Beware The Man

Matt writes a nice little concise post about McCain’s “regular guy” bona fides.

There isn’t much question that Obama has this one won on the merits. Media Man won’t bother with it, of course. McCain is a Republican, and $520 shoes are nothing, not at all like $400 haircuts.

All other things being equal, I’ll vote for the guy who has been poorest, longest, and I’ve said it for years. It’s convenient for me, because it runs against our rich and famous media, our Democratic electoral officials, and the GOP. Christ, I vote third party whenever I can, but at least the Donks provide some lip service to the less fortunate among us. So, no third party votes this year, unless Barry pulls another FISA or something.

If McCain wins, it will be a very profound and sad day in at least one rapt political junkie’s life.

One of the smartest writers and thinkers out there.

‘Nuff said. Check it out.

Update: Well, not enough said. Back during the most recent Israel-Lebanon war, over two hostages, Billmon was so freakishly ahead of the curve of how it would go down I thought he was some sort of mystic, and I fell in love. (But only as friends.) The man is really, really smart, and here John Cole reminds us of how much this is so.

…to the Cubs spanking of the Brewers, whose sphincters have to be fairly tight after losing their first two in Milwaukee with the Brew Crew’s aces on the hill. We scoff at Sabathia and Sheets!

A sweep would be grand, but that’s a lot to ask.

The reason I’m so confident about the Cubs this year is that their success dovetails nicely with my sense that some kind of mild-to-moderate Apocalypse is upon us. If the Cubs win the World Series, and McCain wins the election, I’ll be pretty sure something mystical and epic is right around the corner.

Not necessarily a bang, but at least an acceleration of the whimper.

Update: A sweep it is! In Milwaukee. Possible death-blow to the Brewers, but I personally think they’ll hang in there if Sabathia and Sheets stay healthy. They have to be bummin’, though. The collective score in the series was 31-11. Ouch.

That’s a baseball ass-kicking.

Cubs with a 5 game lead over everyone. Right on. That being said noting that I became a Cub fan of perpetual sadness in 1969, at age 10, when they blew an 8.5 game lead held in late August. Thankfully, the Mets even bigger collapse of last year killed all those demons.

The Cubs are a good team this year. They may not win it all, because luck has a lot to do with it, but they should be in the hunt.

Atrios posts not one, but two “Please just kill me” observations in one day. I always find myself feeling the same way when I read them. Being older, less successful, and more single than Duncan, though, my guess is that I want it more.

Phoenix Woman on the media’s abhorrent, abject hypocrisy on how Clinton was treated vs. how Bush has been treated when it comes to perceived crimes and, you know, real country-impacting ones. Perhaps the GOP strategy of “Scandal Saturation” has worked on our fearless journalists as well as it has on the public. Journalists are just people not doing their jobs, too.

Speaking of someone not doing their job (unless it is to ridicule us DFH’s and advance the GOP meme that this election is about Obama and not, say, the future direction of the country), Nicole Bell takes TIME’s Mark Halperin out to the woodshed and beats him like a slave in GOP FantasyLand, a.k.a., the “good old days.”

Which leads us to this gem by curv3ball about those infamous ungrateful traitors, John Carlos and Tommie Smith, the two Olympians who raised their fists in protest at the 1968 Olympics. Curv3ball is using the inimitably stupid J. Goldberg as his muse so he might be kinda sorta stoopid cherry-picking, but I enjoyed it a lot anyway.

Finally, and because this one was conveniently located above curv3ball’s post, and not because there isn’t a lot more stoopid to go around, The Editors reminds us of something so transparently obvious it should be spoken about all the time, particularly on the Great Tube of Learnin’ which so many of McCain’s base relies on for information, but isn’t, that the NY Times actually points out in print.

Which doesn’t matter at all because the low information voters (morons) McCain is so cravenly courting don’t read the NY Times.

Strange times, indeed.

It’s like they’re not even trying anymore. V.D. Hanson is a noted conservative “intellectual.” The problem with his reputation as an “intellectual” is that he’s a fucking moron. Worse, the war-loving racist kind of “intellectual.”

