BIEBS MEET SPICEY
Only Sean Spicer can save Justin from his own ‘bad behaviour’
My goal in life is to solve problems and bring people together.
Most days, I fail miserably. But on Friday, when I heard China banned Justin Bieber and Sean Spicer resigned as the White House press secretary, I suddenly realized this might not be one of those days.
I will now outline a modest proposal that could benefit young Bieber and keep old Spicer in the public eye where he can continue to inspire late-night comics, albeit in a much less terrifying role, which means everyone wins. Let me explain. Long before he was banned by Beijing this week, for non-specific “bad behaviour,” Bieber has needed a crisis manager the way most of us need sleep. You know, someone who can shrug off a mansion-egging or turn a DUI into a no biggie. Someone who can lie, evade, dither, shirk, fudge, browbeat, dissemble, divert, flip the script, drop kick the truth and beat the living daylights out of reality. That someone is Sean Spicer. Over the past six months, starting with a whopper on an ominous Saturday night in January — “This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period, both in person and around the globe” — Spicer’s willingness to twirl the kaleidoscope of deceptions inside a funhouse of alternative facts is already the stuff of legend.
Day after day, this bumbling automaton in ill-fitting suits gazed into the cameras and said up was down, left was right and 2 + 2 = 5. If his master Donald Trump had demanded it, Spicer would have cast aspersions on gravity by insisting the president could levitate, period, and often floated in the sky when nobody was looking.
As the chief mouthpiece for an administration in which lying is the official lingua franca, Spicer turned state dishonesty into a dark art, swallowing, regurgitating and swallowing again the duplicitous talking points like a cow with its cud. If he knocked on your front door and frantically said smoke was billowing out of a second-floor window, you’d run downstairs to check the basement for flooding because a situation, especially a disaster, is never as Spicer claims it to be.
And this is precisely why the Biebs needs to hire him before he’s snapped up by another prospective suitor, a list that no doubt includes think tanks, cable news networks, conservative super-PACS and, based on his tango with Trump, Satan. You can imagine how Sean — if that’s even his real name — would’ve extinguished Bieber’s past scandals just by recalling how he dealt with the president’s end- less transgressions:
“Justin didn’t spit on fans. He was generously sharing his DNA.”
“Can anyone say for sure Anne Frank would not have been a Belieber?”
“Look, it was dark and that bucket looked like a urinal.”
“Drag racing? No, my client witnessed a mugging in the distance and raced to help when the cops wasted valuable time chasing him instead of foiling the crime. Sad.”
Remember the bad press Bieber earned after German airport offi- cials confiscated his monkey? Now think about how this capuchin caper plays out if Spicer is riding shotgun on the fateful trip.
German officials: “You can’t bring a monkey into this country without the proper records and forms.” Spicer: “That’s not a monkey.” German officials: “What?” Spicer: “That’s not a monkey. It’s special-effects microphone. Justin, sing a few bars of ‘Baby’ into the tail and show these pints of pale lager how this furry mic converts your lyrics into panicked squeals.”
Speaking of bans and lyrics — we now call that a Spicer Segue in the world of column writing — a song that a Bieber remix helped popularize was just outlawed in Malaysia. The authorities say “Despacito,” a Spanish smash hit by Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee that just became the most-streamed song of all time, is filled with raunchy lines sure to turn impressionable youth into pelvicthrusting maniacs.
Billboard recently translated the lyrics into English and, based on how he defended Trump, there’s no question Spicer could justify every questionable line:
“Look, ‘Let me trespass your danger zones’ is not suggestive. It’s a commentary on fighting terrorism. I also fear the Malaysian government does not grasp the metaphorical nuance of ‘You’re the magnet and I’m the metal,’ ‘I want to see your hair dance,’ and ‘We’re gonna do it on a beach in Puerto Rico.’ These are not carnal inferences. ‘Despacito’ is about a metallurgy experiment in the Caribbean that is so fraught with peril, it could cause galvanic skin responses and horripilation.” People, do I have to spell this out? 1. Bieber needs a crisis manager. 2. Spicer needs a job.
Let’s bring them together and solve two problems faster than anyone can sing, “Firmly in the walls of your labyrinth.” vmenon@thestar.ca