Turn Out the Lights

Time for the Repugnicans to break out the fine beach-size 400-thread-per-inch Egyptian cotton crying towels, because it's over, baby. Reports have the McCain team jockeying for a post-blowout take-down of Sarah Palin, who they claim has gone rogue on them. When Peggy and Cotton Hill finally sat down for their interview with Brian Williams of NBC, their body language spoke volumes. McCain suppressed the twitches, sighs, snorts and harrumphs that he featured to such edifying effect in his last debate appearance, but clearly these running mates were not feeling the love. Palin, for her part, has reportedly become fed up with her McCain handlers and, with 2012 in mind, gone off-message, publicly questioning the decision to abandon campaigning in Michigan and to not talk about Jeremiah Wright. 

And then there is Ashley Todd, 20-year-old Texan college student and McCain volunteer who previously worked with that model of rectitude, the College Republicans (of Jack Abramoff infamy). On Wednesday she called police in Pittsburgh to report that she had been attacked by what she described as a tall black man who, realizing she was a McCain supporter, carved a B (for Barack, you see) into her cheek with a blunt knife, but such was the assailant's finely modulated rage, he didn't manage to break her skin. She showed up with a black eye and sure enough, the red welty B was there, only it was backwards, exactly the way it would be if someone had carved it into her cheek while looking in the mirror. Oops. It didn't take the cops long to get Ashley to fess up that she made the whole thing up. A more pathetic end note for the McCain campaign can hardly be imagined: raving about what awful things that black man has done to  them, clutching their little Obama monkey dolls. We can finally retire all the old myths about McCain the reforming maverick, the man of honour, of sound judgment. He'll go down as running the dirtiest campaign in recent memory, and that's saying something. As for the Grotesque Old Party, it threatens to turn into a lunatic rump, powered only by paranoia and bigotry. Even Colin Powell—having permanently sullied his reputation by his disgraceful performance at the UN when he knew the evidence was, as he was reported to have said at the time, "bullshit"—couldn't take any more.

Palin of the Day: Zamboni

While I was away...

To put it tritely, since I last posted, some 62 trillion (that's 62 million million) chickens have come home to roost, and we face a future of diminished opportunities and cancelled retirements while we find a way to clean up the mess left by the wizards on Wall Street, which doled out $62 billion to itself in bonuses alone in 06. The meltdown has exposed the US as a clapped-out shell of its former self, creating wealth through the financial equivalent of musical chairs, passing ticking Financial Explosive Devices from one to another, pocketing fees and bonuses in the billions along the way. Millions of Americans are headed for ruin, and they are taking the world down with them.

I regret my amateur fascination with particle and astro-physics. I am now haunted by the likelihood that we may have already passed an "event horizon" and are now plunging into a black hole, our momentum now too much for us to overcome until all the wealth we have accumulated is squeezed into a forlorn single dollar. Or maybe the analogy of the boat headed toward the precipice of a great falls is more apt; past a certain point, all the back-paddling in the world results in diddly. At least in this scenario, we can hear the "roar" of our fall before we go over. Or maybe that "sound" is the flush as we vortex down, down, down into the bowl. 

Into a black hole. Off a cliff. Down the crapper. Take your pick.

There are, however, things to be grateful for. In two weeks, Obama will be elected president, and Conrad Black rots in a cell.

Of course, here we did finally have our election, to the tune of a quarter billion, which ended up changing nothing. An increased minority, but a minority just the same. Harper will have until next May to throw his weight around, at which point the Liberals will choose a new leader, and we'll essentially have a do-over of the last Parliament.

It came down to what I spoke of earlier: a tin ear on Québec. Trashing artists is always good to pump up the Tory yahoo base, but Quebecers actually like their artists. Québec has its own home-grown culture, with its own stars, and doesn't quite guzzle American pop culture like English Canada does. It also, quite unlike the rest of Canada, thinks highly of its record in keeping young people out of jail, and has the stats to show that it works. So it was manna from heaven for the Bloc, who came storming back to deny the Harperites a majority.

I agree with Lawrence Martin of the Globe and Mail that we are likely to see Harper leave before the next election (assuming he doesn't have one foisted on him). With everything in his favour this time around, he still couldn't get a majority. Next time out, he can't count on a Liberal leader as easy to defeat as Dion. And by that time, we all stand to be considerably worse off than we are now, which won't bode well for the Tories. So I think Steve will take a look at the landscape and pull a Mike Harris, get out of town while the getting is good.

