Cranky Lesbian

Look what the homosexuals have done to me!

Tag: John McCain

Fyvush Finkel for Treasury Secretary

By

On October 8, 2008

In Uncategorized

“You dopes just got schooled, Finkel-style.”

One of the many things John McCain did last night that irritated me was repeatedly invoke the names of Russ Feingold and Joe Lieberman. It felt like a very calculated shout-out (we know how much his ticket likes shout-outs) to Jewish voters, who are turning their backs on him when he needs them the most.

If he wants to pander, that’s fine. What else can he do right now but pander? I’d just like to see him really commit to it, if that’s how he wants to play things. I want to see him take the stage in a yarmulke. I want newsreel footage of him dancing the horah in South Florida — though I don’t know what the occasion would be since he currently has nothing to be happy about.

Most of all, I want him to announce that if he becomes president he will appoint Fyvush Finkel, the beloved Yiddish theater actor and star of TV’s Boston Public, as secretary of the treasury. I mean, you say the name Fyvush Finkel once and it’s like saying Feingold and Lieberman twenty times.

What better way to get your point across? And it might actually sway some of my grandparents’ friends. Oh, sure, they’re all aghast at McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate, and it’s true their rabbi belongs to Rabbis for Obama and is outspokenly anti-Palin. But they all loved Finkel on Picket Fences. That has to count for something.

Relief!

By

On October 8, 2008

In Uncategorized

“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.

Those Crazy Brits and Their Silly Headlines

By

On September 29, 2008

In Uncategorized

From yesterday’s Guardian:

Gay TV host is liberal queen of US news

No, they’re not talking about Anderson Cooper — he isn’t a pundit, silly. And the “liberal” rules out FOX’s Shep Smith, which leaves us with the brilliant Rachel Maddow, whose new MSNBC show has garnered impressive ratings for the network since premiering earlier this month. It also has the distinction of being the only show on TV that my teenage sister and middle-aged father watch together, which I think could form the basis of an inspiring ad campaign.

You could start off with a family sitting in awkward silence at the dinner table. When they do speak, their comments are terse and accusatory. The teens are surly, the dad seems exasperated, the mother defeated. But later that night, as Maddow’s show is about to start — she can stand in front of a standard-issue network promo backdrop and smile benevolently with her arms crossed as this happens — the parents put down their copies of Nixonland or What’s the Matter with Kansas? and the teens silence their cell phones and lower their laptop screens for the first time all day.

They watch the show as a family, wearing similar expressions of slack-jawed disbelief as a torrent of clips showing John McCain referring to himself as a maverick plays (or maybe it should be a clip of Sarah Palin talking about Alaska’s participation in the Russian civil war and how they bravely rode into St. Petersburg on dinosaurback to fight on the side of Union because slavery was taking jobs away from Americans — I’m sure CBS has something like that on the cutting room floor).

Then Maddow would offer some kind of wry commentary and the family would relax and find themselves united in laughter. At which point one of those deep-voiced announcers who tries to make everything sound heartwarming would say: “Rachel Maddow, bringing families together in living rooms across America.” Accompanied, perhaps, by a small picture of Rachel at the bottom of the screen and a quickie voice-over: “I’m Rachel Maddow, and I approved this ad.”

Can you tell I’ve had too much time on my hands today?

John McCain’s No Sandra Bullock

By

On September 27, 2008

In Uncategorized

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.

Sarah Silverman Wants You to Threaten Your Grandparents

By

On September 27, 2008

In Uncategorized

And she’s right. Your grandparents, if they are registered voters, are loose cannons, potential menaces that must be kept in line. Let’s look at this logically: They’re afraid of robots and they pour iced tea into gigantic old people diapers. Sometimes they drive around parking lots with 3-year-olds on the roofs of their cars.

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.

Palinpalooza

By

On September 2, 2008

In Uncategorized

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.

Alec Baldwin’s Presidential Eff, Marry, Kill

By

On June 8, 2008

In Uncategorized

“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.

Joe Eszterhas Supports John McCain

By

On February 5, 2008

In Politics

“We’re voting Versace.”

Does this mean the beloved hack screenwriter doesn’t support Cristal and Nomi’s right to marry? The news, while not surprising (Eszterhas contributed to McCain’s campaign in 2000), is almost as disillusioning as the failure of film critics to recognize Jade as one of the towering achievements in 1995 cinema, alongside Dead Man Walking, Leaving Las Vegas and Kieslowski’s Trois Couleurs: Rouge. Or something.

And before someone emails me to point out that McCain once referred to a constitutional amendment that would ban gay marriage as “unnecessary” and “un-Republican,” let me remind you that he happily supported banning gay marriage in his home state of Arizona the very next year. In short, he is more ethically challenged than your average Eszterhas character. They make a fine pair.

Page 2 of 2

Previous

Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén