Spanking the Monkey

"Growing the pie" is indeed precious nonsense of an almost Palinesque -- hell, almost Bushian -- stature, so perhaps the tundra shrew is rubbing off on the old fart despite his best efforts. It's a phrase that could just as easily be replaced by "slamming the ham" or "flogging the dolphin", which pretty much sums up his inept free-floating jerkoff of a campaign.

“Joe’s with us today,” McCain said. “Joe where are you? Where is Joe? Is Joe here with us today? Joe, I thought you were here today.”

After a four second pause, he realized that Joe was not present this chilly morning at Defiance Junior High School.

“Well,” he said, “you’re all Joe the Plumber, so all of you stand up!” That was easy since nearly everyone was standing already.

“I saw Joe on television this morning,” he added. “He did a great job.”

Aides said later that the campaign mixed up its events and that Joe would be appearing later in the day. McCain is at the start of a two-day bus tour through Ohio, a state he must win Tuesday if he has a shot of victory.

Boy howdy, they run a tight ship there, don't they? It's bad enough that they stake their homestretch run on these Bill the CatJoe the Ringer/Bob the Builder jokers. But Obama draws thousands in freezing rain in Pennsylvania, and midnight rallies in Florida, while the Straight Talk Express sputters into early-morning monologues at East Overshoe Junior High. Is the field there bigger and nicer than the high school's, or are we trying to win over a couple hundred thirteen-year-olds?

I caught a little over half of the Obama infomercial last night, out of basic curiosity more than anything, and I noted that not once did I hear the name of either of Obama's opponents uttered. This was much more effective than any open repudiation would have been. Yet it's not an unreasonable impression to assume that neither McCain nor his Neiman Marxist sidekick can go three minutes without lobbing some incendiary lie about Obama, because they're simply incapable of coming up with anything else. Their arguments have been uniformly impotent and incoherent. I'd have some respect for them if they, for example, talked about the working-class people who got hosed by Joe-the-Delaware-Senator's sponsorship of the credit-card industry's bankruptcy bill, but there's too much common ground there, I suppose.

As obnoxious as that "big lies, oft-repeated" aspect of McPalin's tepid effort is, perhaps what's worse is the gleam in Palin's eye as she dutifully recites laundry lists of "This the That" faces-in-the-crowd, almost as if it actually meant or accomplished a single useful thing. More than ever, she comes off like an annoyingly precocious fourth-grader who not only has memorized most of the state capitals, but insists on reminding everyone within earshot as often as possible.

It's easy enough to observe that both parties and their respective candidates are, in the end, simply the far-right and the center-right wings of a militarizing, data-mining corporatocracy, red in tooth and claw, extending the hegemon whilst picking our pockets and drowning our dreams of anarcho-syndicalist bliss, etc., etc. I'm down with all that. But that doesn't mean there aren't serious differences not just between the candidates and policies, but more importantly their audiences. I'll take painfully earnest, muddled idealism over doddering senescence and increasingly virulent yahooism any day. Even the golden opportunity of tearing down a corrupt edifice isn't worth unnecessarily empowering these throngs of hooting retards.