Politics smell like dirty socks, and yes; I’ve been known to sniff those too . . .
Watching the final presidential debate of the ’08 electoral system, I was reminded again of why we need more than two viable parties in this fucking country. I suppose I should take comfort in the fact that the talking point of change is on the lips of both candidates. Then again, we had Bush, who said he was a ‘uniter, not a divider;’ I’d have forgiven the fact that it’s barely a real word if he’d actually meant the fucking phrase. But I digress, I’ve known for sometime who gets my vote when I head into that voting booth, and even he’s been bumming me out . . .
What I saw Wednesday night was the next phase of dimming the light so that it wouldn’t sting the eyes of certain people. I saw the next shedding of ideology so that the image will be palatable to more diverse tongues.
And it’s such a bitch to watch him slip-slide and turn into a politician. It’s also understandable, let’s look at the facts . . .
Barack Hussein Obama II, the junior senator from Illinois, of mixed race, with the skin of a black man is so close to being our president;
and I feel like dancing in the fucking streets –
Obama – Osama; how many times did we see those slips?
Hussein – hung the man awhile back, after we found him in a hole with a big bushy beard.
Barack – articulate, a little bit aloof and a ‘thinker’ – why in the fuck are pundits on American television talking about how Barack can’t appear as too much of an intellectual? Do we really want a president who’s fucking dumb? We’ve had one for about eight years, and last time I checked – yep – approval rating still hovering around twenty percent.
Despite what ‘conventional wisdom’ might wish you to believe’ Barack Obama is almost certainly headed for the White House.
Now here’s the let down; because Washington, when surveyed from the seat of the presidency, is going to tear my man up, especially if he’s facing a hostile house and senate.
That’s where we sat Clinton for a second, polls howling for his blood, pundits trashing his wife because she had this foolish notion that no-one in america should be denied health-care.
God-damn I wish Hunter were here . . .
cuz’ he’d still be letting us fucking have it, right to the throat man –
The swine are still out there, it’s a simple classic rule that you have to look towards who benefits . . .
Bush right now is writing his legacy . . . and who, is going to wind up pocketing the seven-hundred-plus billion dollars that we just promised to our financial ‘markets’ who have been running some of the most absurd transactions with the potential of wealth, not wealth itself, that we’ve seen since . . .
But that’s alright, I can’t imagine why we’d be worried about a plan that’s going to be good for the economy from the administration that’s done such great financial wonders. I’d love to be confronted by the sheer bulk of words that outline that particular proposal, because while I can’t imagine that it’d be as Joycean as the patriot act, which also made it through both the house and the senate at speed during a crisis, I’m sure that it’s a great big stack of nonsense whose ‘evil’ can only truly be excised when we allow school-children to finger-paint baby animals all over the paper it was originally written on. The adults can throw the assholes who wrote the damn thing in jail and we’ll all be happier.
But Hunter’s not here right now, and I have to try to muddle through all this madness on my own. Fuck.
Ok, so whoever gets elected has this giant pile of shit, ready made to slide in their lap . . .
(note to self, edit in some sort of video montage right here)
Iraq, Afghanistan, The Stupid Fucking Economy,
Yeah, that looks tasty.
the only way it’s going to work is if we can unite . . . somehow invoke that spirit of togetherness that we’ve managed for brief moments in history, the New Deal, the general groundswell of public feeling immediately after both 9/11 and Katrina, that we lost, or perverted . . .
So Wednesday night, I’m watching the debate; watching Barack. Knowing the strategy, I understood, but I was disappointed.
Grrrrr . . . when the fuck will we get a public figure who can be honest? I mean it, honestly themselves . . . I’d like a public figure who was honestly themselves, or at least occasionally . . .
The character assassination of Howard Dean through a second long ‘whoop’ was one hell of a big coffin nail in the chances of that happening for a good long while. This country is run on spin, the 24 hour news cycle . . . instead of teaching people how to think and then giving out information, we’re only looking for new ways of providing them with ever more information, while barely checking to see if they are competent at basic things like reading.
So now we’re provided a few ways to think.
Honestly, what the fuck is the point of a small graphic on the bottom of CNN’s coverage of the debate that has ‘instant feedback’ from a ‘panel of undecided voters’ have to do with what you should think about the election?
The answer? Absolutely nothing. CNN took the time to break up the graphic so that you have two lines, one representing men, the other women. It’s just a distraction, or at least it should be for anyone who has the faintest idea of how they feel about things that actually matter to them, instead it becomes a good feedback mechanism for CNN to pull the sound-bites from a series of talking-points, or if we should be so lucky, the gaffe.
Regardless of graphs, and being the sort of person that I am, I wound up paying a bit of attention to the graphs scrolling on the lower-third, Barack acquitted himself fine, he didn’t need to go out of his way to prove himself at this stage in the game, he had to manage the fact that he was on top in the polls with grace and decorum, and I felt he did that, while still managing to brush off some of the nonsense that McCain tried to play with.
McCain handled himself well for the first half-hour or so, although I began to wonder just what in the hell ‘Joe the Plumber’ was going to look like when CNN tracked him down the next day.
‘Joe the Plumber’ of course was the plumber who had spoken to Senator Obama before Senator McCain came to town to speak to him.
Of course, the punch-line to ‘Joe the Plumber’ was that it was the same tax on ‘small’ businesses issue that McCain had brought up in the last debate, with the same rebuttal coming from Obama on Wednesday night. At one point Obama said that he’d talk to ‘Joe the Plumber’ too and then turned right to the camera, which about killed me with the need to convulse laughing . . . and to my subtle mind, that was about the best dig I saw Obama put down all night.
Ok, so Mr. McCain, if I hear the name Bill Ayers one more time . . . it’ll backfire on you, so spare us all.
And Mr. McCain, one last thing, a T-shirt making fun of you or your running mate on the chest of someone at one of Mr. Obama’s rallies is a far cry from shouts of ‘terrorist’ and ‘kill him’ at one of the rallies held by your running mate.
So in closing, and how the fuck is it that I’m talking to Mr. McCain now . . . at any rate . . . I’ll just go with it.
Sir, thank you for your years of service. If it was the same you who had run against W. back in the primaries of ’00 . . . no, even then, the two of you were arguing about who was more ‘Reganesque’
Ok, thank you for suffering horrible indignities in the name of our country, but shame on you for having so much of your convention sound like a snuff-story that I began to wonder if this was the only reason people vote for you, and if so, shame on you for toying with their sympathies like that.
In closing, have fun campaigning into November and then go sit the fuck back down in the senate and try not to feel too bitter about it you grumpy old fuck.
Those kids aren’t on your lawn, because the White House isn’t yours.
- finite