He ain't heavy, he's my brother

John F. Kennedy had Robert F. Kennedy and Ted Kennedy, but since then the presidential brother slot has been occupied by the likes of Billy Carter and Roger Clinton. Jeb Bush seems to be the exception, since he's clearly the smart one. John McCain, well, he has his brother Joe.
Obama is an only child.

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Rolling Stone's Tim Dickinson gives the goods on the Make Believe Maverick

Tonight, on a very special episode of ...

Well, you can leave your sitcom name suggestions in the comments (The Frostbacks? Flyboy and Sureshot? The Pitbull and the POW?) but this latest rumour is proof that the GOP brain trust is being run by people who have watched way too much television --and I don't mean 60 Minutes and Nova.

In an election campaign notable for its surprises, Sarah Palin, the Republican vice- presidential candidate, may be about to spring a new one — the wedding of her pregnant teenage daughter to her ice-hockey-playing fiancé before the November 4 election.

Inside John McCain’s campaign the expectation is growing that there will be a popularity boosting pre-election wedding in Alaska between Bristol Palin, 17, and Levi Johnston, 18, her schoolmate and father of her baby. “It would be fantastic,” said a McCain insider. “You would have every TV camera there. The entire country would be watching. It would shut down the race for a week.”

It worked on Rhoda, it worked a couple of times on Friends, it worked on Cheers, it worked on Coronation Street, on the Office, on Beverly Hill 90120 ---almost every television series that lasted more than a single season has a wedding episode. Whenever TV writers are running out of ideas, need a big season-closing climax or just need to get their audience back you can bet that somebody is going to be getting hitched and wacky hijinks will ensue.

And if the wedding plan doesn't work out, maybe McCain can offer Ted McGinley a cabinet post or go waterskiing or take the whole family to Hawaii or London or adopt an adorable orphan-- I know, why not a speech where McCain and Palin sing a duet of "Summer Loving" from Grease!

For I have promises to keep and miles to go before I sleep

But then, I'm not John McCain, who less than 12 hours before the first presidential debate, a event he committed to weeks ago, can't decide whether to show up or keep obstructing the business of congress in trying to put a $700 billion band-aid on Wall Street's sucking chest wound. How very Mavricky of him to start breaking campaign promises before he even gets elected. What a lovely "screw you" to voters.  I guess the woods in Washington are lovelier, darker, and deeper than we realize. My guess is that he will either cave in and show up or six months from now we will learn he hasd a "medical crisis" that prevented him from attending or even sending Caribou Barbie to stand in for him.

It is what it is, and what it is, is unqualified

I know, I know, I said we should stop talking about her, but the more I see of her, the more I'm of two minds. On the one hand, I'm delighted that the Republicans have picked such an obviously, comically unqualified candidate to shore up the glaring gaps in McCain's areas of expertise. On the other hand, I'm horrified that there is any chance at all that this woman could get anywhere near the Oval office.

Caribou Barbie, Sarah America, Bible Spice -- call her what you want, but by any name. Sarah Palin should not be allowed to work in the White House, not even as a tour guide.

The title of this post, at least the first part of it, is one of my father's favorite little verbal tics of late. I was warned that he has taken to watching FOX news -- this is a guy who has always been a centerist politically, more or less, but like many of us seems to have gotten more conservative as he's gotten older. He was Trudeau fan, but I suspect he voted for both Harris and Harper. We are both political junkies, but tend to treat it more as a spectator sport than something we would want to actually get our hands dirty with as candidates--It isn't that we don't care who wins, we do, its just that I suspect we'd both rather be handicappers or bookies than racehorses. I don't really want to drag him into this, but the fact that he didn't express outright support for either candidate had me wondering. He made some predictions, but he never really said which side he hoped would win and since he's the closest thing to a conservative I'm on face-to-face speaking terms with these days, I was curious to see his reactions to the presidential race. 

