CRS
Chandler, Arizona, United States

There's an old saying. If you don't want someone to join a crowd, you ask them, "If everyone were jumping off of a cliff, would you?" Well, I have. So my answer would be "Yes". True story.
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McCain and the Monster He Has Unleashed

Thursday, October 23, 2008

this entry brought to you by steve earle, "transcendental blues"


I haven't been as into this year's election as I was in 2004. Don't get me wrong, I'm into it. Really into it. I've been reading articles, headlines, every bit of information I can get on the election. I've read Obama's book, and I feel good about him. But compared to 2004, I've definitely taken a step back. In my opinion at the time, there was absolutely no way Bush was going to win, and yet he did. I felt devastated, but I felt more than that. I felt betrayed. The country is filled with idiots, filled with vast oceans of idiots-- it's one thing to think that, but it was another to have proof. George Bush shouldn't have beaten John Kerry. It seemed impossible. It wasn't a case of politics, it was a case of right and wrong, and wrong won. The following four years have been definite proof of that.

I feel confident about Barack Obama, I think he's definitely the man for the job, and he does give me hope. I think he's exactly what this country needs. And I turn on the news and look at the headlines, and Obama is beating McCain by an impressive margin in every single poll I look at. Yet even though he's beating McCain by bigger margins than Kerry was beating Bush-- Kerry and Bush were basically neck and neck at this point in 2004, while Obama, if he wins by the numbers the polls say he is ahead, will win by a landslide-- I still feel scared. I'm afraid McCain's going to take it anyway. I'm sure every Democrat feels the same way.

I've also avoided talking too much specifically about the race here on the page, versus in 2004 when the race was a regular topic, because I haven't been able to find anything new to say. Everything I think as it's happening is immediately said by everyone else, before I get a chance to say it. Yet I definitely feel like I should say something, at least for posterity's sake.

A lot of people have been comparing McCain to a grouchy old man, the crotchety type that waves his rake at the kids on his lawn. While I don't think that's untrue, to me every time I see him on television he seems pathetic. He seems like a doddering old man. He seems to not fully be aware of where he is at all times, or specifically why he's there. He's been doing politics for an entire generation, so when he wakes up and realizes he's on a podium, he waves and reads the cards in front of him, remembers to say "My friends," before every point he makes, but he doesn't seem entirely there at any point in time. And when he does seem to be completely aware of his surroundings, that's when he turns into the crotchety old man, waving his fist, paranoid the neighbors keep breaking into his tool shed and stealing his fishing line.

John McCain doesn't even seem to be in control of his own campaign, nor the things that come out of his mouth. When George W. Bush ran, he seemed like an idiot puppet, a grinning visage that was meant to distract you from the bigger menace, which was, at all times, sort of behind the scenes, pressing buttons. McCain doesn't seem like a puppet so much as he seems like he sold his soul to the devil. He seems helpless to stop the monster he's riding, so he might as well dig in and try and make the best of it, or at least blow up in the most spectacular fashion possible. At some point in time, John McCain, who, while it's come out was never the man we thought he was, was at least a man who thought he had honor, and was a man who could act in a way becoming of a man with honor. And the monster, which has been growing for the past eight years, knocked on his door, and said, look at me. I'm bigger and more horrible than ever. All the ideas that I used to destroy your campaign in 2000? I've got even more horrible, more destructive ones now. Unleash me, and I will show them the fear I showed you, only many times worse. And McCain closed his eyes and signed on the dotted line.

How the hell else to describe the most cynical campaign this country's ever seen? It's been asked whether McCain's campaign is the meanest in the history of our country, and that's been proven untrue. But this is undoubtedly the most cynical. George Bush was the puppet to a monster you couldn't see. In McCain's case, no matter what the instance, you feel the monster in the campaign. You can smell its presence. It's all around, and it does not think much of you. It thinks you are a toy, aloof and poseable, idiot and molestable, and it knows it to be true. And you know what? It's not incorrect. And it thinks this shit is hilarious.

