Archive for August, 2008

I don’t know any native Alaskans. I know maybe a dozen people who have lived there at one time or another, but nobody who actually grew up there. Consequently, I don’t know what an Alaskan — a real Alaskan — actually sounds like. And it’s a pretty big place. I’m sure to the native ear, somebody from Fairbanks sounds very much unlike a person from Juneau.

When McCain introduced Sarah Palin as his running mate, I was genuinely shocked. She sounds like she’s from the wilds of Wisconsin! I can just imagine her swearing in ceremony next January (in the bizarro universe where she and McCain actually manage to win this thing, of course).

I do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same: that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion, and I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God. Oh, ya, sure.

You know how sometimes you get a song stuck in your head, and it just won’t go away? Sure, that happens to everyone. What about situations — something happens, or you notice something about your surroundings, and there’s that damned song. I knew someone long ago who’d find a rock song, usually by the Stones, that she’d find relevant to almost any situation: if your shoelace was untied, Iris would somehow connect it in her head to Waiting on a Friend or Miss You, and she’d break into song with a voice that sounded like she’d never inhaled anything but cigarette smoke since birth — kind of cool considering she was 15 and didn’t smoke.

I find myself in a similar situation whenever I hear Joe Biden’s name. I don’t know for sure yet whether he’s going to be Obama’s running mate, but it’s looking more and more likely, and that means that at least until November, I’m going to be hearing his name a lot, and if Obama becomes president, I’ve got four or even eight years of hearing that name pretty damned often.

What song is it I hear whenever someone says “Joe Biden”? It’s Elvira, by the Oak Ridge Boys. Iris was lucky. She loved the Stones. Me, I can’t stand the Oak Ridge Boys, and I hate that song in particular. But that doesn’t mean I’m throwing my support to Johnny “Lotsa Houses” McCain. I’ll just have to deal with it. It’s my sacrifice for the future of this great land.

I guess I should consider myself lucky it’s not Thank God For Kids.

Eyes that look like heaven, lips like sherry wine
That girl can sure enough make my little light shine
I get a funny feelin’ up and down my spine
‘Cause I know that my Joe Biden’s mine

Oh, what a filthy mind you have. That is not what I meant at all. I just thought it was a good title for this new video from the Jed Report.

I’ve been saying lately that McCain and his campaign have been lying about Obama and his record, but now I’m having second thoughts. After all, they keep telling us what a maverick McCain is. When I hear the word “maverick,” I naturally think of Bret Maverick, that hero of the wild west on the eye of hell. And Brett Maverick was a gambler! From that perspective, it all makes sense: McCain isn’t a liar. He, like that other Maverick, is just bluffing.

To aid you in thinking the right way — the hard drinkin’, hard livin’, all-American gambler way — about Maverick McCain, I’ve created the file below. Just mouse over it and see if it feels right. Oh, and make sure your speakers are turned up.

Convinced? Me neither. On second thought, never mind. McCain is just a liar.

No, not that L Word. This is a different one, but one which, at least in the political sphere, seems to be just as taboo.

Here’s a hint. Remember when Obama suggested to some people at a rally that if they wanted to decrease the amount of gas they used, they should make sure their tires were properly inflated and their engines were tuned up? McCain (and every other Republican, by some odd coincidence) yukked it up over how Obama’s energy plan was all about getting those tires inflated. They were even offering “Obama Energy Plan” tire inflation gauges for donations of $25 to the McCain campaign. As of the writing of this post, the offer was still up:

Obama’s response to this latest bit of levity from the right was just perfect:

I’m sure you caught the “l word” in there, but if not, I’ll make it easier in my next example. The McCain campaign put out this new video today:

Here’s a piece of a Los Angeles Times article on the video and the Obama campaign’s response to it:

The Obama campaign immediately denounced the ad.

“This ad is a lie and it’s part of the old, tired politics of a party in Washington that has run out of ideas and run out of steam,” said spokesman Hari Sevugan.

The Obama campaign has been smarting from McCain’s attack on his celebrity, which compares the Illinois senator to Paris Hilton. The charge is that Obama lacks the experience to lead the nation and is out of touch with most people’s economic difficulties.

