Until they inevitably screw themselves by underestimating the power of a Huxtable-in-Chief, Republicans are on a roll. They sissy-slapped Lucille Bluth - er, Nancy Pelosi - out of the House majority, upped their annoyance quotient in the Senate, and sent the Democrats to the casa de loca with some new high-profile Hispanics, like incoming Sen. Marco Rubio and Govs. Brian Sandoval and Susana Martinez.

You may have come to power through legal and democratic means - we’re looking at you suspiciously, Lisa Murkowski - but Party of Lincoln Who No Longer Resembles Lincoln, you’re our Imperialist of the Week.

We congratulate you for taking the advice of Sideshow Bob, promising to lower taxes, brutalize criminals, and rule us like a king. Voters ate it up, especially the elderly, who favored Republicans by 21 points over Democrats.

Only the most cutthroat tyrants can inspire their enemies to disavow their own leaders to the extent the GOP did, with many endangered Democrats saying they’d vote against Pelosi for speaker and rename local geography after Reagan. Even President Obama panicked enough to briefly convert from Muslim to Hindu in the hopes of getting electoral help from Ganeesha, Vishnu and other gods who can’t be swayed with peanuts.

But Republicans forgot the cardinal rule of politics: Never trust women.

Freedom has taken a nosedive since dames got the vote, and running them as candidates has proven a riskier bet than Courtney Love keeping her underwear on in public. Steeped in unbridled enthusiasm for Hobbes’ state of nature and tri-corner hats, the Know-Nothings - er, Tea Party activists - rushed the Delaware and Nevada primaries, got drunk on Johnnie Walker and nominated the squawkiest candidates that showed up, Christine O’Donnell and Sharron Angle, who hadn’t yet been recruited for the Reform Party presidential ticket. The Estrogeneral herself, Sarah Palin, gave them the crucial endorsement of blowing white smoke out of her chimney.

Easily-winnable seats for the GOP thus became easy Democratic retentions that helped keep the Senate from flipping. Now another makeup-drenched she-beast, Rep. Michele Bachmann, is running a campaign to associate the word “Republican” with the phrase “short-lived influence” by 2012. Fortunately she’s up against a competent, principled and male Texan backed by other men, who inherently excel in their reason and accountability.

You’ve got two years to show the country you have a better agenda than the Professor, you whites, businessmen, social conservatives, Cubans and gun owners. Don’t let a bunch of erratic broads ruin it for you.

Considering the pathetic state of the global economy (unless you’re in China or Brazil), you'd think workers in Western Europe, where until recently the Spanish slept a third of the workday, would be glad to have jobs at all. But we know France marches to its own drummer, or more accurately, a goose-stepping German drummer. So it’s not surprising that French unions, tired of working for five straight days, would bring transportation to a halt nationwide for two weeks to avoid working through age 62, bringing the pension system into, you know, solvency.

But our second-favorite womanizing national leader, French President Nicholas Sarkozy, stuck to his non-lethal erotic paintball guns this past week, refusing to bend to union pressure. Now they're giving up and going back to complaining about the declining quality and increased sassmouth of mistresses.

That’s why, Monsieur President, you’re our Imperialist of the Week.

Astute readers may spit out their ratatouille and sputter, "You already crowned the Sark for his burqa ban. That's double jeopardy!" First, you idiots should watch Double Jeopardy before spouting off legal terms. And second, why shouldn't we twice honor the man who taps Carla Bruni on a regular basis?

Going up against French unions is like dragging Stephen Colbert and his puppet off stage on the National Mall - laborious and yet funny. Sark has the sense of humor combined with the long-term vision to see through the empty charade of strikers with less resolve than unreconstructed Strom Thurmond, and wait until these pampered poofs run out of money to buy cigarettes, brie and Jerry Lewis retrospectives. As striking workers burn tires and students in funny hats and Li'l Bastard bullhorns clog the streets in protest, who looks more reasonable? What’s next, bossnapping?

Like members of SNL’s Five-Timers Club, burning down Atlanta and marching to the metaphorical shores of Cultural Imperialist is a rare thing. You've done it twice, Nick, like a septuagenarian on Cialis, and we hope you continue to stir our hearts and loins with brutal nonchalance.