Both the Democratic and Republican conventions were on while I was back in Canada. We watched Obama's speech together and he said he thought Obama would win, but that as usual his speech was short on specifics. I couldn't watch the Republican convention with him, mostly because I couldn't suppress my gag reflex long enough or keep from making snide comments whenever Mitt Romney  or Rudy 9u11ani said something stupid, (ie: every time they opened their mouths). 

"You have to listen to both sides" he'd keep telling me as he flipped from CNN to FOX and I started to sneer at Bill Kristol. Hey, I'm a journalist, I know all about listening to both sides, but if I'm doing a story on the Holocaust and one side is concentration camp survivors, soldiers who liberated camps and every serious historian on the planet and the other side is David Irving and a couple of knuckledraggers from the American Nazi Party, it isn't a "he said/she said/who knows what the truth is" kind of a situation and I can tell one side to shut the fuck up and get the fuck out of my office with a clean conscience. Eventually, I went and watched in another room.

When it came to Sarah Palin, I was suspicious from day one. I looked around for bio info on the internet when McCain first announced he had picked a running mate, realized she had zero policy  experience, was a fundamentalist Christian, was a family values conservative, anti-choice, pro-war, pro-drilling here, there and everywhere, had ties to corrupt bum Sen. Ted Stevens and pretty much wrote her off as a losing prospect. I knew she'd never get the disappointed Hillary voters. When it came out that her teenage daughter was knocked up, I admit I cackled with schadenfreude, wondering how the hell McCain's people missed it and how they would try to spin it. I watched her speech and figured "okay, she can tell a really old joke and make mean misinformed cracks about he opponent. The republican base is gonna love her, but that's it. No problem."

But then the press loved her. And my dad seemed to think she was okay -- he seemed to like the pit bull gag--god knows he sat next to enough hockey moms during my and my brother's minor hockey days. He seemed to think she was as qualified as anyone for the job. "It is what it is" he said. This worried me. My dad is a pretty smart guy and he wasn't dismissing this travesty. Could the American people fall for this bullshit? God knows, they've fallen for some stupid shit before, but would they buy into the neocon Cinderella narrative about her being a tough and sassy hockey mom who could hunt moose in the morning and run the state in the afternoon? I hoped not, but they bought the absurd idea that John Kerry was a coward whose war record was a lie and George W. Bush was a fighter pilot/war leader, so anything was possible.

Then some cracks started showing. The GOP machine was keeping her away from the press and unfriendly crowds. Then they let her be interviewed.

"In what respect Charlie?"

"I'll try to find some and I'll bring'em to ya"

Watch CBS Videos Online

These all reminded me of something. 

The best description comes from the comments at Balloon Juice:

"I'm still in shock over how terrible the Palin/Couric interview was. "Train wreck" is being charitable -- it was more like a train derailing on a bridge, tumbling a thousand feet into a canyon and landing on a pile of old dynamite and gas drums. And then a jumbo jet crashed into the flaming wreckage. Followed by an earthquake that caused the whole mess to slide off a cliff into the sea, where the few miraculous survivors were eaten by sharks."

In a way, I'm not worried anymore.

Sorry Dad, but this is a case where one side is grounded in reality and the other is not even sure where reality is anymore--in fact, I don't think they could find reality at this point with both hands and a search party if it was safety-pinned through both ass cheeks. Seriously, if you want to be vice president and you can't even manage to bullshit your way through an interview Katie Freaking Couric, how does she think she's going to do if she has to sit down across the table from Vladimir Putin or even Joe Biden?

 I don't think anyone could watch these and get the idea that this person is well suited to be Vice President. I don't think most people watching these clips would even think she should be running the least populous, most remote state in the USA. I don't think anyone but a dyed-in-the-wool, born-again, Republican partisan would think she was even qualified to be the mayor of a town of 5,000.  Frankly I'm amazed Wallisa doesn't have a monorail, but maybe that's more of a Shelbyville idea. 

