Fox News Gives Me Hope

I know a lot of people are getting absolutely sick and tired of this election and all the ugliness, but I've seen the ugliness of this underbelly of America for years, and I find a lot of hope and inspiration in the fact that as it rears its ugly head, America is banding together to fight it. So I'm not passing these on as ugliness, but as optimism.

That said, Joe The Plumber was quoted today as saying that an Obama Presidency would mean the death of the State of Israel. The comment was explicitly defended by a McCain spokesman, stating that this showed the perception of the American people, proof positive that we can't trust Obama.

Fox News' anchorman is Shepard Smith, their top newscaster and an right-wing loyalist who has staunchly defended both McCain and Palin, and taken great effort to spin everything they say in their favor. I want to share with you a direct quote, on air, from Shepard Smith, at 12:50pm today:

"I just want to make this 100% perfectly clear: Barack Obama has said repeatedly, and demonstrated repeatedly, that Israel will always be a friend of the United States. No matter what happens, once he becomes President of the United States... the rest of it... some things... it just gets frightening sometimes."

At that point, he hung his head in remorse, and cut to commercial.

I see that as hope.

Mature as I may be

None of the memories from my teenage years seem unappealing to me. I would have no problem sitting in the back of my friend's truck, listening to punk music, driving down the road to a kegger where we would take acid and watch Teletubbies. If I could go back and do it all over again, I would make more mistakes the second time around.

State of Modern Journalism

JOURNALIST: “How can Palin still be the champion of Joe Six-pack when she spent $150,000 on clothes in the last month so that she’d be pretty enough to be electable?
PALIN SPOKESMAN: “Oh, now that’s just taken out of context. See, after we’ve won the election, she’s going to give all those clothes away.”
JOURNALIST: “Oh! Well, that’s just charitable.”

Ed Murrow is rolling in his grave.

I am not making this up

One of the assigned responsibilities of our “tier one,” as she is called, is maintaining printer supplies and such. I walk up to the printer to print off one page, and she’s just staring blankly at the printer. She looks at me and asks, “did you print something?”

“Not yet,” I reply. “My job’s in queue.”

“Well, it’s not working for some reason,” she says. I look at the screen on the printer and >TONER EMPTY: REPLACE CARTRIDGE< is blinking. So I point out that there’s no toner in the printer. “I see that,” she says as she rolls her eyes, “I didn’t expect that that would stop it from printing!”

“Yep,” I say. “It can’t print without any ink.”

“Well, the toner cartridges are right over there,” she points, and walks away. I’m wearing all white today, but I need that printout, so I grab the toner and carefully replace it (we have one of those old printers that blow out a plume of toner whenever it’s replaced). I close up the printer and print the queue.

My supervisor walks up and looks at the printer. “Oh,” she says, “did someone get this working again?”

I shrug, “we just needed to replace the toner, so I swapped it out.”

She laughs. “Yeah, I saw that it said replace cartridge. I asked J.J. to do it, but he didn’t know how, and I don’t know how. I figure there had to be instructions somewhere.”

I look at her, trying not to make any sort of judgmental face. “You just swap it out from the toner tray.

She rolls her eyes, “well, I know that. I know that the toner goes in this tray right here—” she says as she opens it while it’s printing, causing a loud XKKRYNGH sound as seven sheets of paper get jammed up inside. “Whoops,” she says. “I’ll go get J.J. and see if he knows how to fix it.”

Side note: J.J. is our accountant. He is not our tier one.

I volunteer to un-jam the printer, and I calmly open it out and start weeding out all the jammed paper. At this point, the tier one comes back in and sees me pulling things out of the printer. She’s visibly upset. “I already called the service guy,” she says, “exactly so this doesn’t happen. You shouldn’t be trying to swap out the toner yourself.”

“The toner wasn’t the problem,” I say. “We just got a paper jam. It’s easy to fix.” I pull out the last piece of paper, close up the printer, and re-send the queue. I grab the one page of paper that I need, while the other 50 print back out, and I leave.

I pass J.J. on my way out of the printer room. I hear him talking to my supervisor behind me. “Oh,” he says, “did you get the toner cartridge replaced?”

“Yeah, Robert did it,” the supervisor replied. “I guess you just have to put it on this tray here—” XKKRYNGH!!!

So now the printer’s “out of order.” I’ll pull out the paper next time I need to print something. Which will probably be Wednesday.