Courtesy of Craftster

Like Arnie in Total Recall, the allergy sufferer has an invasive method for removing troublesome trackers from the nasal cavities. The post-industrial increase in airborne allergens and autism has produced as many responses, some medically sound, others more akin to technological witchdoctoring, but the more notable of these has a cult following, its devotees proselytizing its virtues like Kirk Cameron on Charlie Rose.

While its name might sound like Indian fondue, it is in fact the MOAB of allergy solutions, a bunker buster that uses the dripping power of saline and gravity to destroy any and all nose critters with no respect to creed or custom. It is the Neti Pot, and it's our Imperialist of the Week.

Like a third-world sewage ditch, your nasal cavities are filled with the unholy muck of our sinuses. That air you breathe to survive is filled with pollens, and spores, and molds that will wreak havoc upon your body when collected in the inner caves of Nasaldom. The resulting toxic sludge buildup can cause endless sneezing while your mucus-filled membranes are inundated from the inside out.

The Neti Pot changes the equation, like Andrew Breitbart at an anti-hate rally. The device resembles an Aladdin's lamp, and delivers more wishes per use. Filling it with a specially formulated kosher salt mixture dissolved in lukewarm water, the victim places the spout into one nostril, and tipping her head at an 80-90 degree angle, allows the solution to run through the other nostril. Switching nostrils for a second wash is like a buy-one-get-one-free nasal Apocalypse, when all the spores left behind are beset by the deluge of an angry and vengeful God.

It's best not to look at yourself or the user while this is happening. Like the Nazis in Raiders of the Lost Ark, your face may melt at the awesome cleansing power of the Neti Pot.

Not to be mistaken for Chinese dam construction, which, when it fails also destroys large swaths of ground and people, or even the destructive power of Indonesian tsunamis, the Neti stream is a purposeful, directed intrusion into enemy territory. If the United States really wanted to eliminate Osama bin Laden, the money should have been spent on a gigantic Neti Pot to flush the craggy Afghan caves. Guaranteed results: no more Taliban, no more VHS tapes espousing terrorist doctrines on environmentalism and extreme Islamist theology. No more bin freaking Laden.

The Neti is a digusting and frightening, but necessary weapon in the war against the tiny terrorists in our nose. As long as ragweed and hay fever are out in force, we'll maintain vigilant defense, pop our Zyrtec, flood the caverns, and by God, we're going to win this war.

The bedbug, like heroin in the nineties, is coming back in a big way. It's a tiny creature, not quite a parasite and not quite a Dina or Michael Lohan, with the urge to thrill you while you sleep, leaving welts and scratches on your body like markings of an enthusiastic lover, or Megan Fox. With their will to live, their meteoric rise from the downtrodden ranks of last century's pests to this decade's number one hotel downgrader, and their perky political clout, bedbugs are antennae-down our Imperialist of the Week.

Bedbugs aren't known for loyalty or courage, but they are embued with an indomitable spirit; they were once considered the scourge of New York until they were nearly eradicated in the early 1900's. But you can't keep a good pest down, especially when you have a way of crawling into people's psyche's the same way Thomas Friedman crawled into position at the New York Times--using global warming.

Yes, while Friedman was praising China for its environmental friendly ghetto-squalor tenement housing boom and excoriating the West for buying too many Hummers, bedbugs were using the climate-change for their own ends: the complete and utter destruction of North American hotel sanitation pride.

And it's not just happening in New York. Every major city with an upscale hotel is infested with these tiny beings whose sole mission seems closely aligned with that of Al Quaeda and the Taliban, proving Code Red isn't just for fertilizer bombs and boxcutting suicidal Sunnis. Theirs is a war with no soldiers, only casualties, and the victims are the once clean, once well-minted pillows and 500-threadcount sheets of our nation's temporary homes on the road and tryst-tychs for affair-bound lovers. According to reports, Chicago could experience a New York sized problem in two or three years, and that's not even counting if Rahm Emanuel decides to run for mayor.

More attractive and deadlier than the vampires of Twilight, these bloodsuckers have a peak feeding period of an hour before sunrise; they drop upon their human victims as they sleep and in the cool darkness, suck upon the living tissue of their prey's skin, leaving a host of welts and sequential bite marks behind. When you check out, bedbugs check out with you, traveling with you and infesting every place you visit.

Their seeming omnipresence is merely the first of many characteristics of an infestation. Before long, you'll feel them crawling on you, your mind playing tricks on you. You'll clean your sheets, you'll burn your furniture, you'll even move. But unlike Keyser Söze, the best trick the bedbugs ever pulled was convincing you they're all around you and they're never going to leave.