As a non-noted non-intellectual, but not without some brains and common sense, this kind of analysis always makes me feel a little better about myself. These warneocons are damaged goods, and I’m glad there’s a forum now to out them for their own craziness.

Roy takes over, as is apropos. I’m not good enough to write so well about the stoopid, nor am I even interested in reading it. But I sure do appreciate those who do it for me.

The man is just naturally a bully, thug, and charlatan, but I have a creeping respect for his capitalistic success, and every now and then he sputters out something I agree with, like the government should stay out of people’s bedrooms. (Who can even imagine why he feels that way?) He’s turned being an asshole into the sweet, sweet smell of money, the measure of worth in 21st Century America.

So, that being said, I’m kind of on Bill’s side when he says stuff like this.

I mean, people who “smoke reefers 24/7” are probably likely not to aspire to a lot of power, at least if they’re not Al Gore or George Bush, and probably don’t even aspire to a lot of fame, like Bill O’Lielly.

In other words, people who smoke “reefers” (!) 24/7 just aren’t likely to cause that much damage. Back up the truck and offload the BC bud, and maybe some snacks, and everyone will be left alone.

THAT’s good government. LOL.

She just said that the American people are “not dumb.”

Welcome to the beltway, Rachel. It was nice knowing you.

I live out here among the American people, and I can tell Rachel without any reservations that the American public is, in fact, “dumb,” at least when it comes to politics. I’m not excluding otherwise smart people.

Joe Mechanic may be a genius at fixing your car, and Josette Teacher may be the greatest ever. But their knowledge about politics is so far from those of us that pay attention, to declare they aren’t dumb is, well, dumb.

It isn’t really their fault, either. They simply lack the time to pay attention to the arcane details necessary to have even a clue about what they’re talking about.

Update: I don’t mean to be too critical of Rachel. She’s got some stones, as it were, and we all have to defer to our paychecks from time to time, me being no exception at all. I was watching this live, and it was one of those fantastic “cut to commercial” moments of awkwardness I love so much.

I thought Buchanan was going to have an aneurysm blow right there before the cut.

The original point stands. If the American public isn’t dumb, what is McCain doing going after them so transparently?

About American imperialism, on which IOZ is virtually always right, if amusingly shrill and wonderfully confrontational.

We invaded Iraq because our leadership thought it was in American interests. You can judge for yourself about whether or not this was a good idea (I like to refer to silly ol’ “History” as a barometer) but, you know, there it is.

It may have been blurry at the beginning, self-defense and all, but the picture has come into high-def now, for those with brains.

That’s a lot of floppin’. I’m wondering why he’s so interested in calling Obama a flip-flopper.

Oh, my bad. “Low. Information. Voters.”

Since I’m usually alone, I do it fairly often, though not for dinner out of overt self-consciousness and perceived (or real) loserdom.

So, I decide to start my last day of vacation with a nice old fashioned American breakfast, two scrambled, hash browns with some onions grilled in, bacon, pancakes, OJ, and milk, at my local IHOP.

I brought the laptop for the first time ever, just in case, but there was no Wifi. So I reverted to my usual people watching and listening, a fun pastime for me.

And to what do my wondering eyes appear but a truly lovely redhead also eating alone, writing left-handed, all the way across the room from me. Younger than me, but not horribly so, I guessed, and it all boiled down to my very much wanting to talk to her. No, not even that. Just acknowledge her.

Couldn’t do it. I thought about buying her breakfast secretly on the grounds of a daily random act of kindness towards beautiful women, and I couldn’t even do that.

It’s easy to rationalize my fear away. One doesn’t often see lovely women eating alone, even at breakfast, and this is probably due in no small part to the fear of being approached by creepy old men like me. She also looked busy, though I would’ve too had the laptop been engaged. Maybe she was, maybe she wasn’t.

She was not dressed for work.

I feel like an idiot, because I hate succumbing to fear. I regret failing, at least, to pay for her breakfast anonymously. It would’ve been a simple thing to do. Just pay for it and leave. Completely non-intrusive, nice, polite, selfless. I was out before she was.

Argghh.

Loser? It’s a fair call.