On the other hand, we do have two printers…

There were good moments in the last 8 years

Now we know

Of all the goofy post-debate polls, there were two which I think were the most telling: 28 percent who thought that McCain won the debate, and 28 percent who said that Ayers mattered “a great deal” in their decision. I think it’s clearly obvious that the Ayers thing is absolutely ludicrous to anyone who has a thought in their head. The only people who would say it mattered to them would be obedient neocon loyalists. They would also be the only people to say that McCain made any sense at all in the debate last night (I’m really not sure what’s happened to him; he appears to have been brainwashed). He was an absolute buffoon who made no sense and was unable to respond to anything Obama said. He was very temperamental and outright rude, and in a roundabout way said he was proud of the people at his rally who were calling out to kill Obama. So we can now determine the exact percentage of people who are blindly following McCain to the ends of the Earth: 28%. Now the question is what exactly the other 14% who have said they’ll vote for him are thinking.

"Mafia" is just so... Italian

Besides which, they're virtually extinct in the U.S. (thanks in part to a Mr. Barack Obama). I believe there is a new syndicate being born. You can see the planted seeds in the crowds that amass for Sarah Palin's speeches. What originally seemed a dry, politically-motivated choice for veep may have given emergence to a new, all-American collective. All the elements are there. They do not consider themselves criminals– they see themselves as the last scion of their cause, the great hope to reveal a great new civilization which has peeked out its head in the last 20 years and now has the promise of being realized.

Time will tell (four weeks of time, specifically) whether this syndicate will come to form, but I believe that Obama's election could serve as the great catalyst to make them happen, and their coming out party will be January of 2009. Stay tuned...

How I will win the presidency

When I run for President in, oh, I don't know, 2024, I can tell you exactly how I will win the presidency, in two sentences. I will first give you a guarantee that the tactic will not be tried before then, it will not be proposed by a single advisor, and not only will the press find it brilliant but the people will be drawn to me and will vote for me in drove for this tactic alone. My opponent will call it a brazen parlor trick, and he will lose.

I will hold rallies and town hall meetings with my party. In addition, I will hold public town hall meetings, very loosely organized (think a college Q&A), where the people invited will be my opponents constituency.

That's all there is to it. Endure their tirades for an hour, reply when I deem it necessary, and I guarantee you that a sufficient number of them will say to themselves, "I may not agree with him, but he's listening to us." It will work.

See you in 2024.

I will answer the call to arms

There's something different about this campaign. Mud-slinging, smearing, and rhetoric have been around for centuries. People like Sarah Palin have been around since the start of democracy 2500 years ago. But there's something different about the followers.

McCain can fuck himself. His time is over. But Sarah Palin is building her own following. Her speeches are lined with hatred, intolerance, scornful mockery. As she makes speeches tying the Democratic party to terrorism, her followers literally call out for their blood. They can't even refer to Barack Obama by his actual name, instead using customized epithets and thinly-veiled hate speech. They seem to believe that they're the majority, that they have control of the United States. They have echoed the rallying cry that planted the initial seed in extremist Islam, Naziism, and the genocidal assaults in Darfur: our enemies are a threat to our very existence. The mere presence of a Liberal is a threat to my well being.

We're so confident that the United States is the great beacon of hope that we refuse to see what is happening. They're starting a war.

Supporters of the Republican ticket had their votes cast before they even knew who was running. They started the campaigns advertising how liberals threaten their very existence back in 2004. They're gathering on chat boards, spewing hatred and intolerance towards their fellow Americans using many of the same words that the South used when describing blacks in defense of the slave trade.

We are no longer one nation.

This new era, which can be traced to the war between Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich in 1996, is beyond the breaking point. The only way that we can be a united nation again is the eradication of the other side. Either the conservatives will mandate that all Americans think like them, the conservatives will self destruct, the liberals will threated to secede, the liberals will be driven into bankruptcy with the spoils going to the super-rich conservatives, or there will be revolt.

I will fight to protect my way of life from anyone who threatens it. For now, I am protected by living in the Pacific Northwest, who (with the exception of the collapse of WaMu) have been largely unaffected by this brewing war. But I am a liberal. I hold no grudge against those with conservative opinions or lifestyles, but The Conservatives—this new tribe, borne from the taste of sheer power given to them since 9/11—are traitors to the United States, and for the first time as an American I have seen a threat that inspires me to defend my country from a foreign power.

Any man, woman, or child who joins this new army, the army of Mavericks, is my enemy.

The seed has been planted for the second civil war

You may know about Rob Ayers. Ayers is a Chicago activist who Obama worked with in his early years as a state senator, in an effort to get charitable funding for a philanthropic effort. When Obama ran for President, someone dug up that Ayers was associated with a radical militia group in the 60's and was arrested at one point for a conspired bombing. When Obama found out about this, he disavowed Ayers and reassured everyone that he was only involved with Ayers on the most superficial level. It came up once during a primary debate, and all the candidates agreed it was a non-issue.

