Pitchfork Nation

It's interesting to watch McCain attempt an honorable pirouette, after weeks of stoking throngs of ignorant yahoos. Perhaps he's finding that their bullshit is easier to ignore or play off from a podium than in one-on-one scenarios; perhaps he's having something resembling a genuine crisis of conscience. Hell, maybe he was just afraid that that drunken, shambling, disheveled beast in the red t-shirt was about to throw a cat at him. I know I was waiting for it.

Surely McCain realizes that they're not saying "Boo-urns" when he lamely tries to inform them that Obama is not, despite the stump-speech discursions from McCain and Secessionist Barbie, actually an Arab, a Muslim, nor a terrorist. Too little too late, J-Mac. You can't jerk off these dipshits for a month straight then just stop right before they bust their crazy political nut. Now they've got blueballs and they're gonna take it out on you. Whatever the case, McCain is visibly uncomfortable with the situation as it stands, as a man who has spent the last three decades campaigning on his sacred honor, chucking it at the feet of a know-nothing rabble-rouser from the nation's biggest welfare state.

Clearly Palin does not share McCain's discomfort with spurious, vitriolic imputations of treason, even though her own associations with actual, current domestic terrorists and traitors is much more concrete than Obama's flimsy ties with a seemingly rehabilitated Bill Ayers. She has no sense of shame or hypocrisy, and these extra-chromosome tubthumpers are her crowd, so stoking their troglodyte fervor is as easy as abusing power. She and her dimwit acolytes are good Christians like I'm Ron Jeremy.

I don't necessarily buy the correlation between these crowds of idiots festering at their weird little Two Minutes of Hate rallies, and the will to actual violence. Americans are simply too docile and unmotivated to coordinate any action more complicated than acquiring and/or protecting their toys. They'll stand outside Wal-Mart in freezing weather all night after Thanksgiving, for the chance to save 10% on a flat-screen teevee, but damned if they'll wait ten minutes to vote, or do anything at all after that notional act of political semi-commitment. But if there's any group of violent retards that's up for some rage-fueled desperation, it's these goobers. Buncha closet-case Walter Mitty types who all think they're Tim McVeigh.

Anger is a useful emotion, but not this incoherent pseudopopulist twaddle the Cheap Talk Express trucks in. It doesn't qualify as genuine anger; it's a tantrum thrown by a four-year-old in a supermarket aisle. I've noted some flashes of cockiness amongst some Dem corners, and I would really not count out the propensity of massive blocs of the electorate for stupidity and self-deception. Not only is it not over until it's over, but knowing these goofy bastards, it won't even be over then.