Has anyone else noticed this Tea Party? It is running all over the vaunted establishment with shoes covered in tar and hands filled with rolls of toilet paper, throwing mighty curve balls of soft plushy butt-wiping goodness at the Left and the Right with equal parts conviction and crude but effective talking points that appeal to Americans who keep voting for representatives who go on to do anything but represent them.

Focusing their ire on fiscal responsibility and limited government, the ill-spelling Tea Party might be the first No Suckling at the Teat of Government Party, but angry people who hate anything new or resembling the original Boston Tea Party have taken to calling them Teabaggers (but better the bagger than baggee, right?) and anti-government (but has any party claimed to be pro-government?). But no one has called them Imperialists. Until now.

To their credit, Tea Partiers have for the most part ignored the many denigrating puns on their collective name, including those associating herbal essences with the pale genitals of its mostly white and male members.

And with the TP's surprise win (and now glowing warchest) in the Delaware Republican Senate primary, pushing Christine O'Donnell ahead of GOP incumbent former governor Mike Castle (not the suave, witty Rick), its win in Alaska with the unheralded and unheard-of Joe Miller (sounds like a regular guy, right?), and its surge in Florida with the Anti-Crist Marco Rubio, TP is going mainstream, giving us Palin clones, Hispanics, and even Jews, and it's doing so through decentralized grass roots work, which seems to fluster the establishment, which isn't used to actual government by the people.

But really, O'Donnell's win over Castle isn't that much of a surprise. He's a 71 year old crumbling ruin, a non-Haggar's incumbent; she's a Hottie McTeaParty with something to prove, and the people tire of Strom Thurmond like never-dead representatives. Sometimes it's just nice to moisturize the ancient papery hands of the legislature.

However, the Right is starting to resemble the Democrats, in the circle the wagons and shoot inward way. The Tea Party incursions into hopeful Republican ground have put a wedge in the Republicans' bid to regain House majority; it's rather unlikely that will happen now, which may explain why the Republicans are more pissed than the Dems at these young upstarts. And really, Dems should be happy; they were going to lose anyway. At least they're losing to a house divided.

But that's kind of what Tea Parties are for, making waves, causing trouble, dumping tea into the ocean while masquerading as politically incorrect demons in feathers and red paint. Seems like that's worth a mention.

So it is with great surprise that we learn about 3,200 Mexican federal police--nearly 9% of the total police workforce--have been fired since May 2010. Ay carumba! This represents a sea change, or at least a tidal basin change, for a government known more for knuckling under to influential cartels than to agents of positive change.

Many other governments have made a show of cracking down on their beloved internal legal incubi--men whose gift for deception, bribery, and criminal ventures seem almost genetic. From Kabul to Beijing to Moscow to Bogota to, well, nearly all of Africa, corruption is practically a way of life. But just as the British and Dutch knew, to create financial success, one must stamp the rule of law upon one's subjects; even despots must realize that the rackets can only inflate the balloon of success for so long.

Placing conquered tribes under the happy, if unsatisfying rule of law is a fine tradition for cultural imperialists--successful ones, at least--Rome implemented Pax Romana across its empire, providing its citizens with peace, military protection, and citizenship, as long as they paid their taxes, didn't cheat the government, and didn't attempt insurrection. Babylon too gave its conquered basic rights under the aegis of a serialized code of conduct.

The essential part of the mathematics of successful rule is the mutual agreement between the governed and governers: I won't fail to provide for you, as long as you obey me. Corruption always diminishes the caregiving ability of its perpetrators, eventually eliminating it altogether in order to enforce its rapidly decreased base of support and prevent the breakdown of essential societal structures--things that would have been avoidable had it not stooped to such venal injustices in the first place.

Mexico has the distinction of being the most apt illustration of a nation under complete control of corrupt officials. And like General Salazar's character from the movie Traffic, or Two-Face in The Dark Knight, crackdowns are often engineered by those opportunistic officials who have the most to gain by promoting sweeping reforms... of their criminal rivals' organizations and personnel, that is. And often such crackdowns have their own negative consequences, such as the creation of power vacuums, which quickly absorb the next set of cartel leaders trying to make their mark. The only way to tell if an official is clean or not is to wait and see; if he ends up maimed and dead, he was either clean and getting under someone's skin or he was a rival standing in the way of a power grab. While this implicates pretty much every living official in Mexico, it stands to reason; Mexicorruption is synonymous with "doing business."