Well, Palin found out about it this morning. There was a New York Times article chronicling some of Obama's obstacles in the campaign, and it mentioned Ayers. That morning, Palin made a speech to a group of supporters. Here is her exact words: "This is not a man who sees America as you see it and how I see America. We see America as the greatest force for good in this world... Our opponent though, is someone who sees America it seems as being so imperfect that he’s palling around with terrorists who would target their own country."

She then made the reference two more times in just one day, each time using the phrase "palling around with terrorists."

Now, aside from that comment making absolutely no sense, and is a ridiculous leap to say that because Obama knows someone who was a domestic terrorist that he thinks America is not a force for good, here is what she actually read: "Mr. Ayers and Mr. Obama, who together served on education boards in Chicago years ago... A review of records of the schools project and interviews with a dozen people who know both men, suggest that Mr. Obama, 47, has played down his contacts with Mr. Ayers, 63. But the two men do not appear to have been close. Nor has Mr. Obama ever expressed sympathy for the radical views and actions of Mr. Ayers, whom he has called 'somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago, when I was 8.'"

The New York Times, along with AP, immediately launched a response to Palin, stating that her accusation was deliberately misleading, and that The New York Times took great care not to say he was palling around with Ayers, quite on the contrary, and there was absolutely no reason why Obama would have known Ayers' past, which makes the statement that Obama was involved with Ayers because Ayers was a terrorist completely absurd.

Palin was asked for response. Her statement: "The Associated Press is wrong."

The McCain campaign has already produced a TV ad around Ayers and released it to the TV stations to air in a few weeks. The campaign manager has defended the move and Palin's statements.

What a fucking cunt

Palin said today that the reason why she sounded like such an idiot with the Couric interviews is because Couric wasn't asking the questions she was prepared to answer. I guess when you only talk to Fox News, you actually believe that's what journalists do? What a twat. And to rise to the level of this dumb whore actually offending me, she actually tries turning it around on Katie Couric, saying that it just showed she was "outside the media elite," so she doesn't know how to respond to those hoity-toity news people who know... stuff. So if you came away thinking that Katie Couric is more suited to being President than some random Alaskan bimbo beauty queen, you must be one of those "elitists" who think that the leader of our country is supposed to know something. Anything. Like, more than one Supreme Court case (since she'd be choosing the judges). At least one news magazine (since the executive branch's main role is to be the reactionary branch). One instance of ever having done anything of value to... oh, fuck it. Anyone who doesn't believe by now that this bitch should never be allowed to leave Wassila unless she's wearing a bicycle helmet should go live in a fucking igloo and hunt moose, and give us back our country instead of running it in to the fucking ground. The U.S. is becoming the next Phonecia. Where's Phonecia, you ask? Exactly.

I'm sorry, is it sexist to use every derogatory feminine term I could think of in this rant? I'm just defending Katie Couric, a poor, defenseless woman who is being heartlessly attacked by a mysogenist yokel hockey moose-hunting neo-Christian retard. See I can say gender-neutral things about her, too.

Thoughts on the Debate

Well, we were right on the media appraisal of the debate. They were very impressed that Palin made it ninety minutes without peeing herself. But I could only find one article that even mildly suggested that Palin was in any way worthy to share the stage with Biden, with the following sentence:

"Biden was expected to score. Palin looked like a teacher who had won a contest to debate a senator, and for a moment, was winning."

Impressive. In other words, She was very cute and very impressive trying to be a real politician, but she didn't have anyone fooled for a minute. There were also a lot of people saying that while everyone was paying attention to whether Palin would make a fool of herself, but managed to give a respectable appearance by completely ignoring anything the moderator said and obediently sticking to the talking points she spent all week memorizing, a lot of the real political woks were watching Biden just intently to see if he would make his trademark gaffs. Instead, he ended up looking like the most presidential person to take the stage thus far, including McCain and Obama. He was respectful, passionate, consistent, honest, aggressive, succinct (whaaaaa...?), and most of all, right. 

The media are trying desperately to show both sides of the issue, but the fact is, Obama's campaign was helped greatly by the VP debate, and while Palin didn't hurt McCain's campaign (not right away, we'll see what they say in a couple days after watching it and analyzing it), she definitely didn't help it. I don't think anyone... ANYONE... is even considering McCain a contender anymore. They're just being polite to the old war hero and the nice hockey mom for trying, and giving them a "participant" ribbon and a pat on the back.

A can do anything with my life

You know what I've been doing with it thus far? Making excuses. That's why I am where I am now. Hell, I'm at work now and I'm not even working. I'm blogging. And it's not my break. Which is why I'm the least productive employee in my department. And least accurate. Quite a change from the prodigy I enjoyed being for most of the last 25 years.

So... now what?