To support its claim, the McCain campaign cites two Obama votes in favor of a budget resolution. Obama’s yes vote means he voted in favor of ending the Bush tax cuts, “effectively raising taxes on those making $41,500 in total income.”

The Obama camp has repeatedly complained that McCain is distorting Obama’s position on taxes. The vote was for a non-binding budget resolution that did not include any tax increase, though it does assume that the Bush tax cuts will end. It bears no relation to the tax plan that Obama has announced, his campaign said.

“Even though a host of independent, nonpartisan organizations have said this attack isn’t true, Sen. McCain continues to lie about Sen. Obama’s plan to give 95% of all families a tax cut of $1,000, and not raise taxes for those making under $250,000 a single dime,” the Obama campaign argued. “The reason so many families are hurting today is because we’ve had eight years of failed Bush policies that Sen. McCain wants to continue for another four, and that’s what Barack Obama will change as President.”

Finally, this isn’t coming from the Obama campaign, but check out McCain’s bronze medal win on tonight’s Countdown:

“John McCain either lies or can’t tell the difference between reality and stuff he dreamed or imagined. Those are not two good options.” I say we stick with option 1. If we start labeling these obvious falsehoods as cases of McCain getting confused, they’ll claim we’re playing the age card — the wrinkly, white-haired age card. If we accuse McCain of lying (which is what I think he’s doing most of the time, except in the cases where he starts repeating words like he’s lost his place), their only real defense will be to say that the Senator just misspoke… again. Those self-proclaimed errors are going to add up pretty quickly if they’re not willing to admit to just making shit up.

No, this post is not about Mao, or even Billy Bragg. Rather, it’s about an advance I have to admit I’d waited for all my life, and had frankly given up on seeing come to fruition. Why? Because it’s an advance on the eye of hell, where things change pretty damned slowly. In fact, the advance is in advertising on the eye of hell, where things, for the most part, don’t change at all.

I wrote a couple of years ago (yikes! I’ve been blogging for two years!) that words like “period” and “menstruation” had finally started replacing “time of the month,” although such things are still visually represented by blue fluid. This is easily as big as that.

I think I was about 10 or 11 when I first noticed the problem. I’d see ads that spoke of a special little town called Hidden Valley, where the kids never complained about eating their vegetables, because they all came with a thick coating of mayonnaisey spoodge that made them oh-so-tasty. I’d be watching these packs of kids happily downing their dripping broccoli, and it occurred to me that they were all white! The happy town of Hidden Valley was restricted!

Well, this week I saw an ad for Hidden Valley in which the veggie-lovin’ local kids were crowding around what looked like an ice cream truck, which in fact, served cones of salad drowning in the glory that is ranch dressing. And among those kids, I was astonished to see one or two of African descent! At last, these children were being judged not by the color of their skin, but of the content of their salad cones! It was beautiful.

Of course, salad dressing is just one example of the long list of products that have been segregated on the eye of hell all these long years. For decades, Madison Avenue has tried to convince us that separate detergents, fast food establishments, shoes, and pet foods could be equal. Those days may at last be gone.

Think about dating services. For as long as they’ve advertised on the eye of hell, they’ve demonstrated their successes by showing us couples who always just happened to share ethnicity along with chemistry. Was it a decades-long series of coincidences, like the coin flips in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead? I doubt it. I don’t know if they ever had rules regarding interracial couples, and if they did, I don’t know when those rules changed, but on the eye of hell, it had always clearly been a strict “no miscegenation” policy.

A couple of weeks ago, I saw an ad for eHarmony (one of the first, I believe, to do without the presence of Dr. Neil Clark Warren) in which a black man was shown next to a set of three thumbnail images of women, apparently representing the choices picked for him by their computer. Two of them were black, but one was white.

Then, just last week, I saw a spot for the service that showed three happy couples, two of which were of mixed ethnicity. Wow.

I have to wonder what the cause of this long-delayed advance might be. I suppose it’s possible that the fact that we’re (hopefully) on the verge of electing our first mixed-race president might be an indication to the ad execs that we just might be ready for such a radical concept. I really don’t know, but I’m glad to see it finally happening.

Next up: gender roles and sexuality. Don’t hold your breath.