Nevertheless, the eradication of such a large swath of Mexico's narco-traffickers and Zeta enforcers shows that someone has the cajones to push for the right kind of change, chomping hard on the tortilla of trafficking and the chalupa of corruption. We're not really sure who is responsible--really responsible--for these firings; it is probably best they remain nameless, lest they end up without a head and buried in the Sonora desert. But whoever you are, Caballero Blanco, you've earned our Imperialist of the Week award.

The last Supreme Court judge to make it through confirmation without having actually, you know, judged, also happened to have the most rad robe at the Clinton impeachment hearings.  So we expect big things from White House shyster Elena Kagan, another judicial neophyte sworn in this weekend as Long John Silvers' replacement.  You've come a long way, Lenie - you're our Imperialist of the Week.

Many other great leaders didn't deserve their jobs, either, but grabbed history by the scruff and threw it headlong into a pile of inevitability, like a freshman getting hazed. Hitler was a "masterly" artist who drew postcards before new German boundaries.  Jimmy Carter, who would later become history's greatest monster, was a peanut wrangler who taught young children in Sunday school to do what Jesus would do - get beat up on the world stage.  And ho-hum Ali sure as heck shouldn’t have landed hunky, gorgeous Roberto on "The Bachelorette," but that promiscuous Pole’s pixie dust overwhelmed the Spanish speaker’s Santeria, just like John-Paul II and Castro.

Kagan has shown she has the chops to join this illustrious crowd.  Barely 50, she’s already strong-armed her rabbi into giving her a feminist bat mitzvah, sailed to tenure despite a meager publishing record on the University of Chicago law faculty, and pistol-whipped the military for its discrimigaytion as dean of the Harvard Law School.

Most imperialistically, this jovial Jew singlehandedly "fooled the nation's highest judges" by fudging a medical group’s appraisal of the intact D&X procedure, casually known as partial-birth abortion, leading to the eventual Supreme Court imprimatur on the procedure as "medically necessary."  Though Congress later banned D&X, a decision upheld by the dreamy Roberts court, the fact that a sneaky political hack could orchestrate such a brilliant con on the courts shows Kagan's clinical determination to win at all costs.

The raging debate over whether Kagan's slugging abilities show her sexual proclivities obscures the more fundamental truth that she plays political hardball.  Jon Lovitz's fraternal twin will surely be lobbing up hard-hitting opinions masked by toothy grins for the next three decades. Cultural Imperialist salutes you, Shorty, and looks forward to your reign.

Photo used with attribution

I've never been much for fireworks, at least on the city-wide level. The displays can only have so many planet shapes and smiley faces before they get old, and much of the show is repetitive, like returning to the same move in bed all the time, simply tweaking it with a swirl and a pinch. But now that I've learned that fireworks are "imperialist and hegemonic," I've fully embraced July 4's aerial orgy.

You're not just a shell-out anymore, you low explosive pyrotechnic devices: You're our Imperialist of the Week.

The Slate article above makes the argument that

The professional fireworks display is an exercise in pomposity, aggression, triumphalism, and hubris. The pyrotechnician—and, more importantly, his patron—intends to ornament the night sky beyond the powers of God himself. He means to inspire awe for little purpose other than to demonstrate his power. The first great fireworks nuts in the Western world were Peter the Great (who put on a five-hour show to celebrate the birth of his first son) and Louis XIV (who, with a specially equipped sundial, used them to tell time at Versailles).

If I may parrot my co-imperialist's favorite insult, listen, douche: That's what makes fireworks AWESOME. You may prefer to see a piano on fire, echo the Gavin Rossdale lamentation that there's no sex in the violence of fireworks, and complain that all fireworks offer is "bombast."

But much to the dismay of the French, Americans have long preferred violence to sex, at least in public displays, and we love bombast, as evidenced by our affinity for Shaggy and Rush Limbaugh. In fireworks, we gain release and nobody or thing gets hurt, like a certain activity championed by Joycelyn Elders. Sex can wait - detonate!