How else to explain Sarah Palin, the epitome of cynical politics? Sarah Palin seemed initially like a self-destruct sequence, as if McCain knew he couldn't possibly defeat Obama, and, Predator-like, was dialing the buttons on his armature to set off a horrible detonation. But instead, she proved to be exactly what the monster wanted-- something to toy with America. Sarah Palin is like a cartoon character, and I don't mean that in a demeaning way, I mean that as in, she is a caricature. She's not a real human. It's as if you could press a part of the back of her head and a disk would come out. She is the ultra-conservative sex symbol, a smiling, winking beauty pageant queen with a machine gun and a giant glittering necklace that says the word "Jesus", everything middle America wants to jack off to, wrapped up in an admittedly easy-to-look at package. But if you think about it, the fact that she's pretty is really just a life-affirming convulsion after an orgasm; a sticky pool of a warm cherry on top. She could look like Condoleeza Rice if that's what they had to use. If you can imagine Condie smiling and winking and flirting and using idiotic "down-home" euphemisms while shooting wolves from helicopters with high powered rifles and whooping praise the lord, although it makes you and I choke back an involuntary gag reflex, conservatives would've instantly fallen in love with her, too. The fact that Palin looks like a model and is poised like a model and can't wipe that stupid smile off her face, like a model-- well, a model who got a job as a stewardess-- was just exactly perfect for the monster, though. If Sarah Palin is a creation, then she is a perfect creation, and its creator is pleased.

But it hasn't just stopped at this Sarah Palin creature, designed as the cum bucket for every right winger. In fact, with the introduction of this creation, the monster has unleashed its final phase, an overwhelming torrent of pure hatred. Sarah Palin is the political equivalent of one of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse. She is pestilence, and with her comes a plague of black locusts. If you watch Republican conventions nowadays, it's as if the grinning visage of McCain is Big Brother, and Obama is Goldstein, and they are practicing the Daily Two Minutes of Hate. In the book 1984, Big Brother is this symbol of all that is good. He is the leader of The Party, and although we later learn he isn't real, he is this symbol that is meant to be adored and ceaselessly loyal to. On the other hand, Goldstein is the villain, all that is wrong with the world, and every day, at 11 am, an image of him is put on the screen, and the entire nation is to spew every bit of hate they have in them at him. If you watch the conventions, they've grown to that. The audience boos at every reference to him, hissing, shouting epitaphs, crying out to kill him. I only wish I were making that up. And McCain, who was supposed to have some sort of honor-- isn't that the platform he's running on? Honor and patriotism? Never stops the audience from becoming a frothing lynch mob. Again, McCain is powerless to control the monster he has unleashed, and it keeps growing.

And Palin, this harbinger of doom, is completely bullet proof. She has instantly got her hooks into her constituency, and they're in so deep, she's got them hypnotized so completely, that any movement against her by anyone perceived as an enemy, and they'll call foul, with such fervent lunacy it's as if their party hasn't been in power for the majority of the past twenty years. It's funny how suddenly the monster is so happy to have a weapon with which to cry sexism. It pounced on the "lipstick on a pig" thing as if something was really there, like a lunatic cat chasing imaginary rats, if that cat were the size of a dinosaur, and when caught cornered in its own bullshit, refused to back down. Meanwhile idiot housewives in middle America-- and obviously I'm not saying all housewives are idiots, I'm just referring to the ones that are idiots-- went out in droves and, literally, bought lipstick as a symbol of their defiance of Obama's horrendous insensitivity, waving their them in the air during McCain rallies, as if to say, we fall in line. We are intoxicated by the monster.

All signs point to an Obama win. But there are still two long, laborious weeks left, well, less than two by the time this gets posted, and anything can happen. And I watch the news and read the headlines, and rather than feeling invigorated and pissed off and impassioned like I felt four years ago, I just feel this sense of dread. John Sidney McCain III should be ashamed of himself for letting The Monster out, and he should be ashamed of himself for not reeling his frothing masses in, for not trying to tame the beast. For not being honorable. But if McCain wins, I won't even be able to blame it on the monster. That's the worst part. It'll be America that will be the only blame, for everything of the past six months, for everything for the next four years. I don't mean to say that it'll be worse than the last eight-- it can get worse, I'm not one to say that it can't. But that doesn't mean McCain won't make things a little better. But America will be to blame for letting all of this happen, and for letting it continue on its dreadful, pox-ridden course. Even when Obama wins-- I was going to type if, but despite my worry, winners do not come from negative attitudes-- the most depressing thing about John McCain is that if he hadn't picked Sarah Palin as his running mate, he wouldn't have gotten as many votes as he will have gotten, a loser though he may be. Which means that as much as Sarah Palin has turned our nation's politics into a cartoon-- and don't believe for a second that she hasn't, or that her performance at the Vice Presidential Debate showed she can be an actual politician, because it didn't-- and has made a mockery of our country itself, she still would have turned on more people in her own party than she turned off.

John McCain and Sarah Palin believe God wants the USA to succeed. If he exists, and if he does want the USA to succeed, he will put Barack Obama in the White House. Because even if McCain makes things a little better than the last eight years, even if McCain helps the economy turn around a little, he will inevitably helping the monster grow even bigger and more unstoppable. And if that happens, God help us all.
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with love from CRS @ 11:06 AM 

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