Normally I dig around British websites every weekend for odd, lesbian-related tidbits to lazily exploit here. You might recall this one about Subarus, or the one about bisexuality being “reserved for 15-year-old goths and Abi Titmuss, you stupid lesbian,” or the field day I recently had with a lesbian sex diary that included strange mentions of sex toys and squirrels.
Tonight I come to you with nothing about lesbians. Honestly, I get lesbian fatigue sometimes. Anytime I’m around more than three lesbians who are under the age of 30 for longer than five minutes and it becomes apparent they all have histories with each other, I start rubbing my right temple in misery and despondently think to myself, “I could be watching Turner Classic Movies right now…”
CBS Evening News anchor Katie Couric recently took a few minutes off from practicing gotcha journalism (sample questions: “What’s your name?” and “How do you spell cat?”) to point out that while Barack Obama’s Tuesday victory is being celebrated as a “triumph for civil rights in America,” we’re still a pretty hateful country, as evidenced by the fact that gays and lesbians were viciously bitch-slapped by millions of bigoted voters in no less than three states on the day Obama was swept into office.
After noting the Chicago race riots of the 1960s and the progress the civil rights movement has made since then, Couric concluded: “In 1969, there was another riot called Stonewall. Thirty years later, gays and lesbians hope for their moment to return to the streets and cheer.” Thirty years?! Did she get that number from a sad old queen dressed entirely in Abercrombie garb?
Alas, Mink Stole was not a volunteer at my polling place.*
Four years ago, when I voted in my first presidential election, the line outside my polling place — a small, shabby church with a kitchen whose ancient refrigerator was covered with alphabet magnets and children’s fingerpaintings — was long and grim. And that was at six in the morning, when the polls first opened.
Everywhere I looked there were tense, glum men in business attire, yawning and impatiently checking their watches and cell phones. It was cold and dark outside, and every now and then the wind would pick up and sting my face. The wait ended up being a little more than 90 minutes long, and by the time I stepped into the church my hair was tangled and my fingertips were numb. As it turned out, the day didn’t get any better from there.
Mid-morning yesterday I went back to the same polling place, thinking of the bleary-eyed zombies who’d surrounded me in 2004, when my candidate lost. Again the line was very long, but the volunteers were better organized this time and everything moved faster. It was nice outside, warm and breezy, and the leaves rustling overhead seemed more colorful than I remember anything looking the day George W. Bush was re-elected. The atmosphere was oddly idyllic.
Yes, I really rented Top Gun just to get this image.
I’d planned on simply posting the headline, the picture, and the word “discuss,” but there’s nowhere for you to discuss anything here so that would be kind of stupid. All things considered, the only difference I see between John McCain and Goose is that Meg Ryan, a Barack Obama supporter, cried when Goose went down.
Touched by a convicted felon’s rendition of Lionel Richie’s “Hello,” judges Paula Abdul and Randy Jackson gave the man a reduced sentence.
Kit Bond, the Missouri Senator who I believe was recently played by Abigail Breslin in Patricia Rozema’s An American Girl movie, gave a rousing speech in Cape Girardeau today urging voters to support John “At Least I Don’t Plaster on the Makeup Like a Trollop, You C*nt” McCain. His greatest quote:
“Just this past week, we saw what Barack Obama said about judges. He said, ‘I’m tired of these judges who want to follow what the Founding Fathers said and the Constitution. I want judges who have a heart, have an empathy for the teenage mom, the minority, the gay, the disabled. We want them to show empathy. We want them to show compassion.'”
Oh no, not empathy and compassion! That’s just plain un-American!
MSNBC ratings heroine Rachel Maddow’s blustery, bile-spewing fake uncle*, the scary death monster Pat Buchanan, is getting all worked up over John “Sweet Coconut” McCain’s new go-to threesome (replacing longtime favorites Burt Reynolds, Dom DeLuise and Charles Nelson Reilly): Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid.
In fact, Buchanan can’t stop fantasizing about the possibility that should Obama become our next president, the Democratic trio might seductively embrace illegal aliens (that they’re illegal makes them that much sexier) and erotically tease the uninsured with promises of access to affordable health care.
These are some of the awful things Pat wants you to fear from an Obama administration:
Robert Draper’s much-buzzed-about New York Times Magazine article about the chaos behind the scenes at the McCain campaign went live on the Times website this afternoon, my fellow prisoners, and it’s a doozy. Not as explosive as some might have hoped, but still an interesting read. It’s nine pages long, so here’s the abridged version for those of you with compromised attention spans:
This summer, Steve Schmidt, the large, bald man billed as the campaign’s chief strategist, was all, “Aaarrrghhh, we’re losing!” Not in those words, exactly — I’m taking some creative license here — but you get the point. So he got together with his fellow strategists and strategized, as strategists are wont to do. Let’s listen in:
Another night of no middle-class mentions from John McCain, and “maverick” was finally off the table. As promised, my thoughts on last night’s debate, roughly as it happened:
Oy vey with Joe the Plumber! Is he fucking John McCain or something? Is he related to Joe Six-pack? (He can’t be related to Joe Lieberman, or McCain would’ve mentioned it.) If only there was a fourth debate, John McCain could’ve told us a story about another old buddy of his, Joe Mama. (BTW, Joe the Plumber’s a real prize.)
Barack Obama says “profligate.” I love the word “profligate.”
John McCain is not George Bush … he just votes with him most of the time.
