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I, Stretch, believe I am speaking for the rest of us when I say the following: Let’s keep the hate fresh.

Hate is a big deal. Politicians wet their pants worrying about how to erase it. Celebrities mount self indulgent crusades to teach us slack jawed yokels how to cleanse ourselves from it (George Clooney, come on down!). So what exactly can we do about hate? What should we do about hate?

As for Stretch, it doesn’t bother this giraffe. I don’t know if it’s even possible in a mathematical/theoretical sense to get rid of all hate. Isn’t hate kind of like poverty? No matter how much money we all accrue, someone is still going to have less, and by definition be ‘poor’. Likewise, no matter how much we all emote and improve, isn’t someone always going to be a little less nicer? Moreover, who decides what “hate” is? Is it like our weird definition of poverty, which is a level of wealth that people of the third world would do anything to attain? The insaniacs whacking people to bits in Sudan are haters. I am not a hater because I didn’t want to go see Brokeback Mountain.

Instead of trying to rid ourselves of hate, I have a better idea: Let’s hate some new people. This means retiring some of the all-time targets of hate. New targets, here we come.

A long, long time ago, pop music meant Brian Wilson slaving away for months at a time over a single song, which, when completed, would feature melodies and harmonies so complex that John Nash would have had to snort a line of Goody’s after listening. However, Yoko Ono trashed the Beatles, Elvis found drugs, and Brian Wilson found, well, sandwiches, and pop music was never the same. Today’s pop music sounds much like —and I think I’m using this term correctly— “marmot scat.”

Vanilla Ice was the low point of early 90s music. His music was cheesy, his appearance forced, and the marketing behind him relentless. After whoring him for every possible cent until public backlash became uproarious, the music industry abandoned him and left him in the recycle bin of America’s desktop (right next to Milli Vanilli). Unable to cope with the hate of millions, Ice tried to kill himself—twice—ultimately failing in both attempts.

The verdict: when a man tries to kill himself, Stretch calls off the dogs. After 15 years, can we find another artist to dump on?

The replacement: find your local Top 40 radio station. Turn it on. Whatever song is playing, there is a 78% chance that it is hate-worthy. There you go.

POLITICAL HATE: Bill Clinton/George Bush
There had to be two in this column to even things out. First up: Slick Willie.

Attention all conservatives: Bill has left the building. During my mostly uneventful years inside the fundamentalist home school circuit, I remember being at a conference and seeing an underground Oliver Stone-type documentary on Clinton. In it, the film’s makers attempted to prove that Clinton had murdered two teenage boys in a forest in rural Arkansas. So the Stay Away From Bill Clinton List needs to be updated:

The replacement: In his place, there are a number of Democrat Presidents we can hate on, including Jimmy Carter (horrendous failure at any and all foreign policy), or my dark horse, JFK. (The Bay of Pigs)

Next up: W. While I think that any sitting President should be ripe for critique, I also think we need to draw a line with Dubs. Sean Penn calls him Satan. Filmmakers lustily film his assassination. Cindy Sheehan is trying to reconstruct the time machine from Napoleon Dynamite so she can go back and slit infant George’s throat.

Additionally, the list of things that are currently claimed to be W’s fault looks like this:

The replacement: There are lots of underutilized Republican Presidents who could use some hate. Nixon is the chic pick, but why not Ulysses Grant? He was a drunk and a crook and had no idea what was happening around him. Need a dark horse? What about Abraham Lincoln? He suspended First Amendment rights and threw his political opponents in jail. That’s a neocon.

Michael Moore. This guy got booed off the stage in Hollywood for criticizing George Bush. In Hollywood, that’s quite an achievement. Plus, I think the hate Moore generates is compounded by the fact that he looks like the angry bastard child of John Goodman and Wolf Blitzer. (Hey, I would be angry too)

Is Stretch the only giraffe that realizes people like Michael Moore subsist largely on the outrage of their opponents? If conservative people would stop yammering about him, his influence would immediately begin to shrink.

Likewise, Ann Coulter’s power is based on how many people violently detest her. It’s a little harder for me to take the anti-Coulter crowd as seriously as the anti-Moore people, because the angry mob around Coulter consists largely of sexually frustrated liberal bloggers who would follow her underneath the sheets at the drop of a hat if she so beckoned.

The verdict: Let’s move on. We need some new ideologues to hate on.

The replacements: Let’s give Ann Coulter’s position to Sean Hannity, and Michael Moore’s position to Al Franken

The Brawl at the Palace of Auburn Hills The Brawl at the Palace of Auburn Hills The Brawl at the Palace of Auburn Hills The Brawl at the Palace of Auburn Hills

Stretch isn’t defending Ron-Ron. The guy is clearly sitting on his own cloud, but that doesn’t make him a baby eater or anything.

The replacement: THE ENTIRE MIAMI HEAT TEAM. Seriously. Has there ever been a shakier, luckier champion in the past 15-20 years of the league? The Heat won the Finals because A) the referees morphed into the Dwayne Wade Secret Service Unit for games 3-6, and B) Miami didn’t have to play San Antonio, who would have drawn and quartered them in a seven game series. Aside from this, the only reason that Miami even made it out of the East was the Richie Tenenbaum-on-center court-level meltdown of Detroit in the Conference Finals. The result of Miami winning this title will have several lasting implications. For instance, now that Wade has a ring, we can look forward to LeBron James receiving the first of many Kevin Garnett memorial Feel Sorry For Me I Don’t Have A Championship awards. We can also look forward to Shaq showing up for training camp at a svelte 480 lbs. and mailing in an entire 82-game regular season (a league first).

In the “history” of the Deadly Hippos, surely no singular Hippo has garnered as much hate as “Clay.” His detractors number literally several. On a recent “occasion”, the multimedia conglomerate Jefferson Washington Mutual Financial Lincoln Pilate Sports Inc. sent a flaming “email” to the alpha Hippo, in which they attempted to bludgeon him to death with lyrical superiority. It seems that JWMFLPS Inc.’s “plan” was to frustrate Clay by placing every other “word” in “quotations”, thus proving him to be wrong about SEC football.

To the Clay haters (Mathew J. Van Ormer or otherwise): Have you no sense of decency, sirs? This is a man whose Tennessee Volunteers went approximately 3-16 last season, including losses both to my Crimson Tide and to a previously unknown industrial trade school, the Vander Built Commodes. He has neither the spirits nor the time to scrutinize the tawdry history of your corporation. I will not even broach the subject of whether or not JP’s 4am kickoff times contributed to his team’s demise. No, it is you fellows who need to learn the meaning of chivalry, and for that I have included the following link:

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