Since my last post, the US election has taken what looks like will be its final shape, with Obama finally pulling away from Cotton McCain and Peggy Palin. McCain is now just a jittery old poot, reduced to flailing and mugging and Palin seems to be more interested in burnishing her far-right cred for '12. Is a chair on The View in her future?

Palin of the Day: Mutt

Cotton & Peggy

The brilliant Chris Kelly at the Huffington Post has nailed the McCain thing:

John McCain doesn't actually believe anything. He's just belligerent. And he's not a conservative, or a liberal, or a maverick, or a Hutterite, or anything much, philosophically, one way or the other. He's just the 2000 Year Old Prick.

And this was before McCain picked Palin.

It finally occurred to me what we have in this odd couple: war hero-cum-prick Cotton Hill and his daughter-in-law Peggy, from King of the Hill.

Palin of the Day: Gold Wing

Harper Valley SFA

Although the American election is the more fascinating and consequential, we also have an election here in Canada. The once sulky doughboy of Canadian politics, Stephen Harper has transformed himself, if you believe the laughable ads showing him in a blue sweater, into Mr. Rogers.

[Stephen Harper has dropped in for a visit with Mr. and Mrs. Sensible Shoes in Potemkin, Alberta. Sitting on the edge of the settee, diabetic music dripping in the background, and forcing a gluey rictus, he intones: "I think families are just about the keenest things there can be. I have a family, you know. Sometimes we sit around and play cards." Shit-eating voice comes over: "Stephen Harper. Not a resentful block of wood. A leader."]

When I saw the first fuzzy Harper ad in the pre-election days, what immediately flashed to mind was the image of Boris Yeltsin boogalooing his way to re-election in the mid-90s, with the help of hired hands from the U.S. There he was, in shirtsleeves, up on stage with some pop tart, shaking his booty and all eight of his fingers, sweating, letting his inner lumpkin out, doing his version of Clinton-plays-the-sax. Not surprisingly, he won (as did Bill). Both saw how merging politics and showbiz could work to change the channel and divert the electorate. Of course, Boris didn't need to change channels; he controlled all of them in the shiny new Russian plutocracy.

We have, in Canada, the mirror image of the political situation as it stood in the 90s. This time, instead of the right being fractured, it is the centre-left. One sure sign that the Conservatives are thriving is the spectacle of the NDP leader going around saying he should be seriously considered for the post of Prime Minister, something that looks like a bit of a long shot for Jack Layton. This situation is made possible only because Stephane Dion has been unable to connect with enough Canadians, if recent polls are any indication.

This is a pity in a way. Dion is much loved by anglophone federalists in the Liberal party for his part in challenging Lucien Bouchard in the years following the referendum, keeping Bouchard and his successor Bernard "Red Rag" Landry, on the defensive. In the process, though, he cemented a reputation in much of Quebec as a vendu, and to this day, he is widely loathed in his home province. It certainly says something about his courage that he has persisted in the face of so much ill will in Quebec, never bowing. Nevertheless, he has not, over the two years he has had to prepare the Liberals for an election, connected with Quebec enough to stave off the likelihood of a big harvest of seats for Harper in Quebec ["J'ai une famille. C'est vrai."] If this happens, we are into a Tory majority. Only the spectacle of spittle-flecked Reform Party hyenas being let out of their cages to howl about abortion and the triple-E Senate, and accuse people of supporting child porn, as happened in the 2004 election, will be enough to forestall a Tory majority.

The events of the last week have not done much to dampen such fears. The puffin taking a crap on Dion was straight out of the dying days of the Ontario Tories' Common Sense Devolution in 03. Harper had to step in and apologize for both the crapping puffin and for the sleazy imputation by one of his zeal-bots that criticism from the father of a soldier killed in Afghanistan was to be taken with a grain of salt because the dad was a Liberal supporter, so what does he know? Anyway, the perverse effect of these "gaffes" is to burnish Harper's self-styled reputation as a decisive leader. In fact, it is certainly easy to imagine this crop of Tories staging examples of Harper riding herd on his collection of mouth breathers, reassuring voters in the centre that he has banished the fanatics. Having a reputation as a control freak works for him here.

The meltdown of the American financial system will also help Harper appeal to nervous voters, who are not likely to migrate to Stephane Dion's Green Shift, let alone to Jack Layton. However, that could easily change if there are any more serious reverses in the economy and Harper looks as powerless as any of the other party leaders to do anything about them.

All in all, a bad news week if you think a Harper majority is bad news.