When Mother Nature halts oil-spill cleanup for weeks at a time and smothers East Coasters with oppressive heat, fireworks reassert Man's control over the sky. Unencumbered by gravity or enviromorality, fireworks pwn the sky and make the moon irrelevant, like Conan O'Brien taking the 25-54s to TBS and leaving the geriatrics to Jay.

Cultural Imperialist salutes you, inanimate objects. Never stop reaching for, and light-polluting, the stars.

While we caught your thieving Red fingers in our very boroughs, it did take us almost a decade of dedicated FBI investigations to do it, and that was with the sultry online photos (see above) posted by your resident hottie, Anya Kushchenko, aka Anna Chapman (yowie, what a Natasha!), who nevertheless is a savvy operator who knows how to build high tech startups and bring value into market (at least, that's what her LinkedIn profile says). With a photo like that, who'd disagree?

The Plaming of these alleged spies presents two possibilities. One, it reignites the dispute between two aging superpowers over which fundamental economic and political ground is most firm, communism or capitalism. Two, it begs the question: Is Russia still to be feared as a Menace II Free Society?

A look at Chechnya might make you think no, but consider Russia's current position in the world poker tour: an economy staggering under a tax burden and an insufficient population to prop up the infrastructure for more than a couple decades, a loss of dominance in Olympic sports, and internal political corruption that threatens stability within the power structure.

What better way to announce that the sleeping babushka may rumble once more than by having a spy ring within the United States exposed? It signals ability, if not intent, to unsettle the American heartland through wily godlessness. And if their femme fatales are any  measure of their worth as enemies, we've got a hell of a fight on our hands.

So congratulations, Russia; you may once again fly the Imperialist flag proudly.

Image courtesy of Phawker

Facebook says "Privacy? What privacy?" And Cultural Imperialist heartily agrees. You don't own your privacy. In fact, you don't even have any privacy. And even if you did, you gave up your privacy rights the minute you were born. See how that works? See what I did there? Congratulations are in order. Facebook, you're our newest (and hardly weekly) Imperialist of the Week.

Facebook wants to eat the Internet, starting with your profile as an appetizer and all your friends as an aperitif, moving on to Google, Yahoo, Microsoft Live, and Twitter accounts for the main course, and finishing off with a breezy port and walnut glaze brownie. And why shouldn't it? It's been given the motivation by you, its users, to make the interwebs as easy and cheap as possible to use, and since you, the average user, can't be bothered to moderate your own security (let's face it, you're the same people still sending out chain-emails from "Bill Gates" and forwarding malware because you apparently don't know that "Click here!" equals instant Trojan death. But I digress.) Facebook has shouldered that responsibility.

And admirably so. Someone needs to step up. The internet is a scary place, but Facebook has made it a whole lot friendlier with its now-ubiquitous "Like" button. Note the many "Fan" pages (you may be reading this on Cultural Imperialist's Fan Page, how meta). Notice that when you have a profile, all your friends can see what you post, and if you don't change those privacy settings, they get to share your love with everyone in their network. Strangers of strangers of friends of you could be copying and disseminating the Facebook version of you around the globe. Isn't that a nice thing? Don't you want the opportunity to be famous, if only for one brief kiloparsec?

Facebook's frenemies are basically pissing themselves now because they didn't think of a way to own the internet first. Now that Zuckerberg has Bob Loblaw'd himself into a position where he can own the online version of you while simultaneously courting you to give more time and more content (the average Internet user spends more time on Facebook than on Google, Yahoo, YouTube, Microsoft, Wikipedia, and Amazon combined. Holy CRAP!), Facebook is primed to make itself the arbiter of all that is good and true about the Internet. And that's a lot of everything.

But the privacy thing is very simple. Many people are scared that Facebook not only doesn't care about your privacy, it is actively circumvrenting it. Here's the rub. If you're online, you've already lost the privacy game. You've given away your name, birthday, email address, and maybe phone number, bank account, and even photos to any number of corporate entities. That ToS you didn't read when you signed up? It says that in exchange for using the free service, the company that made that free service can do whatever the hell it wants with the information you freely give it, provided it doesn't harm you.

Facebook isn't the devil, and it isn't an angel. It's just a thing, a behemoth intent on using you because you are a consumer, and our open and free society dictates and encourages the natural parasitism of the creator and consumer. You are the cookie. Facebook is the blue monster. It is not evil; it's just big and hungry.

So quit your griping and hit that "Like" button. Because Facebook's eating, whether you like it or not.