Well, that happened. Bravo unrolled its fifth entry in their wildly successful reality franchise and it was, well, something of a death knell, methinks. For the series, for DC, for women in general. It was just plumb awful, wasn't it?

The series is set in Washington D.C., which is of some national significance. In case some of you are reading this in a foreign land or are the product of an Eastern Liberal public school education which teaches nothing of true patriotism, I'll provide a brief history of our capital city.

Four score and several centuries ago, our nation's Algonquin fathers joined up with a group of Portugese fur miners to build this new United States settlement, in the dingy swamps of Swampscott, MA. (The man who first found the swamp was named Scott.) It was a noble endeavor and a hard-won national birth. We early Americans (I am three hundred and twelve years old) repelled the jealous British (who wanted America's rich natural orthodontia reserves all for themselves, which we clearly did not give to them) and finally beheaded French general Lafayette on the steps of Gettysburg Cathedral in 1902, delcaring ourselves sovereign over the five original colonies — New Caledonia, West Belgium, Brickshaven, Massaconnecticut, and Rhode's Island of Slaves. Seeking a new seat of government after the Will 'o the Wisp attacks of 1913 made remaining in the swamps of Swampscott both untenable and terrifying, a new brackish morass of horse flies and eels was discovered a few hours south. As its founders were avid fans of the Wizards basketed-ball squadron, they named this new city Washington D.C. (the D.C. standing for Drew Cleary, the Wizards' well respected strength and conditioning coach). Due to its deep river port and abundance of delicious, salty Eel Snacks, a beloved treat at the time, the city's political prominence grew and grew until it because what you see today: a fetid stinkheap of horrible monster people crawling over each other to grab whatever shred of power, real or imaginary, they can get their mutated, talon-like hands on. That is the wonderful history of the Capital. Cue fireworks.

Yes, these women are horrid. Let's take a look at who they are.

Stacie
 Stacie is the the Harvard Business-educated real estate agent with a nice home and a nice family. She met Barack Obama "yearrrsss ago" and likes to hitch her wagon to his star any chance she can get. She actually lives in the downtown area of the city (known as New Eelington), which she thinks makes her more of a D.C.-ite than the rest of the gals on this clanking, smoke-spewing jalopy of a television program. In true geographical-logical terms, she is correct. That she lives in the city of Washington D.C. makes her more of a resident than women who do not live in the city of Washington D.C. But in terms of a more intangible D.C.ness? Well, I'd say the other ladies are just as status-obsessed, if not more, than she is. I've no particular beef with Stacie, I just think she's sorta sad. When she had her little chef dinner party ("He's Janet Jackson's personal chef," she told us about fifty million times, as if being Janet Jackson's personal chef involved anything more than a six month schedule of making tuna macaroni and cheese four times a day, followed by a six month schedule of salads and weeping, year in and year out) she invited British bitch Cat (we'll get to her) and Cat was telling drawling stories about her husband being buddies with Barack Obama and Stacie kept saying "OK, then you have a dinner party and we'll all go and meet him. Yeah, we'll meet him." Stacie really wants to meet Barack Obama! But waiiiittt Stace. I thought you already knew him. AHA. A chink in the armor of Stacie, the true D.C.ian.

Lynda
 A little known fact about Washington D.C.'s interesting and varied history is that in 1922 a brilliant but slightly deranged scientist, Dr. Jefferson Memorial (his sprawling, neoclassical laboratory is now decorated with cherry blossoms every year to commemorate the anniversary of his birth), conducted a series of experiments that would alter the course of evolution forever, just in a small and mostly unknown way. Overcome with a dangerous love of Eel Snacks, Dr. Memorial decided to take an eel as a wife. After several years of wedded bliss, Memorial decided that he and his eel bride, Patricia, should have a child. Thus ensued years of hideous genetic experiments full of progress and setbacks. Eventually, after nearly a decade of toil, he produced the world's first, and possibly only, eelperson. He named her Lynda. These days Lynda, her father long dead and mother long ago slithered off to the mysterious Sargasso Sea, runs "the biggest modeling agency in Washington". Well, it's not hard to be the biggest when you're the only one, is it? So that's what she does. She also dates a much younger man who looks like what would happen if Wayne Brady and Seal made gentle love and a baby was made (Seal the recording artist, not some Dr. Memorialian experiment). She totes him around town and coos and flirts and cackles about her delicious models, whom I suspect she pimps out. How else would she make money? She said she mostly "caters to the diplomats and dignitaries" and some such nonsense and it was like, Wait, what? What do they need with models? It's almost like they— ohhhh, oh I see. Models — wink wink, nudge nudge, groan groan. Suuure. "Hi there, I'm the king of Latvia, can I have a model sent to my modeling dungeon in Adams Morgan for a vigorous bout of modeling, please?" I get it, Lynda, you clever eel-freak you. I get it entirely. But whatever, good for her. I don't know what else she did this episode. Who cares. She has some potatoy children who seem of no consequence one way or the other. Actually most of the children on this show are potatoy. Most of the children on all Housewives shows are potatoy. What are wealthy nouveau riche Americans serving their children to eat? Is there something in the Housewife water? It's really weird. Just scads of potatoy children. (Dear Albie, sex mongoose of the ages, I mean not you.) Uh, anyway, whatever. Lynda the Eelperson is probably the second least-bad person on this terrible baloney fart of a television series. Good for you, Lynda. Her best moment was when she referred to the Salahis' (whom she has a tetchy social relationship with) polo match as "a goat rodeo". I have no idea what that means, but obviously I love it. Ten points for Eel House. (Slitherin'? HAHA.)

