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

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

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.