Wednesday, October 8, 2008

McCain-Obama II











John McCain: You need a friend,
but please stop calling on me

Let’s get this out of the way: John McCain is not my friend. I’ve never met the man, and he certainly does not know me.

Neither is Barack Obama my friend. He doesn’t know me, either – but at least does not pretend to be my friend.

I don’t trust people who use the word “friend” over and over again, and sound like a used car dealer trying to unload a clunker on a naive shopper. An old used car dealer, whose slick is wearing thin.

If I had to choose, I’d want Obama as a friend. But I’ll settle for giving him my vote – as the winner of Tuesday night’s debate and for president.

Obama could have done better. There were responses I wanted him to give to some of the questions, and mistakes that made me wince – especially pulling Delaware banking laws out of the political closet as an unfortunate metaphor in addressing a lack of requirements for health insurers in some states.

It might be true, but hey – the Republicans lately had not been going back to allegations of Joe Biden being cozy with Delaware-based bank/credit card companies. That’ll change as Election Day nears.

I enjoyed the spectacle of McCain dropping a line that many in the audience had probably used eBay – this from a candidate who has never even learned to email. So the work of his writers was transparent – it was just a line fed to McCain to make him sound current.

He’s not current. He’s the past. It was apparent from McCain’s repetitive answers that he’s still fighting the Vietnam war. He still thinks the only way out is victory, when there may be no such thing in Iraq any more than there was in Vietnam. Not for America, and not for Iraq after we went in and busted up the place so badly for the sake of regime change.

George W. Bush talked a few months ago about establishing a “time horizon” for getting out. One thing about the horizon – you never get there. And McCain doesn’t even have the horizon in sight.

1 comment:

MitchHellman said...

Yeah, I loved how he mentioned Whitman and eBay; apparently he didn't notice that eBay announced yesterday that they were laying off 10% of their workforce...

Hey, are you or someone you know good at stringing video clips together for YouTube? I've got a script laid out.

Imagine Isaac Hayes performing the theme from Shaft (I'm guessing he did this during the Oscars) and he says:

Who's the black private dick/
that's such a sex machine with all the chicks?/


(cut to scene from last night's debate where John McCain says:)

"THAT ONE!"

Back to Hayes:

Who's the man who won't cop out/
Tells ya what it's all about?/


(cut to scene from the VP debate where Sarah Palin says:)

"Can I call ya Joe?"

Back to Isaac:

He's a complicated man/
And no one understands him but/


(cut to scene from the VP debate where Joe Biden says:)

"Joe Biden"

(cut to McCain:)
"THAT ONE"
(cut to Hayes)
...is a bad mother--
(cut to Palin)
"Gosh darn it!"


--and we can dig it.