Wednesday, July 9, 2008

Bink! Bink! Bink-bink! Bink-bink! Bink!

If you’re watching John McCain speak in public, he has a “tell”: He blinks more than a quasar when he’s lying. Try it out for yourself. Say “bink” every time he blinks. If you’re saying “bink” so much that you can’t hear what John is saying, stop keeping track of his blinks and pay attention to his words. Do that because whatever he’s speaking about, he’s lying about. Pretty soon, you’ll stop keeping track of his blinks because he’s lying too much to keep this little exercise viable. Just be thankful it isn’t a drinking game.

McCain has had a bad couple of days. His “joke” about American cigarettes being a good way to kill innocent Iranian civilians has all but overshadowed the news that the Iranians have test-fired missiles capable of reaching Israel and beyond. Even McCain’s wife Cindy knew that her husband was forging a fresh gaffe because she actually poked him in the back when he made his “joke”. His jaw-grinding laugh and his manure-munching disclaimer that it was “just a joke” didn’t do anything to clear the stench in the room. That joke makes it hard to imagine McCain standing at the podium of a presidential briefing. It joins “Bomb-bomb-bomb! Bomb-Bomb Iran!” and calling his wife a cunt as evidence of his unfitness to represent this nation as its chief executive.

The Iraqi government has also made it crystal-clear that it wants American troops out of its country and that it wants a timetable outlining that goal as soon as possible. John McCain is immortalized on videotape promising that if the Iraqis asked us to leave, we’d honor their wishes. Now? Not so much. McCain needs to be called on his flip-flops--past and present. We call flip-flops "slippahs" here in Hawaii and right now, John McCain is manufacturing a mountain of them.

Mainstream media has a chance to redeem itself in this election. It has a chance to return to its rightful place as the wellspring from which the electorate gains enough information to make informed choices about the people for whom it will vote. Only MSNBC seems to be discharging that duty at present.

As for another loose cannon on the political stage, Jesse Jackson may have rendered his own political coup-de-grace with the release of his remarks about Democratic candidate Barack Obama’s Father’s Day speech about the personal responsibility of fathers. Jackson—out of the side of his mouth—accused Obama of “talking down” to the black community about fatherhood and said “I’d like to cut his nuts off.”

Even Jackson’s own son—Representative Jesse L. Jackson III—stomped on the tawdry ignominy of his father’s remarks. The elder Jackson is a contributing commentator to Fox News and may have become so steeped in the atmosphere there (“steeped”, in this case, meaning “accustomed to benefitting from Fox News chief Roger Ailes’s largesse) that he forgot that Barack Obama—his “homey” and his son’s bread-and-butter—stands an excellent chance of becoming the next president of the United States. Jesse Jackson, Jr. had a chance to stand as an embodiment of the triumph of Dr. Martin Luther King’s dream in an Obama administration. Now? He’ll be lucky to play the role of a groundling. His son—knowing how to keep his bread from landing butter-side down—will occupy the position that Jackson pere so coveted.

Though the heavens may fall, let justice be done.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Another way to tell McCain is lying is to watch his lips. If they're moving, he's lying.

Anonymous said...

RE: McCain -- it's like John Cole says; he just makes shit up. And the press laps it up, with seldom a burp.

As for Jesse -- he needs to be sweeping his own house, he does. Though I suspect it was the very fact that he's been catting around, and fathering kids with women other than his wife, that sparked him to squeal when he wasn't the one Obama was hitting.