My darling dear friend Betsy and I were IMing yesterday, and here it is folks:

[8:44:54 PM] betsy r says: victory gardens are happenign

[10:24:52 PM] betsy r says: Matt Gonzalez is running for V.P. with Ralph Nadar

10:13 PM can you imagine

10:13 PM crzy

[10:48:17 PM] Uncle Sam says: !!!

[10:50:47 PM] Uncle Sam says: how could he run against obama?

[10:55:13 PM] betsy r says: he is no race

[10:55:19 PM] betsy r says: but i still will vote nadar

[10:55:24 PM] betsy r says: i am an idealist

[10:55:30 PM] betsy r says: and want a 3rd party

[10:55:36 PM] Uncle Sam says: will you let me try to talk you out of it?

[10:55:44 PM] Uncle Sam says: not now, i mean

[10:55:52 PM] Uncle Sam says: but sometime in the next months?

[10:56:06 PM] betsy r says: 🙂

[10:56:08 PM] betsy r says: NO

[10:56:09 PM] betsy r says: sorry

[10:56:17 PM] Uncle Sam says: really?

[10:56:22 PM] betsy r says: i will move to belgium where there are 12 parites

[10:56:26 PM] betsy r says: or norway

[10:56:35 PM] Uncle Sam says: but you said you were voting…

[10:56:45 PM] betsy r says: i am down for porportional governing

[10:56:52 PM] betsy r says: represent the peeps

[10:56:55 PM] betsy r says: in the house

[10:57:01 PM] betsy r says: i know it does not exist here,

[10:57:06 PM] betsy r says: but i believe in it

[10:57:14 PM] betsy r says: and wil vote for those who believe in it

[11:03:58 PM] Uncle Sam says: well if you DO ever want to discuss it

[11:04:03 PM] Uncle Sam says: i’d be curious what you mean

So we’ll see how much of a non-story this ends up being…

McCain. So he’s gonna be the Republican nominee for president. Well, sorry the media has misled you, but the guy actually is not such a hero. Were I to wish to identify those qualities in a John McCain that voters might need to know to accurately compare him with his rival, I might point out some of the following items about the man. He:

1) moved all over the country, admitted he never got an education

2) graduated at the very bottom of his military class at Naval Academy (894th out of 899)

3) nicknames were “Punk” and “McNasty” cuz he had a temper problem and fought all the time

4) never paid attention to details of flying an aircraft, got shot down, may have caused a major fire which consumed a bomber aircraft while screwing off

5) wrote a lame confession under duress trashing the USA, which he said he regretted ever doing

6) lived for most of his life as a super-playboy, dating strippers and trashy women, driving race cars, kind of an “I’m Mr. Flash” self-image

7) cheated extensively on his first wife, who was loyal to him while he was being tortured in the ‘Nam, and left her soon as he was stateside, and only because, in his own words, “I was 40 and wanted to be 25.”

8) lied to his trophy wife, the Stepford-looking Cindy, about his age (admitted doing this) to get her to marry him

Finally, he’s 71, and does seem to be slowing down a bit. He might be a bit dottie. He has had skin cancer, now in remission, but it was really serious and for awhile it looked fatal or at least that he would never be able to run. He almost become Kerry’s running mate. He almost left the Republican party. He helped bring about the S&L debacle. He can’t raise his hands above his head. He’s pro-life, pro-Iraq, pro capital punishment, anti-gay marriage, pro Bush tax cuts, and the list goes on. He cusses a lot, drinks a lot, shoots first and asks questions later, and is about as “old school” a guy as we could get. I just don’t think we’re going back to my old school this time. Another sort of a loser / pretty boy son and grandson of royalty. It’s just too similar to W, and that’s subtext will out down the stretch.

Obama needs to paint McCain as the trigger happy Dr. Strangelove that he is. He needs to make it so that America is more afraid of what McCain would do in an emergency situation than Barack.

Got two responses to this, one from Babe the Blue Ox, the other from Paul Bunyan. Paul says:

I agree, with the minor variance that I think Hillary would lose worse.

If so, then we have an interesting situation. Our fate lies in the hands of a man who has shown glimmers of decency and honesty in the past, but who kissed the ring of the godfather 8 years ago and has been raving like a madman ever since.

The money machine, the stupidity machine, the power machine–It’s not meant to be fascism at first, its just rich fat guys rolling around in piles of money. It leads to fascism, terror, bankruptcy, and failure, but that’s a byproduct.