“You overcook it, it’s no good. It defeats its own purpose.”
Now that the third and final presidential debate is over, can we address the “knockout” issue?
The people who write about political debates and talk about them on TV after the fact love to bring up knockout punches. It’s a subject they’re so fond of that if you Google the words “debate” and “knockout punch” together, you get something like thirty billion results. You get more results for the words “debate” and “knockout punch” than you do for “Britney Spears” and “naked.”*
They didn’t think one was landed in the vice-presidential debate; they didn’t think any were landed in the first two debates between John McCain and Barack Obama; they don’t think any were landed tonight. Here’s the thing the pundits have been reluctant to admit, on the right because they’re hopelessly stupid and on the left because they’ve been afraid to jinx themselves: John McCain knocked himself out in August when he chose Sarah Palin as his running mate.
John McCain knocked himself out again on September 15 when he said “the fundamentals of our economy are strong.” So far he has spent the month of October knocking himself out on a daily basis with his schizophrenic smear ads and the way he has allowed his rallies to turn ugly and vicious. What is left of John McCain at this point for Barack Obama to punch?
My meager thoughts on the substance of the debate are coming sometime tomorrow, but in the meantime I had to vent my “knockout” frustration somewhere.
*That was a lie. Sorry, I thought I was John McCain for a minute. If you Google “debate” + “knockout punch,” there are currently just under 47,000 results. “Britney Spears” + “naked” gets 8,400,000. Remove the quotes from the naked word and you’ll get another million results.
My parents’ yard sign was stolen, much like the 2000 election.
Note: If the time line seems screwy, it’s because this post was originally written on Saturday night.
Last night my dad did something he’d never done before in his life: He put up a political yard sign. He’s approximately one trillion years old (or maybe he’s closing in on 50 — it’s easy to lose track), so it’s something he avoided for a long time. The whole time I was growing up, in fact, I remember him rejecting the very idea of yard signs.
He’d see them pop up around the neighborhood as elections approached and he’d get that ‘blah, blah, blah, boring dad stuff’ tone of voice that would make me close my eyes and think of things I liked, like Beach Boys songs or Edina drunkenly falling out of a car on Absolutely Fabulous. Faintly he’d drone on in the background, pointing out miserable truths like “a campaign only lasts a few months, but you’ll be living next door to your neighbors for a long time after that.” Best not to ruffle feathers, then, over something as deeply personal as politics.
What was different about this election that he felt compelled to stake a sign in his lawn? I think what finally did it for him, what made him feel he had to take a stand, was the wave of disgusting rallies John McCain and Sarah Palin held this week. The tenor of those meetings turned his stomach, and to step outside his own house each day and see McCain-Palin signs in his neighbors’ yards only added to his outrage. My mom, who’d normally do anything to avoid attracting attention, agreed: they needed a sign of their own.
And so they got one. In my official capacity as the family’s paranoid cynic, I predicted it would be stolen within 24 hours. “Attach a personal alarm to it, something the thief won’t see, so it scares the hell out of him when he tries to steal it,” I advised. They seemed to think I was overreacting. But I know what kind of people their neighbors are, and they’re not as friendly as they try to appear. I also know what kind of kids their neighbors raised. (Beasts, almost all of them. Racist, homophobic, anti-Semitic little brats who thought nothing of reheating whatever Rush Limbaugh rhetoric their parents regurgitated at dinner each night and making the rest of us inhale its putrid fumes on the school bus and in the cafeteria the next day. These were kids who’d earnestly declare between bites of tater tots that Jews are “God’s chosen people,” then solemnly inform me that I’d be damned to the fiery pits of hell if I didn’t hop aboard the Jesus train.) There was no way that sign was lasting longer than 24 hours.
So … 24 hours later, the sign is gone. Someone waited until it was dark outside, trespassed onto my parents’ lawn and stole their $8 political statement, which had been the only Obama-Biden sign on their street. (It would’ve been stolen even sooner, I think, had it gone up before nightfall yesterday.)
There’s a problem with this, beyond the obvious issues of laws being broken and rights being violated. Two problems, actually. The first is that my dad is stubborn. Really stubborn. Incredibly, impossibly stubborn. If you think that I’m a stubborn jerk — and just about everyone who knows me will tell you I’m a big one — multiply that by ten and you have the beginnings of a composite sketch of my father.
The second problem is a much bigger problem, at least for the area thief. You see, my dad owns a print shop. Not one of those rinky-dink operations college kids use to make copies of black and white flyers, but a serious, professional print shop. One that’s filled with all kinds of high-end equipment he can use to print anything he wants, from books and business cards and brochures to posters and signs (including, yes, yard signs) and large outdoor banners. If he tires of paying for something that keeps getting stolen, he might be tempted to take matters into his own hands and turn his entire yard into an Obama sign of his own creation. Stealing someone’s entire yard would be pretty hard, don’t you think? You can’t exactly swipe it when no one’s looking and disappear into the night.
Not that I’d advocate doing anything that flamboyant. (Hell, I’d never get a yard sign of my own to start with. I don’t want my neighbors to know anything about me. My desire for privacy is such that I regularly put on a Reagan mask or Groucho Marx glasses and nose just to get the mail.) My suggestion was to put up a new sign that says “Stealing My Sign Won’t Change My Vote.” Too confrontational for my parents, but it’s also beside the point: They won’t settle for anything less than “Obama-Biden ’08” in their yard, and have already put up a second sign. How long until this one disappears?