Cat
 Cat is the aforementioned British bitch. She's got a sort of posh accent and grew up "just outside London", which seems a point of some stuttery shame. I wonder if maybe the accent is a bit put on. Maybe she's really the daughter of a chimney sweep and good-hearted, jigging prostitute named Nelly Winslow Jones, who was found floating face down in the Thames with 'er best lady bits cut righ' outta 'er body, they was. Who knows! It's possible. Either way, Cat has fled the rocky isle to make a new go of it in America, with her dashing White House photographer husband, a pair of pale-faced daughters, and a breezy, lazy attitude that seems charming for about five minutes and then sours into cold eel pudding. I mean, it is funny when she dismisses the Salahi polo match as low rate and stupid. It is fun when she cuts through the other H'wives' grimy ambition with a well-placed brag about her close relationship with people of note. But then you see how brittle and dull she is, so busy being bored with everything that she's forgotten to do or create anything interesting. Apparently she had some dramz with her first husband. Apparently she wrote a book called Inbox Full that is a gross title, like a really gross title, as if she had many emails in her inbox at one time, which is a terrible image. And then she went to the polo match and said bitchy things, and then did something else and said bitchy things, and then finally she went to Stacie's chef dinner party and said bitchy things. Some of the things were funny. She was very accurate about why Tyra Banks (oh, Celebrity Chef has cooked for Tyra Banks too, faboooo) is annoying in an interview segment, but then when Stacie and her friends asked why she didn't like Tyra Banks all she did was this horrible 'black person accent' that was so thuddingly mortifying. British people can be weird that way about race. Did anyone see Martin McDonagh's play A Behanding in Spokane? It was McDonagh's first play set in the States and involved black people and it was so fucking racist. Like just flat out racist. And he didn't mean to be, it's just sorta the way that some people from the UK see American depictions of race. It's OK to do gangsta voices and say "nigga" and shit like that. They just don't understand the various, years-deep nuances and all that. So when Cat did the Tyra black voice in a room full of black people (oh, yes, Stacie is black), it was just sort of hideously embarrassing. Stacie frowned. She also frowned when Cat said she doesn't love Obama but that Bush was a class act. The only one that agreed with Cat was the other white lady there.

Mary
 The other lady there was Mary. Though the Salahi woman (who we're getting to) is the more obvious choice for The Worst one on the show, I think the actual Worst one is Mary. Mary is youngish and yet has had some sort of professional Face Mangling procedure that is just... It looks like she got cheap plastic surgery on a whim while vacationing in the Bahamas. "Oh neat, I'll get my hair braided, and... oh, yes, a Face Foldening, that sounds fun! Gotta love these Pina Coladas!" Whatever. I don't hate her for that. I hate her because she is dumb and vain and talked about her family's historic political legacy (dad was a lobbyist — congratulations, you're half monster!) and hanging out with the Kennedys and she's just such a little grasper. She's also a tremendous embarrassment. She said embarrassing race things at a birthday party for sad ladies who like doing sad things, like hurling wine around a room and yelling. (God almighty, I'm so upset that these shows have invented the new sacred pastime of dumb, new money women sitting in soft-lit bad expensive restaurants, hurling wine around and yelling. It's increasingly insufferable to watch. "Oh ladiesssss! Wiiiiiiine!!" they say, then clap and giggle, as if they'd just thrown off the corset for the first time, just pulled their first lever in the voting booth. No, ladies. You've had decades to assert yourselves and be proud and independent and you have frittered and pooped it away for fashion and money. Saying "Ladiessss, wiiiine!!!" does not make up for that, it is microscopically too little, far too late. "Ladiessss, wiiiiine!!" No, shut up. You're not sassy fierce independent women. You're drunk idiots standing in a room embarrassing yourselves on national television. You wanna do that, fine, it's a free country. But don't look at the camera as if to tell younger audience members, "This is what success looks like, girls." It's not, girls. That's what failing up looks like. And people who fail up may have fun for a while but when they die they go to San Diego, and they work in offices for eternity, and they never see the ocean. It's a banal kind of hell.) ANYWAY. Mary got drunk at a party and Stacie the Black Person was there and Mary was all sloshy and said "We need to integrate our hair salons... Juss because we have different hair, we need to go to the same hair salonsss... With this wonderful man in office right now..." And it was OHHH GOD. I'm so sick of it! So sick of everyone getting all hallowed and hushed when they talk about Obama. "This man..." BAH. Stop it. Stop trying to co-opt something that has nothing to do with you and that you don't understand, Mary. Stacie politely laughed it off and chalked it up to the wine. Sure, I guess. But here's a terrible and maybe offensive theory: Isn't the way that some white people adore Obama a little bit racist? Like, "Oh, I can now talk to black women about their noble proud hair and call them Halle Berry because I voted for Barack Obama." It's such lumpy, simple reasoning. Oh, Mary. Shut up forever. Mary has five kids, potatoes all, and they did a super special cutesy photoshoot that was painful and, in Mary's case, wine-soaked. Ugh. Mary also has a biometric fingerprint lock on her closet door so her oldest daughter, Golden Russet can't get in and wear her mom's clothes. ("Same size, same style!" Mary the Goat brayed during her own private sad rodeo interview, as if she should aspire to dress like a bewigged potato.) Mary stood up for George Bush when Cat was saying her British bitch stuff. Mary has a terrible husband with terrible hair who owns several pairs of pink pants and together they think that they are the classiest, preppiest, Beltway power playeriest people on the block. They are two french fries lying in a sink getting soggy. That's all they are. They went to a big party for Washingtonian magazine where the husband and Lynda were hailed for their fashion and it was like, ohhh bigshots! D.C. fashionistas! Ha ha, lamemobile. Mary is awful. I'm not sure I'm articulating it properly. Sorry.