This may take a while to load, and it’s of rather low technical quality, but what the hey — give it a try. I tried turning it into a video file, but the supposedly transparent background (with the speckly bits I failed to remove) turned black when I opened it in Camtasia. It seems that once you’ve exported the hundred or so layers you’ve created to ImageReady, it’s too late to fix the background. That meant that I couldn’t add the sound effects I’d been planning (an opening “My friends,” a popcorn pop for each bandage going on, a nice tearing noise for their removal, and maybe some evil cackling for the big surprise ending), but that’s OK, since I’ve already blown the evening on this thing. The “special effects” for the Bottoms Up, Johnny post only took a couple of minutes and came out a hell of a lot better, it seems to me. So, not so long story about as short as I can make it, I’ve just uploaded it as a gif. Enjoy!

College was a long, long time ago, but I still remember the important stuff, like drinking games. I was always pretty bad at the skill portion of Quarters, but I didn’t really have a problem with that — it just meant I got to drink more. In fact, I rarely bothered with such things as pointing to other players with my elbow. I’d point with my finger and… ooops! time to drink again. Silly me.

Being a vidiot, my favorite drinking games have always involved the eye of hell. Being a vidiot and a Bob, my all-time fave would have to be Hi Bob.

I’ve just come up with a drinking game of my own, and it’s not unlike Hi Bob, which took advantage of the fact that a certain phrase showed up rather a lot in the scripts for Bob Newhart’s sit-coms.

Think about it — what’s on the eye of hell all the time these days, and what phrase does one hear repeated over and over?

I think you may have already figured it out based on the image above. The name of the game is My Friends, and the rules are just like those of Hi Bob: whenever McCain intones that famous phrase, everyone has to down a shot. Be warned, however, that when Johnny Mac is having particular trouble dealing with the text of his speech, he may say it fairly often. In fact, I’ve heard him throw it into a single sentence as many as three times. It’s apparently his version of “um.”

Because of this, the game is often kind of short.

Dear Karl,

Remember back in 2000, when John McCain won the New Hampshire primary and it looked like he was going to roll on to the Republican nomination? Remember what you did to add a little friction to his momentum?

Rove invented a uniquely injurious fiction for his operatives to circulate via a phony poll. Voters were asked, “Would you be more or less likely to vote for John McCain…if you knew he had fathered an illegitimate black child?” This was no random slur. McCain was at the time campaigning with his dark-skinned daughter, Bridget, adopted from Bangladesh.

It worked. Owing largely to the Rove-orchestrated whispering campaign, Bush prevailed in South Carolina and secured the Republican nomination. The rest is history — specifically the tragic and blighted history of our young century. It worked in another way as well. Too shaken to defend himself, McCain emerged from the bruising episode less maverick reformer and more Manchurian candidate.

You know how good you are, don’t you Karl? McCain knows it too, and that’s why he’s taking the advice of you and your acolytes, even after stating in 2000 that there must be “a special place in hell” reserved for you lot.

I’ve got a little tip for you, and I think it’s going to help McCain big-time. What if we spread a rumor that Barack Obama has two black babies? Can you imagine how that would trash his image? Having two black babies is twice as bad as having one. Nobody’s going to vote for Obama when they hear about this, whether it’s true or not.

Two. Black. Babies. Wow.

I’m just amazed you didn’t come up with this one yourself, Karl. I hope you’re not going soft in your old age.

My last post made reference to this advert from the McCain campaign:

The claim that Obama went to the gym rather than visiting wounded military personnel, was, of course, utter crap. Was it a lie? You could say so, but it was more a matter of implication than falsehood. That is, it implied that Obama decided that, since they wouldn’t let him bring in cameras and use the troops as campaign props, he decided it wasn’t worth his while to visit them at all. Had they come out and said that in the ad, it would have been a lie, but instead, all they did was imply it.

But now it’s come out that, whether Obama had made the visit or not, the McCain camp was ready to attack him for whichever choice he made:

What the McCain campaign doesn’t want people to know, according to one GOP strategist I spoke with over the weekend, is that they had an ad script ready to go if Obama had visited the wounded troops saying that Obama was…wait for it…using wounded troops as campaign props. So, no matter which way Obama turned, McCain had an Obama bashing ad ready to launch. I guess that’s political hardball. But another word for it is the one word that most politicians are loathe to use about their opponents—a lie.

That’s inexcusable.