It might also be worth noting that McCain is trying — and failing — to connect with Hispanic voters.
When you attack your opponent for his so-called “otherness,” when you make his “otherness” an issue in venues packed with angry, mostly white evangelical types, aren’t you basically telling every voter who has some “otherness” of his or her own to fuck off?
Aren’t you also, by extension, telling every voter who doesn’t seem like an “other” (whatever that means) but still appreciates “otherness” (rather than fearing it) to fuck off as well? What kind of voter base does that leave you with, other than the dregs of society and, uh, Pat Buchanan?
“The fundamental difference between myself and Senata Obama is that I’m completely insane and he isn’t.”
Oh, that John McCain. Saying “my friends” as much as Sarah Palin says “betcha” and “gosh” — and sounding just as insincere. Telling joke after joke that fell flatter than … I don’t know, something that’s really flat. (And how about that terse exchange between Chris Matthews and McCain flack Mike DuHaime on the late edition of Hardball? Matthews clearly wanted to issue a Philly-style beat-down as they went back and forth about McCain’s Tom Brokaw/treasury secretary barb, and I’d guess a fair number of viewers were encouraging him from their couches.) Visibly seething with anger and resentment for 90 minutes as Barack Obama wiped the friggin’ floor with him. He’s really quite the character.
I couldn’t sleep at all last night, just as I couldn’t sleep the night before the vice-presidential debate. (Couldn’t sleep after the vice-presidential debate, either. It took hours for my brain to recover from the trauma of trying to understand Sarah Palin’s answers.) I’m tortured by the thought of having to endure another four years under another Republican president. I don’t know what repulsive stunts the McCain campaign might pull at this point to improve their flagging poll numbers. Part of me thinks they can’t sink much lower than what they’re already doing. Another part of me, the part that has lived around Republicans for 25 years, expects to turn on the news tomorrow to find Sarah Palin delivering a stump speech in Imperial Wizard garb — to rapturous applause and Nazi salutes.
What I do know is that after tonight’s “wipe-out,” as Andrew Sullivan is calling it, I’ll finally get a bit of sleep. Then tomorrow night I’ll start worrying again, if any of you want to join me.
Just wanted to remind you all, in case you missed it any of the eight thousand times he pointed it out last night: John McCain was never voted Miss Congeniality.
McCain seemed to wear this failure like a badge of honor, not realizing it was both a groaner of a line and a repeated reminder of his appallingly unqualified running mate, who isn’t allowed to take questions from reporters but used to put on a swimsuit for a panel of judges in hopes of winning a tiara.
Truthfully, a Miss Congeniality title could only help his campaign at this point; McCain’s irritability and juvenile unwillingness to even look at Obama during the debate hasn’t played well with voters. Plus, if box office returns are any indication, America loves a bumbling but ultimately competent beauty pageant contestant.
McCain seemed to have the bumbling part down as he informed us of the advanced age of his pen (which appeared to be a Sharpie) and launched into countless meandering anecdotes of dubious relation to the topics he was asked to discuss. What he didn’t do was convince anyone he could foil a terrorist plot as ably — or dare I say as adorably — as Sandra Bullock.*
* Well, I’m assuming she foiled the plot in Miss Congeniality. I’ve only seen about ten minutes of that movie but the fact that a sequel was made indicates everyone survived. Bullock, come to think of it, is no stranger to battling terrorism. There was Dennis Hopper in Speed, Willem Dafoe in Speed 2, cyberterrorists in The Net, the beauty pageant terror plot in Miss Congeniality. And I won’t even get into Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood. She’s a one-woman Department of Homeland Security.
If they’re anything like my grandma, they’ve been known to accidentally buy dog food for their cats — and then pass it along to you, sighing, “I don’t know, Pepper wouldn’t touch it, but maybe yours will like it.” That’s crazy, right? It makes you question their mental competency almost as much as the hideous sweaters they give you each holiday season.
The sad fact of the matter is some grandparents aren’t qualified to make important decisions, like who to vote for in the upcoming presidential election, on their own. That’s where we come in, for reasons Silverman helpfully explains in this video.
I’m fortunate in this regard. My grandparents, while insane, are not insane enough to vote for John McCain. But they are Jewish septuagenarians, a group McCain was hoping to frighten into supporting his bid for the presidency by having other right-wing sleazeballs suggest that Obama has some kind of secret, religiously-motivated political agenda that would threaten Jews.
