Okay, first, for all you non-politicos sick of reading my posts about the election, I'll satisfy you early: it was reported this week that pop culture icon Rolling Stone is shrinking the size of its magazine. I'm talking actual physical size. It will now be the same size as every other magazine on the shelf, with a roughly 8 1/2" x 11" page size. So, for all you non-conformist college students who ordered the magazine to "stick it to the man"... you'll be pleased to know your non-conformist magazine is conforming.
Now, onto Misdirection '08...
This week marked the third and final presidential debate between candidates (named in alphabetical order so as not to appear biased) John "Don't Vote For Him, He's Old" McCain and Barack "C'mon, Is There Really A Competition At This Point" Obama. Not five minutes into this debate, McCain used an anecdote of a man at an Obama rally earlier in the week. The man is a small business owner worried about being taxed if he earns more than $250,000 (part of the Obama tax plan). His name...is Joe Six-Pack. Wait, no, that's not right... hang on here.... oh, here it is... Joe the Plumber. No, wait, that's not it either... hold on... oh, got it right here... Joe Mama. Oh, wait, I guess I was right the second time.
Yes, Joe Wurtzelbacher quickly became a "media darling" after McCain WOULDN'T SHUT THE FUCK UP ABOUT JOE THE DAMN PLUMBER. During the FIRST conversation about Joe, I got bored and started watching The Daily Show from the night before. I tuned back in for the debate 20 minutes later.. and the second sentence from McCain mentioned JOE THE DAMN PLUMBER! All this guy wanted to do was to give Obama some shit about his plan and get him to say "No, sir, you will not be taxed because you clearly are far better than the rest of the people in this world." Let alone we didn't hear that his wife is ALSO in a high-paying career in a similar field... she's a hooker. Oh, come ON... she OBVIOUSLY would know just as much about laying pipe as her husband! Okay, okay, I'll stop with the Joe the Plumber jokes. I'm sure we've all had MORE than our fill of plumber's cracks.
During the debate, McCain also expressed outrage that Obama would not repudiate the comments of a friend of both of theirs, Senator John Lewis. Lewis has spent the last few weeks comparing McCain and running mate Sarah Palin with a politician known well for his..um..."off-color"... oh, hell, they were RACIST comments... George Wallace. Okay, I can understand why McCain would be upset about being called a racist. Lewis also drew a link between McCain and a church bombing in Alabama. That TOTALLY pissed off McCain! He doesn't cavort with people who want to blow shit up in the U.S... he leaves that to Obama.
Yeah, kinda indignant on McCain's part to be compared to a terrorist act when he and Palin have been linking Obama with "known terrorist" Bill Ayers. "Paging Mr. Kettle, Mr. Kettle, there's a Mr. Pot on the phone for you..."
And the racism thing... why on earth would we get that impression from McCain? It's his VOTERS who are the racists! Like that nice, old bigot who, at a recent McCain rally, expressed she was afraid of Obama because he was an Arab. Wait... what? First, not an Arab. Second, does she usually find herself afraid of people of other ethnicities? Ohhhh, she apparently got her information about Arabs from the Wikipedia entry:
"Arab: see also Terrorist, Mad Bomber, Someone Who Doesn't Speak English, Someone Who Likes To Rape Old Women. Author: Mohn McJain." (It probably doesn't help that Palin is telling people that Obama is hanging out with terroristS, but can only name Bill Ayers. David Letterman asked him about those comments point-blank on the Late Show last night... to which McCain responded that not everything said in this campaign has been totally accurate. You think?)
At least McCain had the good taste to say she had no reason to be afraid of the tan-skinned man. I can't remember... did he respond to the person who shouted from the crowd at an earlier rally about Obama, "Off with his head"? Real classy, America. We've used our Freedom of Speech and Religion and turned it into "That thing in the constitution that comes up right before the part that says I can have 20 loaded guns in my home," which, by the way, it doesn't. It's a military right, not the right of every redneck, uneducated piece of shit in the country to have a gun in their homes that will eventually kill their children in an accidental shooting preceded by the words "Hey, Bobby, check THIS out!" Ladies and gentlemen, the law enforcement officers of America.
I digress... bottom line, this is a RIDICULOUSLY contentious fight for president, one that's forcing people to cross their own party lines and "root for the other guy." Example: Chris Buckley is the son of the founder of the magazine National Review. I don't want to point fingers, but I think most people at the magazine would agree that it's generally a conservative, right-wing, Republican publication. Anyway, Buckley (again, the son of the FOUNDER) wrote a recent column endorsing Obama. Seeing how that might not gel with the editorial board at the magazine, he resigned shortly after he wrote the column. This is not a critique of Buckley or National Review... it's just one example of how people are so sick of the past 8 years of George W. Bush mo-running the country into the ground. Heck, even McCain's statement that he'll get Osama bin Laden sounds SANE.
Anyway, McCain has done a brilliant job of forming a lynch mob... er, group of supporters... during the campaign and looked like an idiot doing it. Obama, meantime, is trying new things in this campaign. I won't say he's not attacking McCain and Palin (let's be fair), but he's also planning a 30-MINUTE campaign ad to air before the election (a la Ross Perot) AND is putting his campaign ads in video games with online connectivity (like on the Xbox 360 or Playstation 3). Billboards and other signs in the games will show Obama ads in at least 10 swing states between now and election day. BRILLIANT! That's someone who KNOWS about new technology... more on this in a second...
I want to interject here that I have lost a lot of faith in the voting process in the past 8 years. In 2000, the presidency was left riding on the number of votes in Florida and the number of Republicans vs. Democrats sitting on the Supreme Court. In 2004, after Bush had already started a war with a country that had NO weapons of mass destruction and, to this point, has NOT been proven to be hiding Osama bin Laden, people STILL re-elected him! So, no, I can't say that I'm going to vote in this year's election. Yes, every vote counts, and I strongly encourage you, if you have an informed opinion, to get out and vote for whoever you think will best serve the country. If you still don't know who to pick, but still want to vote, I IMPLORE you to PLEASE do some kind of homework on the issues. I recommend visiting the campaign websites of both candidates (and even Ralph Nader, just to see what he's all about). Don't watch news reports on the candidates. You're likely to get biased coverage. Fox appears to some viewers to be right-wing. CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC... they appear to some viewers to be left-wing. No one is reporting on Nader. All of that is fine and dandy for viewers who already know who they plan to pick. But for those of you "undecideds" out there, please go directly to the campaigns and find out what their plans for America are. Unedited, untainted coverage. There might be a few half-truths in there, but at least you're walking in with a healthy amount of skepticism, something that's sorely missing from viewers of local and national news coverage. But, I can't see a point in wasting my time in a process that has abandoned any common sense since I became old enough to vote. (However, I'm still on the fence)
Anyway, back to the point I was making earlier... Obama has a good feel for new technology and how to use it. McCain... I doubt it. Here's WHY McCain's TV won't even work past February:
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