leaves for Ohio, a place where he hasn’t been arrested much.
- 1831 Mark Twain reviews Book of Mormon; calls it “chloroform in print.” Scholars able to stay awake, estimate that the Book of Mormon plagiarizes over 25,000 words from the Bible. Entire chapters and verses are lifted directly from the ubiquitous 1611 King James Version. Scholars note that, for an ancient text, The BOM reads an awful lot like an illiterate mimicry of a 17th century translation of an ancient work.
- 1835 Smith writes The Book of Abraham based off of an Egyptian papyrus he found.
- 1840 Joseph Smith decides that in his very first revelation, you know the one that sparked a new religion, actually, it was God and Jesus Christ who visited Smith in his youth. That whole thing about an angel named Moroni, uhm, you must be mistaken.
- 1844-5 Joseph Smith, living in Illinois now with upwards of 28 wives, encourages his followers to destroy the printing press of a man whose wife he failed to seduce and had the nerve to then slander Smith as a polygamist in print. Smith is imprisoned and in a bit of mob justice is killed in the gunfight that ensues.
- 1849 Church head Brigham Young and his flock establish a new Mormon state in what is now Utah.
- 1857 Faced with a dwindling treasury and paranoid populace, Brigham Young countenances the massacre of a wealthy wagon train of 120 men, women, and children in southern Utah. Mormon militia responsible, blame the attack on Paiute Indians.
- 1887 A reinforced act of Congress (Edmunds Act) makes polygamy a felony and authorizes the confiscation of offending church property that exceeds a total value of $50,000.
- 1890 An increasingly wealthy Mormon church decrees that polygamy is “definitely not a covenant with god anymore, and is absolutely no longer a required belief or practice for salvation.”
- 1947 Mitt Romney, champion of the 53%, is born to devout Mormon parents. World instantly a better place.
- 1966 Joseph Smith’s Egyptian papyri are found by people who can read hieroglyphs at the NYC Metro Museum of Art. Smith’s papyri are standard Egyptian funerary registers and curiously fail to mention Abraham or god.
- 1978 “Negroes, ahem, blacks (just what do those people go by these days?),” the Mormon Church declares, “are officially “okayed” to take up the priesthood…although we’d really rather they didn’t.” Sales of mouth guards sky rocket across Utah, as a mysterious epidemic of teeth grinding besieges the Mormon populace.
- 1990s DNA testing reveals that Native Americans are in fact descended from Asiatic peoples just as secular scholars suspected. No Semitic markers were found in Native Americans, but some were found in African peoples.
- 1990s Mormon practice of “proxy” baptisms for the dead. All of the dead. Those related to Christian and especially Jewish deceased are not amused. Livid in fact, that strangers would dishonor the memory even of Jews killed for their faith during the Holocaust.
- 2008 Barack Obama’s dead mother, decidedly not Mormon while alive, is baptized into the Church of Latter Day Saints on June 4th.
- 2012 Despite representing approximately .04% of the American population and a belief system that encompasses the span of this timeline, Mitt Romney is widely considered a viable candidate for the U.S. presidency.
- 2038 Former president Mitt Romney, canonized in American politics for his two terms of service, a noted Mormon, passes away and is instantly spirited to the throne of his very own celestial kingdom on a planet not far from the star of Kolob where God resides upon his throne. Decades earlier, intelligent citizens of the United States were decidedly undecided as to which part of that last sentence seemed more unlikely.
