Bob's Your Uncle, Have A Fag

AOL / Time Warner / HBO / Cinemax / People Magazine / DC Comics / CNN / Turner Broadcasting decided this week that it was finished buying up every conceivable media outlet, and would instead concentrate on de-magnetizing the moral compass of the planet. Turner Broadcasting, who owns the rights to Hanna-Barbera cartoons, including Tom and Jerry, The Flintstones and Scooby-Doo, has decided to hunt through more than over 1500 scenes of the classic cartoons and edit out any which “glamorized smoking.”

According to the original complaint, which was directed to a British media watchdog, Turner has “proposed editing any scenes or references in the series where smoking appeared to be condoned, acceptable, glamorized or where it might encourage imitation.”

The spokesperson for Turner Europe, Yinka Akindele, was quoted as saying, “Our audience is children and we don’t want to be irresponsible.”

You don’t want to be irresponsible. So you will edit out scenes of a cartoon cat rolling a cigarette. Just in case a child decides to imitate his actions. But you will keep the scenes in which the same cartoon cat is repeatedly bashed over the head with a meat tenderizer, sliced in a guillotine, and then dropped off a 15 story building into a box of nails.

Right. Good thinking. There’s no danger of kids emulating violence using everyday items they might find around the house, butbut after watching Tom and Jerry, children have been known to rush out to Te-Amo and pick up a deck of Newports and a Macanudo.

Here’s some more insidious pictures of reprehensible individuals with their malevolent smoking apparatus:

Albert Einstein

JFK

Ol' Blue Eyes

I’m really eager for Turner Broadcasting to expurgate these images from the American consciousness, because I sure as hell don’t want my children growing up to be famous Statesmen, Artists or Scientists!

And here’s the best part of it all: This proposed blue-penciling of our history was brought about by one viewer who took “offense” at a Tom and Jerry cartoon being aired on a British television station. One man. Who isn’t even from the country that created the cartoon. Hey buddy, did anyone ever tell you that there are various switches and buttons on your remote control which allow you to choose the programs that you and your over-protected bastard spawn watch? Here's an idea: locate the "Power" button, switch off the telly for a few hours, go out of your flat and play some cricket in the loo or whatever it is the fuck you people do in England, and that way you won't have to worry about us Americans and our wacky animated rodents' nicotine addiction somehow influencing your idiot children.

I think George Carlin said it best: “If your kid has a role model, and you ain’t it, you’re fucked.”

England. A country that for half a century only had three television channels showing scantily-clad women being chased around a park bench by an overweight pervert in a sailor's hat is suddenly the de facto authority on ethics and decency in broadcasting.

Maybe I should write a letter to the BBC, expressing my moral outrage at the fact that the British consider items with names like “Bangers and Mash,” “Bubble and Squeek,” “Toad in the Hole,” and "Cock a Leekie Soup" to be food fit for human consumption. Think of the effects that a cooking show set in Manchester would have on the nation's impressionable youth! Televising such images may lead our most fragile and innocent citizens into thinking that it somehow glamorous to eat concoctions that sound like they were named after debauched sexual practices.

Utterly repugnant.