She can't seem to form and express a coherent opinion or even put together a full sentence. 

That McCain picked her should disqualify him from ever holding public office again. This choice is not a demonstration of poor judgement, its is evidence that he has lost his freakin' mind.

A pause for the GOP cause?

As we've been reminded again and again and again, John McCain is genuine hero POW who was tortured and stuff after he was shot down during a bombing mission to burn women, children and villages in North Vietnam from several thousand feet in the air. Apparently this brave air warrior is askeered of debating Barack Obama and is calling for a time out in the presidential campaign to "put country first" once again and deal with the financial crisis as only he can.

It's interesting that McCain came up with this brainstorm only a day after his poll numbers took a serious hit. It's also interesting to note that he hasn't voted in the Senate in five months and has missed more votes this term than any other member except Tim Johnson, who had major brain surgery. Also interesting is the fact that two days ago, McCain hadn't even read the three page bailout proposal he now feels that only he can push through Congress and save us all from the mess he and his helped make. Especially interesting since he told us only the other day that the "fundementals of the economy were strong" and has previously admitted he doesn't understand economics.

George W. Bush managed to debate John Kerry twice while he president of a country that was at war and McCain thinks he is indispensible in getting this no-strings-attached, no-oversight $700 billion handout through congress? Or is he just chicken? This is all about keeping himself and Caribou Barbie out of the debates.

Thankfully it doesn't look like the Obama campaign and the media are going to play along with his attempt to get himself some political breathing room and put the brakes on the Democrats momentum with this cheap stunt.

My world no longer makes sense

Please understand that among the two-legged lifeforms that populate the Earth, there are few I loathe more than Paris Hilton. She is a cringe-inducing, spoiled, dim-witted, wealthy skank who is famous for being a vapid, skanky, shallow, spoiled, materialistic media-whore. And she's a total skank. And dumb as a Prada bag of Louis Vuitton platinum, diamond-crusted hammers. And not especially good looking, even her porn isn't hot. And in addition to giving me hives, her television show epitomizes Everything That is Wrong with the Western World. And did I mention she's a total skank?

Well, that was what I used to think. Then John McCain used her in an campaign ad to try to hint that Obama was a lightweight - and I suppose he wanted us to think Obama was as dumb and skanky as Paris Hilton, or at least as big a media whore or something. Naturally Obama supporters either sputtered and fumed about how unfair the comparision was or laughed at the idea that this was the best the Republicans could do. The Skank Princess' mommy came out of the Hilton palace to say that she didn't think it was very nice of McCain to compare her darling daughter to that no-talent skanky nutbar Brittany Spears and I figured that was that, on to the next round of brainless negative campaign ads as the McCain campaign continues to clutch at straws.

But then I saw something that shattered all my preconceptions.

See more Paris Hilton videos at Funny or Die

Now, I doubt she had a hand in writing the script for this. For all I know she didn't even pick out the shoes she's wearing and I still think Paris is a skank, but I'm not so sure about the dumber than a designer bag of overpriced hammers part anymore. This is actually pretty clever.

What next? Will they let someone on American Idol that isn't a douchebag sing a song that doesn't suck? Will Jerry Bruckheimer start producing a film version "The Cherry Orchard"? Will Stephen Dion kick the living crap out of Jason Kenny and Stephen Harper in the lobby of the House of Commons? Will the temperature dip below 30 degrees in Tokyo this month? I'm so confused.......

Equality vs convenience

Shorter John McCain: Justice and equality are important, but not if it means a bunch of lawsuits and stuff.

To the "sour grapes" crowd within the Hillary camp: Are you still sure you want to vote for McCain if your favorite doesn't get the nomination?

One wonders whether McCain would have voted against striking down the Jim Crow laws on the basis that getting rid of the laws that allowed segregation would have just lead to more lawsuits against bus companies and lunch counter owners.