As for the American contest, the ongoing self-inflicted soiling of John McCain's name is, if nothing else, grist for many a playwright or novelist. Oliver Stone would be a fool not to do a McCain picture, say, in eighteen months. By that time, he will have been in the political wilderness for a while, or he is President. As it stands now, there is a frisson of fear among many nervous Democrats that McCain will repeat what Poppy Bush did to Dukakis, create fake controversies over hot-button social issues to distract from larger issues.

It is chilling to reflect on the Repugnicans' propensity to nominate tickets with one quite apparently capable person and one complete loon, and if I were the producer of the Andy Griffiths Show, I'd sue the bastards for ripping off the Andy/Barney Fife dynamic. W's daddy did it with Dan I-Can't-Spell-Potato Quayle. In W's case, the genius idea was to put the "genius" in the Naval Observatory and the idiot in the White House. With the McCain-Palin ticket, it is truly hard to decide who is supposed to be the leader, and who the clown. Is it the guy who vetted her for all of fifteen minutes, or the woman who, until she is reprogrammed by Dr. McCain-enstein, will go on saying the same patently false things? Instead of the intrepid leader of the Alaskan National Guard being with her troops in Iraq, we get Sarah being able to step over the Iraq-Kuwaiti border so that she could say she was in Iraq. That would be as far as she got.

The Obama campaign, to its credit, is fighting back in the ad war, but every time they have to respond to McCain, instead of making McCain respond to them, they let McCain define the campaign. The question then becomes, if McCain sets the agenda of the campaign, do you let McCain continue to act like the snivelling sell-out he has become, and let the American people judge what they see, and hope they will be as revolted as you are? It's a big risk.

In any event, one hopes that come election day, all Americans will look around them and see what has happened to them over the last eight years of extremist Repugs running the store.

Palins of the Day: I know I have fallen behind, so I will make up for it with a few:

Suvie, Wiper, Flit.

Never Did No Wanderin'

Via Harry Shearer's Le Show, we find that the Times (the UK one, not the NY one) reported that Track Palin is so named because he was born during, you guessed it, track season. Had he been born during basketball season, he was to have been named Hoop. Sister Piper Palin, whose middle name is Indy, was named after a snowmobile. I am not making this up. 

Earlier today the Washington Post reported:

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has billed taxpayers for 312 nights spent in her own home during her first 19 months in office, charging a "per diem" allowance intended to cover meals and incidental expenses while traveling on state business.

Palin of the Day for today, then? Mooch.

Palin of the Day

Perhaps you were as taken as I was by the arrival of Sarah Palin, pistol-packin', moose-dressin', bear-guttin', snowmobilin' hockey mama from Alaska, and her bizarrely named brood:

• Track, (named presumably after her favourite sport in high school. Presumably he is grateful that mom didn't excel in Tiddly-Winks.)
• Piper
• Willow
• Bristol
• Trig (named after her favourite subject in school? I'm betting not.)

The alliterative pair Track and Trig are the boys. Track, we are told, enlisted in the army last September 11, and he is shipping out to Eye-Raq on September 11 this year. What an incredible coincidence. Trig is still a baby, born in April this year, and has Down Syndrome. He (along with the rest of his sibs) featured prominently as a prop throughout the Republican convention, clasped up against a baby blanket held throughout by 17-year-old sister Bristol.

Bristol, of course, made her own news when it was announced that she took time out from her busy high school life last spring, perhaps to celebrate the arrival of Trig, to get impregnated by boyfriend and hockey yahoo Levi Johnston, who was then duly packed off to St. Paul for display at the convention, like livestock at the state fair. Johnston thus goes down in history as the first human ape ever to be brought to a Republican convention expressly because of his proficiency in underage insemination. Like I say, kind of like the Royal Winter Fair we have up here. Anyway, if Bristol is to follow in Mom’s snowmobile bootsteps and name the child after her favourite high school sport, can we look forward to a bouncing baby Boink? Just askin'. (update on baby-naming rationale in next post)

Bristol, we are informed, made the choice to marry Levi and have little Boink, something that Mom Sarah, should she ascend to the presidency, would try to deny every other family (choice, that is).

Sarah, according to Wikipedia, "eloped" with her high school sweetheart Todd at the tender age of 24. Frankly, I suspect a typo. How one "elopes" at 24 is a mystery that will have to be deferred to a later meditation. For now, look for a new feature, to be posted daily or nearly so, called Palin of the Day, in which we feature the names of the rest of the mythological Palin clan.

Today’s Palin of the Day: Strep.