Five Before Chaos

As I’ve mentioned recently, there’s been some whining about the media favoring Obama over McCain, and indeed, the Obama coverage is more positive. But it’s because the two different campaigns are like night and day… one is extremely well-organized, focused, and ideally, appealing to peoples’ better nature. The other is floundering, ever-shifting, increasingly negative, pathetic and desperate, and is appealing to the xenophobic, anti-intellectual anti-progress crowd. How is that positive?

Anyways, have a look at John F. Harris & Jim Vandehei’s Why McCain is Getting Hosed in the Press over at Politico today:

There have been moments in the general election when the one-sidedness of our site — when nearly every story was some variation on how poorly McCain was doing or how well Barack Obama was faring — has made us cringe.

As it happens, McCain’s campaign is going quite poorly and Obama’s is going well. Imposing artificial balance on this reality would be a bias of its own.

He’s running a shitty campaign and he and Bible Spice like to lie. A lot. They say things that assume their audience is stupid and reactionary, which seems to prove itself true, time and time again. That’s not saying Obama has been straight up about everything (he most certainly hasn’t), but there’s no way to put a shine on the sheer amount of bullshit and bad judgement coming out of the McCain campaign, and it’s a stark contrast to the Obama campaign. I have a lot of reservations about Obama, but since I’ve been following politics closely over the last 15 years, I’ve never seen a campaign run this well on many levels. It’s astounding, actually. There’s the occasional hiccup, but afterwards, he seems to come out of it even stronger than before.

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Choke on it, bee-yatch. I really do intend to do some serious gloating and taunting when this is all over. There will be no limits to my prickitude as I do my best to remind the right-wingers how utterly discredited their pathetic ideology is. How it has dragged this country into the ground. Their anti-people, anti-progress, Godiodiotic, plutocratic, Social Darwinist bullshit has scarred me irrevocably and I intend to wreak some good ol’ spaghetti-western style vengeance.

They will make tons of excuses. Some of the more deluded will predictably say that if only a “real conservative” had run, they would have won, going on the false assumption that somehow Americans prefer those policies. When they’re actually seen for what they are, without the spin, they don’t. The only way conservatives win is by lying and at least partially masking the agenda. Seems like the mask has fallen off. You can’t polish a turd, is what it really comes down to.

They will blame the media for making Palin look like a vacuous idiot, not the fact that Palin is a vacuous idiot. They will blame the “liberal” media, completely forgetting how it gave Bush a pass in the previous two elections and through most of his presidency, or that yes indeed, sometimes realiy does indeed have a liberal bias. Some of the bottom-feeders will probably blame it on not having prayer in schools anymore. Or the gays. Or those nasty brown people Seriously, that’s how some of ‘em think. They will not look inward. Self-reflection is not possible. They are always right and it’s always someone else’s fault. That’s what happens when you construct your own reality instead of living in the real one.

And we should continue to make them eat their own shit. There’s no nice way to put it, folks. It will be fun. I will gloat until my head explodes, if necessary.

And then we can concentrate on getting Obama on board where he needs to be. I’d love to see some of that non-existent “socialism” the deluded wingers keep rambling about. Hell, put William Ayers in charge of Homeland Security, just to add insult to injury. Fuck, dig up Huey Newton and put him in charge of something - for bonus points it’ll scare the piss out of those family members of mine concerned about Obama’s “black agenda”. Did you hear part of his educational plan is to make middle-schoolers watch Superfly and Sweet Sweetback’ Baaadasss Song?

It will be fun.

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I haven’t commented much on the election lately, due to that burnout I’ve mentioned before. But now that things are winding down, time for some random musings.

Regarding Hillary and “uneducated white voters”… I can understand the angle coming from “electability”; there are obviously more of them than not, but to look at it from a different angle, what does that say? We want the candidate that uneducated people prefer? We’ve had that for the past 8 years.

And that brings me to another point, that rampant American anti-intellectualism that I bitch about so often.  As I’ve said before, Republicans have been good at a lot of things; unfortunately all of them are bad for the well-being of the nation. And one of the biggest Republican success stories is somehow promoting the idea that intelligence, complexity, and cultural refinement are all things to be scorned, not something to strive for. In Republican world, you’re not a real American unless you like country music, watch NASCAR, drink shitty beer, eat iceberg lettuce, pray to the Sky Fairy daily, and don’t think too hard about anything. As I was getting firewood with my neighbor last weekend, I was saying how we really have this strange existence in which the ruling class in this country consists of millionaires and rednecks, basically, with the former setting the agenda with the help of and to the detriment of the latter.

When we hear the punditry go on about how Obama can’t relate to Americans because he eats arugula, there’s something very wrong here on so many levels. First, the implication that one’s salad green choice is in some way an indicator of how good a president one will be. Second, the fact that some people actually take this seriously. But the big one is that somehow it implies that the president must somehow really relate to the Bubba vote on a fundamental level. Lemme tell you something: it’s the hardest and biggest responsibility job in the world. I don’t want some uneducated hick in there. I don’t care who I most “want to have a beer with”, because I have news for you: the President is never going to have a beer with you.

Now I certainly don’t mean that a president can’t or shouldn’t come from humble working-class origins.  If anything, it is undoubtedly an asset, for they can relate to the struggles of working-class Americans. The last thing we need is another elitist, and I mean that in the real sense of the word, a person born into privilege who’s never had to go without. I don’t mean someone who eats arugula. And yes, there are undoubtedly more fine, good working-class Americans out there than not. But the current frame of thinking completely marginalizes urban dwellers (last time I checked, most people lived in cities). Those urban hipsters with the funky eyeglasses are no less American, and we do a great disservice to our country when we continue to frame what is “American” in such a narrow frame. We don’t have to be redneck nation.

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