Normally it would not matter so much who wins, but we need someone to stop the bleeding. To stop the Scalias and the Wolfowitzes and the David Addingtons and the Roves (Injustice, War, Torture, Deceit, respectively). There’s a chance McCain might stop those things, but that chance rests on the idea that he has spent 8 years pretending to be evil in order to be president and do good. It seems a dark prospect. By the way, McCain, just today, voted against a bill to ban waterboarding. It passed the senate with 51 votes.

Babe wrote me:

On a flight from Burlington, Vt., to Warwick, R.I., on Thursday, Mr. McCain volunteered that Brooke Buchanan, his spokeswoman who was seated nearby and rolling her eyes, “has a lot of her money hidden in the Cayman Islands” and that she earned it by “dealing drugs.” Previously, Mr. McCain has identified Ms. Buchanan as “Pat Buchanan’s illegitimate daughter,” “bipolar,” “a drunk,” “someone with a lot of boyfriends” and “just out of Betty Ford.”

It is only a matter of time before some viewer, listener or reader complains — recovering addicts, for example, mental illness sufferers, or, for that matter, Pat Buchanan himself.

One of the trademarks of Mr. McCain’s rebel image has been his inability to cloak his emotions, especially anger. He has been prone to volcanic blowups over the years. And while he would hardly be the first president with a temper, Mr. McCain has been ever vigilant of late about resisting provocation.
>

So says one of those wry NY TImes campaign articles. Nobody has gotten away with this kind of humor in front of reporters since Johnson and Nixon. You gotta have very big balls to do it these days.

By the way, can somebody explain why the right-wingers hate this guy? As far as I can tell, he is as right wing as Satan, with the one single exception of stem-cell research.

Paul Bunyan sent me this after South Carolina.

> Watched Obama’s victory (or whatever you call it) speech for South
> Carolina. Happened to catch it live. I was moved. I haven’t had that
> reacation to a political speech in a long time. And it’s been a long
> time since I saw a crowd for a national candidate look so into it, and
> so real. Wow.

and Paul is as big a cynic as I am. I think the only excuse not to vote for him is that it’s too good to be true. But forget that. What’s true is whatever we want to be true. I think this is the beginning of a new era in American Politics.

Thereis a big issue being discussed in this presidential campaign, and it involves who candidates will and will not take money from.

The idea is that somehow, if you accept donations from a criminal, it rubs off on you. I think that’s nuts. All you’re doing if you take money from a bad guy is separate him from his money! There’s no way that’s why the criminal made his money illicitly to begin with, so you’re not exactly supporting their life of crime. But once they got it, I say: Take it. Were I to be running, my motto would be: “I’ll take money from anybody!”

Giving money is a different issue: that’s where you have to screen where your energy goes. You need to vote with your dollars. But if money is energy, then why not separate money / energy from evil? If Exxon wants to give me a million bucks, I will take it.

This campaign is getting really interesting!

I love the current wrinkle, essentially amounting to whether Obama gets any play out of any response he can muster to the end of New Hampshire attacks that absolutely did hurt him.

His team did try to recoup, by pointing out that the attacks were a little bit racist, or unfair, and that got some play. But whether it translates depends on their response to Clinton’s response.

Clinton responded by saying:

“I think that his story line is not accurate,” he said. “And in 15 debates, no one ever once bothered to ask Sen. Obama, ‘How can you say you were always against the war, and your judgment is better than theirs, and they were wrong to vote for that resolution which authorized force, when two years after you gave the anti-war speech in 2004, you, Sen. Obama, said you didn’t know how you would have voted on that anti-war resolution, number one, then two days later, you said there was no difference between you and President Bush on the war?’ ”

So for me now, the question is: what’s Clinton talking about, and did Obama say those two things, or are they out of context? If Obama did say them, that was dumb, since it’s the main thing that distinguishes him (the other two things are 1) I will talk to bad guys, and 2) I’m really going to fuck shit up and we all know it so I’m not going to say anything specific, which is what “change you can believe in” is code for.

I assume, in the Clinton quote, he’s referring to the 2nd anti-war resolution, which Obama was absent for. But Clinton isn’t being specific. And I’m not sure if it is that, that that makes Clinton’s point that that means there’s less of a difference, or how much less of a difference, between Hilary and Obama (I guess it’s just going to be that for awhile: Hilary and Obama, unfair and sexist as using the female’s first name and the male’s last name is). But I really would be surprised to find substance behind the 2nd part of Clinton’s quote, where he says the no difference thing. I just can’t imagine. But again there’s no reference.

Furthermore, Obama’s side isn’t responding so far. My feeling is that at this point they ought to. Barack (there, I used his first name) should very factually call Bill Clinton out and say what he meant in these two instances, especially if that meaning differs at all from how Clinton is portraying it. So my question is: does Barack respond?