Fearmongering is, as Karl Rove taught us in 2004, an effective way of grabbing votes. But the only candidate capable of terrifying Jews this election season is Sarah Palin, whose church is tied to all kinds of things that most Jewish voters would find alarming. (See: this and this. My grandparents aren’t Internet-savvy, so I’ve been printing these types of stories out for them to distribute to their friends.)
If your grandparents need a swift kick in the ass, take a page from Sarah Silverman’s book and tell them what’s what. If that fails, you could always point out — respectfully, lovingly, and of course with great tact — that odds are they’ll be dead in 10 years and you’ll be around for another 50. Which is why it’s monumentally important they don’t fuck this up for you. And if they let you down, it’s off to Shady Pines.
After everything that came out this weekend about a certain crazy-eyed, caribou-hunting vice presidential candidate, it would be really easy to ramble on for a few dozen paragraphs about this Sarah Palin character and the repulsive way she has thrown her teenage daughter under the bus in exchange for heightened fame. (Is she not, in a sense, the Michael Lohan of politics?)
In fact, there’s so much to say about Sarah Palin — the corruption scandal; the incalculable sexism of a campaign that thinks female voters who supported Hillary Rodham Clinton would consider voting for an anti-choice, anti-gay politician simply on the basis of her possessing both a uterus and sassy go-go boots; her bizarre decision to spend the critical hours leading up to her son Trig’s birth performing more tasks and traveling more miles than your average Amazing Race contestant — that I’m not sure Blogger has the bandwidth to contain all of it. I’m also not sure my sanity could survive such a task, as I’m a pretty impatient, all-around disagreeable sort to begin with, so I’ll leave the heavy typing to Salon’s Rebecca Traister, who covered all the bases quite nicely yesterday.
And while you’re at Salon, why not stop to take in what Thomas Schaller had to say about Sarah Palin and John McCain’s support of abstinence-only education programs. If you’re too lazy to click, this it it:
What’s galling is this: When the subject is a pregnancy to an unwed, minority teenage mother growing up in some (presumably Democratic) urban area, that pregnancy becomes fodder for lectures from conservatives about bad parenting, the perils of welfare spending and so on. But when the subject is a pregnancy to an unwed, white teenager from some small town in a Republican state, that pregnancy is…a celebration of the wonders of God’s magnificence — and choosing life!
That is a bit curious, isn’t it? I’m just hoping that CNN anchor Campbell Brown, fresh off her “live vivisection” (as Josh Marshall put it) of McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds on the issue of Palin’s foreign policy experience, gets the chance to shock and awe another hapless McCain staffer with a few choice questions about reproductive rights, sex education (the kind that talks about common sense things like birth control instead of the Bible. If Bibles really kept people from having sex, don’t you think hotels would’ve removed them from all of those bedside tables by now?) and how you can make a five-month old baby with Down syndrome a prop in a political campaign while simultaneously telling the media to back off the story of his 17-year-old sister.
To be clear, I agree with Barack Obama’s statement that the children of political candidates should be off-limits. Sarah Palin’s daughter, who didn’t choose to become a public figure, doesn’t need to be criticized by the world for having sex and getting pregnant. Her body is her business. But my body is also my business, which is something anti-choice politicians like John McCain and Sarah Palin don’t seem to understand. That’s what the media needs to be focusing on right now, not how many expletives Palin’s future son-in-law uses on his MySpace page.
“And I’ll tell you another thing: I will not be intimidated by Richard Dreyfuss.”
Maybe when you saw that post title you thought I’d write something about Barack Obama’s acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention last night. Something about how it left me teary-eyed (which it did, but only in my left eye, which is either politically symbolic or has something to do with allergies), or how alternately thrilling and cathartic it was to hear someone in a position of power stand on a stage in front of the world and articulate the pain, anger, sadness and outrage that everyone who loves and cherishes the founding principles of this country has felt so deeply over the last eight years.
Well, I’m not going to do that. You know I don’t get very personal here. But last night, after hearing MSNBC’s political commentators repeatedly (and rather excitedly) invoke the name of Andrew Shepherd, the character Michael Douglas played in The American President, as they discussed Obama’s speech, I checked the movie’s sales rank on Amazon.
