Baby Pandas.... Awww....

If you don't like baby pandas, you're a bad person. You're probably a Republican, in fact. (Scroll down to see why.)

But you're a normal person, though, you'll enjoy these:

• Tai Shan, the famous baby panda at the National Zoo in DC.
  
• Hua Mei, born in 1999 at the San Diego Zoo.
  
• A gallery of baby pandas at the Wolong Research Center in China.
  
• And best of all, recent video from Wolong showing a bunch of baby pandas playing in the snow.
  
• Want more? Of course you do. And Pandafans.org has just what you're looking for.
  
• Can't make it to DC to visit Tai Shan, a.k.a. "Butterstick"? Thanks to the magic of the internet, you can at least visit Unrequited Narcissism and read about what it's like to be in the presence of HIs Roly-Polyness. Tai Shan for President!
  

Semi-obligatory lame panda joke:

A panda enters a cafe, orders and devours a sandwich, draws a pistol, fires a few shots and then heads for the door. "Why?" asks the bewildered waiter. The panda tosses him a badly punctuated wildlife manual and says: "I'm a panda. Look it up." The waiter reads the relevant entry: "Panda: Large black and white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves."

Updated: A few reasons why Republicans hate pandas so much:

1. Pandas come from Red China. The whole cuteness thing is a commie plot against America. Anybody who likes pandas is helping the commies, and at the very least ought to be wiretapped. Without a warrant, naturally.
   
2. The tree-huggers love pandas, and it's essential to always do the opposite of whatever the tree-huggers are doing, no matter what.
   
3. Pandas are endangered, and the eternal Republican creed is "Kick 'em when they're down".
   
4. Even if they weren't endangered, they're still cute and fuzzy, the antithesis of everything Republicans believe in. Liking any kind of animal is a weakness of character, kind of like Bill Bennett and his gambling addiction. But if you're going to do it, you should at least stick to good Republican animals, like rats and tapeworms.
   
5. They apparently don't taste good, it's illegal to shoot them or otherwise turn them into trophies, you can't train them to do demeaning stunts, it's even illegal to wrestle them. There's apparently no way at all to test your fragile masculinity against them, so what good are they?
   
6. This story has a picture of Bill Clinton posing with a Panda. Case closed!!!
   
7. They're part-black and part-white, which is intolerable. If members of the master race (i.e. polar bears) get the urge to sow a little wild oats now and then, they need to show some discretion, like good ol' Strom Thurmond. Pandas are an embarrassing and very private matter, and it's the height of tackiness to even talk about 'em.
   
8. If the free market, in its infinite wisdom, decrees that pandas need to be chopped up as aphrodisiacs or turned into tacky souvenirs or something, it's automatically a wonderful thing, and nobody has any right to interfere. What are you, some kind of communist? Oh, right, we already answered that one.
   
9. Pandas aren't mentioned anywhere in the Bible, which puts them into the same dubious category as Klingons and unicorns. It's possible that Satan put them here to confuse the faithful.
   
10. Or possibly they don't exist at all Have you ever seen one in person? No? Clearly there's a liberal media conspiracy here just begging to be uncovered.
    
11. If God did create pandas (hypothetically speaking, of course), and he'd wanted us to like them he would have put them right here in the Good Ole USA, instead of on some other godforsaken continent full of foreigners.
    
12. Assuming that other continent even exists. China isn't mentioned in the Bible either. Clearly this whole "Asia" thing was dreamed up by those evil liberals to fill a huge gap in their so-called "globe" of the "round Earth". Everybody knows our own continent is the biggest and the best. Anybody who believes in Asia and says it's bigger obviously just hates freedom. The same goes for Africa, btw.
    
13. Certain notorious liberal scientists use the panda's so-called "thumb" as an argument for their sick theory of evolution. Why do they hate America?
    
14. Pandas just might be hiding WMDs -- they've so far refused to prove to our satisfaction that they don't -- so the only patriotic course of action is to do 'em in and destroy their habitat, just in case.
    

tags: panda zoo republican