Now here’s a plumber you can get behind.

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.

John McCain has a zeal for eliminating pork from our federal budget. I’m also anti-pork, but more in the bacon sense than the “no projectors for planetariums” sense.

Speaking of trimming fat from the federal budget: John McCain knows how to save the economy. Matter of fact, he can balance the budget while riding a unicycle and spinning plates at the same time. This is all in addition to knowing how to capture Osama bin Laden — and of course having Barack Obama right where he wants him in the polls.

John McCain will be in therapy for the rest of his life over Obama snubbing his town hall events. This seems to amuse Barack Obama as much as it amuses the rest of us.

When asked by moderator Bob Schieffer if he wanted to say Barack Obama pals around with terrorists to his face, John McCain all but answered: “Me? Personally, I don’t give a lot of thought to washed-up terrorists. But if other people, like my fellow maverick Sarah Palin, want to say Senator Obama is BFFs with a terrorist when he’s not there to respond, I’m cool with that. It’s valid.”

Of all the vile, disgusting, reprehensible things that have been said leading up to this election, what John McCain really regrets is that John Lewis thinks it’s dangerous to incite hatred. I’d say McCain lost me there, but honestly I thought he was incredibly incoherent from the start of the debate. By the time he got around to defending his supporters and crying about his hurt feelings, I almost wanted to turn off the TV. It’s not that I felt bad to see John McCain embarrass himself as a man, because that’s a situation entirely of his own making. (I’m reminded of that Jonah Hill line from Knocked Up: “You embarrass yourself!”) It’s the embarrassment he brings to our country when he acts so incredibly smarmy and self-righteous that’s hard to swallow.

Hatchet! Scalpel! Incoherence!

Barack Obama talks fancy, like an educated person. Like he reads books or something. John McCain didn’t crack many books when he was languishing at the bottom of his class at the Naval Academy, so his vocabulary doesn’t quite compare to Obama’s. But he did learn two new words this week: plumber and autism. And he’ll be happy to use them for you in a sentence. Or in nineteen sentences. However many it takes to get his point across.

Speaking of autism, John McCain seemed to repeatedly confuse it with Down syndrome when talking about Sarah Palin’s son. He also seems to think Sarah Palin has spent years and years raising a special needs child, when in reality Trig is only a few months old. In other words, Sarah Palin is not yet an expert on the subject of raising special needs children. She’s not even close. If John McCain needs someone to explain to him how that works, I could put him in touch with several relatives of mine who’ve raised special needs children and I’m sure they’d be happy to help him out.

When John McCain started in on “gold-plated Cadillac insurance policies that have to do with cosmetic surgery and transplants and all of those kinds of things,” I was momentarily confused. The word “transplants” immediately brings to mind very serious matters; you hear it and think of organs being packed into coolers and transported to hospitals via helicopter. To hear it used alongside “cosmetic surgery” in a dismissive way was kind of jarring. I was all, “Wait, is he still hung up on hair transplants?”

Barack Obama will protect your uterus. John McCain will not. John McCain is sick of hearing about your goddamn uterus. Remember what Dick Cheney yelled at Patrick Leahy on the Senate floor? That’s what John McCain would yell at your uterus if he could see it today. Then he’d call it a “trollop,” plus that other word he likes to hurl at his wife. If you really fucking hate your uterus, vote for John McCain.

Barack Obama believes in equal pay for equal work. John McCain’s wife is worth a hundred million dollars, so he hasn’t given a lot of thought to that issue.

Barack Obama wants to be your president because, well, you’ve seen how nutty the other guy is. John McCain thinks he should be president because of his dad. That sounds vaguely familiar.

… The end.

That’s how I interpreted it. It was a very difficult debate to watch at times, mostly due to John McCain’s inability to answer a question without launching an ill-conceived attack and his inability to just sit there and listen. In a way it didn’t seem like a real debate at all, because only one real candidate showed up. Barack Obama was there to pay attention to the questions and offer detailed answers in a friendly, civil, authoritative manner, while John McCain was there to sulk because he’s not getting his way in a presidential election. How screwed up is that?