As of 10:50 PM, it was #1,389. Pretty respectable for a movie that has been on DVD for nearly a decade. By mid-morning it had jumped to #699. It currently holds spot #447, outranked in popularity by various and sundry TV shows (the fifth season of NCIS is performing particularly well for something that only my grandmother watches) and an eclectic mix of films ranging from 10,000 B.C. to Babette’s Feast and the forgotten Meryl Streep/Ed Begley Jr. masterpiece She-Devil. It is, at the moment, more popular than 10 Things I Hate About You, the extended edition of The Bourne Identity and Napoleon Dynamite.
That’s how powerful Barack Obama is. People are more interested in 13 year-old Aaron Sorkin-penned movies that might have influenced his speech than Julia Stiles and Jon Heder. If only he’d worked in a subtle reference to Showgirls — maybe something about levitating nipples or Ver-sayce — perhaps the Fully Exposed Edition of that movie wouldn’t be languishing at #3,403 right now.
“I’m thinking new window treatments for the Lincoln Bedroom.”
Asked who he’d “boff, marry or kill” between Hillary Clinton, John McCain and Barack Obama, Alec Baldwin (the talented Baldwin, the one nine out of ten dentists recommend) answered that he’d sleep with Hillary and wed the senator from Illinois. Baldwin told The Observer:
“Barack would just be my long-term companion, as they say. I’d have to have sex with a woman because I’m not gay. I wouldn’t want to have sex with Barack Obama or McCain. Obama’s wife perhaps. Anybody’s wife — Bush’s wife, McCain’s wife, but no men — not even operating the video camera.”
Alec baldwin
As for McCain, Baldwin isn’t willing to kill him off:
“Maybe I’d lead him out into the woods and leave him there, and I’d come back and tell you that I’d killed him. But I’d lie, I wouldn’t really kill him. And knowing McCain, knowing his past in Vietnam, he’d make it back, he’d survive.”
alec baldwin
You know, as much as I like Michelle Obama (and I’ve kind of loved her since reading this New Yorker profile back in March) I’m intrigued by the idea of Baldwin as First Spouse. I imagine him promoting literacy to schoolchildren à la Laura Bush, but instead of sitting there all glassy-eyed and quiet he’d pound on desks and say things like, “We’re adding a little something to this month’s reading contest. As you all know, first prize is a Cadillac Eldorado. Second prize is a set of steak knives. Third prize is you’re fired.” It would really inspire children to pick up books, I think. Kids love bland, boxy luxury vehicles and free cutlery.
If you’re familiar with Chris Matthews and his MSNBC show Hardball, you already know he’s kind of a jerk. He’s done little to hide it, what with all the tongue baths he has given the Bush administration over the years and his frequent swipes at Bill and Hillary Clinton.
You might have also noticed his tendency to lose interest in interview subjects who resist coaching, or the way he spits (sometimes literally, which might explain why so many of his guests appear via satellite) questions at his panel in a tone that suggests he cares less about their answers than about making his own not-so-subtle points with what he asks them. It is also hinted at in the way he sometimes says the word “gay” like he’s saying “date rape” or “chlamydia,” but that’s a post for another day.
His agenda-pushing was certainly on full display during his Iowa caucus coverage, in the language he used to describe Barack Obama. And for the last several weeks, it has been completely unavoidable when he talks about Hillary Rodham Clinton. Matthews attacks her so frequently, so viciously, with such unabashed glee, that it almost makes you wonder if his hatred isn’t hiding something deeper. Something private. Very private.
Fine, I’ll come right out and say it. What if his invective is a decoy, partly borne of subconscious self-sabotage, that must be deployed with increased frequency as he desperately struggles to smother an illicit and all-consuming sexual passion for a powerful and unattainable woman? Seriously, consider the language he uses when he talks about Clinton possibly defeating Obama and tell me he hasn’t dreamed of the senator from New York showing up at his dressing room with a riding crop in hand, ready to punish him for all the negative things he has said about her.
That is why I was thrilled to wake up this morning and see that Matthews, in the wake of Hillary’s New Hampshire victory, is being called on his boorish, unprofessional behavior. And not just in sloppily written, ultimately meaningless blurbs by jackasses like me. If you haven’t already, you might want to check out:
