Let me start out with this: fuck Joe the Plumber, can we say that one time?
So help me God, I am going to find Joe the Plumber and bash his skull in with a pipe wrench. Joe the Plumber’s got the money to throw around to buy a quarter-million dollar a year business. Joe the Plumber’s a rich guy. The only business I have the money to get into would be if I wanted to buy out the queen in the third stall in the bus station men’s room.
But apparently Joe’s a big deal because he said Obama’s tax plan meant that he probably wouldn’t invest his money in that plumbing business. Good call, Joe! Invest it in the stock market instead! And then you’ll qualify for a tax break from either candidate when you go fucking bankrupt next week.
I refuse to give a fuck about Joe the Plumber just because he made his fortune in a job where he shows his asscrack. If Joe made his money showing his asscrack in gay porn, this would have been a very different debate. It would have been entertaining.
I couldn’t even make it through the entire debate last night. About halfway through it struck me that I was pissing away my time watching two grown men acting like yippy dogs, alternating between snapping impotently at each other and humping up on my leg to get a Snausage. Which would be entertaining for the twenty seconds it would take to get a YouTube video out of it, but after twenty months of this shit, I’m ready for someone, anyone, to be mercifully put down.
I am tired of hearing Barack Obama broken-recording that John McCain plans to shovel money at oil companies like they’ve sent McCain his daughter’s little finger in a box. And I’m tired of hearing McCain talk about his commitment to alternative energy with one breath, and his commitment to start offshore drilling for good old oil with the next; it’s like saying you want to try tantric sex, but only if you can try it by plowing a new hole… and anyone who’s dated a woman for longer than two weeks knows that that argument’s a non-starter.
But still, I watched some of it. And after four and a half total hours of debating, what I want to know is: what the fuck is McCain writing? Over three debates, every time Obama starts talking, McCain is feverishly scribbling something in his notebook. It can’t be new arguments, since both he and Obama pretty much stick to the same old tired talking points in these things. My guess is, if we could get our hands on one of those notebooks, it would be filled in cramped, John Doe-style writing, with “Don’t call him a negro, Johnny-boy. Don’t call him a negro, Johnny-Boy…”
From a pure entertainment standpoint, the only reason to watch any of these debates has been John McCain. Let’s face it: Barack Obama speaks in the same measured tones, he never loses his temper, and he never goes off message. In short, he comes across like he’s playing to tie, which is boring. But McCain is desperate, which makes watching him fun, if only because he changes positions faster and more often than a porn star who chucked his Adderall.
One minute he’s saying that he wants to buy up every defaulted mortgage in America, the next he wants a complete freeze on all federal spending. “I would have, first of all, across-the-board spending freeze, OK?” McCain said, “Some people say that’s a hatchet. That’s a hatchet, and then I would get out a scalpel, OK?” So apparently McCain’s decided to split from Alan Greenspan and embrace the Patrick Bateman school of economics: first you kill the bitch with an axe, and then you chop her up into pieces to kill a lazy evening. If I see Huey Lewis within a hundred yards of McCain, I’m fleeing to Guatemala.
Within one minute of the start of the debate, McCain said that the financial crisis was Fannie Mae’s fault, and not ten minutes later, he said that he wanted to bring back FDR’s home ownership loan corporation. Which sounds good until you realize that Fannie Mae – McCain’s single bullet theory for the recession – started out in 1938 as… wait for it… FDR’s fucking home ownership loan corporation. That’s like going to an oncologist for lung cancer treatment and having him prescribe you cigarettes.
At one point, Obama directly raised the point that the McCain campaign said that Obama “palled around with terrorists,” to which McCain replied, “Let me just say categorically I’m proud of the people that come to our rallies. Whenever you get a large rally of 10,000, 15,000, 20,000 people, you’re going to have some fringe peoples.” Sure. And apparently sometimes you nominate one of them for the Vice Presidency.
At that point in the debate, both Obama and McCain were accusing each other of running the most negative campaign in history, basically recursively upping the negativeity of the campaign, and I figured I was about three minutes away from one campaign or the other releasing an official statement saying “NO U“. And finally, after weeks and weeks of bearing witness to these horrible things, I realized that I didn’t have to watch them anymore, because I suddenly knew what my decision was.
And I followed through with that decision by snapping the TV off. “Let’s go out and get a beer,” I said to my girl.
“NO U,” she replied. Clearly all this bullshit is starting to get to both of us.
[tags]Presidential Debate, John McCain, Barack Obama, Sarah Palin, political humor, dark humor, satire[/tags]