Michaele
 Michaele is the monster woman who broke into the White House last year with her strange Nermal of a husband. Michaele is a social butterfly who flits around as if the butterfly just main-lined a small shipping container's worth of ephedrine. This lady is a toe-up drug addicted psychopath. She was here and there and kissing and hugging and joking and laughing in her terrible deep smoking voice. She's strangely apish and liver-limbed, all gangle and knob. And she makes absolutely no sense. She starts sentences and then laughs or claps or darts away in the middle of them. She talks about going to Congressional Black Caucus events that she assuredly was not invited to. She knows a stylist, the best stylist in D.C. (again, not hard to be the best when you are the only one), named Davidian or some balls who has crazed hair that changed in every scene. (Davidian is also friends with the Eelperson, better friends even, and he hissed mean, eely things to her about Michaele in a scene that was both satisfying and ugly.) I don't really even know how to talk about Michaele. I don't really want to talk about Michaele, lest she Google search herself and find this and have one of her bone-scraping sawdust orgasms over another mention of her stupid, awful name. YOU'RE A HORRIBLE CRAZY PERSON AND YOU NEED TO STOP TAKING DIET DRUGS, MICHAELE. There, she probably saw that from space, where spends a lot of time doing mercury bone dances and mining star colonies for her magic white energy powder. Michaele and her husband, Tareq the Dinosaur Hunter, live in the "Virginia wine country" which is so not a thing I laughed until my face bled when she said it. "Oh yes, the Virginia wine country. Yes, of course, that thing that exists, entirely. Me, I live in the Baltimore olive groves. And have you met my friend Barry? He lives on the Arkansas shoreline. Beautiful, beautiful." Ugh. So they live out in a tract development area in some fart-infested corner of Virginia, one our most boring states (you're still winning, Connecticut), and they drive into D.C. to ritually embarrass themselves. In this episode they had their sad dog and pony polo match, in which mighty Tareq, brandishing scepter and billowing lamb-fattened gut, scored a horse goal or whatever you call it in sad people polo. Michaele bounced around and said weirdo things and did her shaky-breaky cartilage dance and everyone got worried. Later she did other stupid things and said more stupid stuff but by then we'd already thrown our treasured ceramic bald eagle figurine, measuring three feet in length, through the television and were on hold with Canada about becoming citizens through their Mounties 'n Moose training program.

UGH. I hated this stupid awful fucking show so much, guys. They were all so pathetic and aware of the cameras and trying to be these political movers and shakers. When the New York Housewives try to do it with New York society it doesn't really matter because New York society is a completely useless, frivolous thing. But this is politics, actually life-changing stuff, we're talking about here. That these brainless goats think that they can flop their way into the scene just because they vacuum-stippled their gorgon faces and put bows on all their potato children and buffered their Cornell dorm room chronic masturbators with no friends but hey they still went to Cornell husbands is just such a sad indicator that maybe none of this really will mean anything soon. Maybe politics will always be a game and the doors will open wider and wider for the D.C. Housewives and Professor Sharron Shitbox Infuckinguts Angles of the world and we'll all just languish and die and turn to dust while the eels swim away to find somewhere better. I hated this show. I never want to watch it again.

But this is America! So let's put it to a vote: Should I continue to watch and recap this television program for the rest of its miserable but blessedly short run? Or should I scrap it? Cast your vote in the comments.

For now I'm going to put on my tri-corner hat and get out my sparklers and march down to Antietam Air Force base, where we defeated the Cuban huns in 1972. It's the most patriotic thing I can think to do in the midst of all this horrid abject misery. Ladies, you all completely embarrassed yourself and no one thinks you're interesting or fun or exciting. You all fucking fail. God save America.


Note: This is satire. Obviously, nothing stated herein is intended to be read as the literal truth.