Alright, so that happened!

Sacre’Poutine! What's happened! That goddamn Tropical Douchebag Fay has kept me soaked to my Ray Bans, car-less, without credit cards, and a nasty, rum-soaked case of neural trauma, but you can watch all about that on Dateline sometime in the fall! In the meantime, nom dieu! I may have missed the Democratic Convention, but I sure didn’t miss my mark with McCain! Sarah Palin! I saw this coming in June, my little fleas!
Don’t question for one second the devious, insidious machinations of the Republican Party, true believers! Neither deceive yourselves as you watch that soccer mom delivery of her acceptance in Dayton! It is shrewd and calculated and all but Guarunteed to give Obama and Biden a run in the next 66 days! This was no cynical ploy to snap up disaffected Hill Chicks. Palin, herself, is the very embodiment of the Undecided Voter! Not the kind who’s pouring over the campaigns, scouring the RealClearPolitics, raising their voices in dingy bars; she IS the ultimate soccer mom, creeping to the polls between picking up Tommy at hockey and dropping off Sally to pick out a dress for her Daddy-date later that night, not about to get bogged down by the tainted bore of Policy while pulling the lever for family values! She's got tremendous appeal for the type of Voter who believes watching Kevin Costner's 'Swing Vote'counts for getting informed.
And working class white males?! Hell’s balls, this is a former beauty queen, lifetime NRA member, pro-life gal who’s been married to a union card carrying steelworker who was her high school sweetheart and with her is raising a veritable brood of like minded DNA vessels! Short of picking one of the Matco Tools calendar models, could there be a better salve for the poor crackers clinging to guns and god?
It’s a risk, though. Though you can see the sharpened nails of Darth Rove slipping into the hand puppet that is an energized McCain, crashing news cycles like the Joker in The Dark Knight, it seems pretty clear the Democrats are making a better claim than they have in almost a decade to doing what it takes this time. I must admit that my faith in Obama was overly influenced by his Mad Hatters (Haters?) and feared the Worst (Sebelius, Kaine, Edwards (John or Chet), or Bayh), but he has really come through. Biden cracks the ridiculous, unnamable code of change and brings the campaign working class respectability, foreign policy cajones, and a whole lot of teeth. He will chew Palin up like the soft underbelly of an antelope (barring her presentation of a loaded assault weapon at the debate).
I see they let Kerry speak in Denver. That was nice of them.
Alright, fuck it, I’m back. Somebody book a flight for Minnesota. I’m not going to miss this one!

The O Files: They want to Believe...

Margaret’s drinking had come down a bit since the demise of the HRC campaign. She’d also stopped wearing so much yellow, but that’s another issue altogether. When she appeared at my hotel room door at three am, Famous Grouse on her breath, a Marriot tumbler pinched in her right hand, I knew something was up.
“I was attacked!”
“Ma puce!”
“By a Canadian.”
“Then it could not have been that bad, mon cheri. Come in.”
“It was unreal,” she said as she splayed herself over my sleep-tussled sheets as I cracked the mini-bar. “A law professor from McGill. I was minding my own business, downstairs, having a nightcap after a seminar on the Founder’s Constitutional Intentions with regard to War Powers. He approached me at the bar, innocently enough, over a comment I had made about Nixon’s attempted veto of the War Powers Res. Blah, blah, blah, by the time we got to the campaign it was pretty clear where he stood, and frankly, Pierre, where I stand, too. So, I felt comfortable telling him what I’m telling everyone one: ‘I’m for him, but I don’t adore him.’
“That was all it took. It was like his eyes rolled into the back of his head and he was in some inner-psyche warfare, battling the demons at Armageddon.”
“Was the race card pulled?” I asked, handing her a cold scotch rocks.
“It was.”
“They should print an actual card; one with two sides, each stipulating the advantages to be gained by its appearance depending which side you are on. If it is not produced, it cannot be deduced!”
“These people are madmen, sweetie; this swarthy FC maniac was enraged that Republicans would suggest that He pulled it with the Dead Presidents thing and then flip around, with a finger in the air and say that the Clinton people were at work, coaching the McCain staff on dirty little tricks. They’re still mad at the Clintons! It was inchoate madness! I was scared to ask what he thought about Paris and Britney.”
“I thought once the primaries were over,” I said with a giant sigh, cracking the seal on my own mini-gin, “they would turn and focus. But with McCain fumbling the are like Caged Animals, these Obamaniacs, on a strict diet of Raw Red Meat laced with Methamphetamines, their only instinct is to fight and kill in the name of the Holy One. They are Bashi-Bazooks!”
“My dear, Froggy Nuck friend, it was so emotional. It was like he wasn’t even talking to me; he was coming from a place deep inside him. He kept saying how Barack has tried to be white his whole life, asking me if I knew what that was like. If I knew his pain.” Margaret hoisted herself onto her side, sipped of the drink. “There is something inside these men’s psyches, and it is men, mostly, that want to believe in something again. They want Camelot back, the world is not good enough the way it is. And this a Canadian! Jesus, Pierre, will it end after the election?”

Sickness falls over the Diamond!

Sacre’Poutine! The Dread is settling in! Indeed, now with only three wins separating the Yanks from first place and teetering on the precipice of a sweet and delicious sweep of the infernal Sox, I face the malevolent evil that is Jon Miller and ESPN Sunday Night Baseball! Nom Dieu, that man hides Nothing of his contempt for America’s Champion and his dirty, oral love of the Sox of Boston! Nonetheless, and though I have sworn I would not watch the coverage of the battle of Armageddon if Miller was doing the play by play, I will endure tonight because this, my friends, is the turning point; the moment we can all look back to and say the high tide of evil has begun to recede!
It is worthy to note that, since Barry Goldwater took the stage and swore allegiance to Satan and all his works back in 1964, donning the mauve, bengaline cassock of modern conservatism, the Yankees have failed to win a World Series ring during a Republican Administration. You think that’s coincidence? Fatto putain! Now, with the dawn of Obama, the presumptive national leader, it will be that the real champs will return the Universe to order.
Another curious note: the maddening success of the Batman! Is the nation’s embrace of Ledger’s amoral, capricious force of nature somehow at odds with the fierce adoration of the Presumptive Democrat? Are we just hungry for charisma, never mind the message? Are we really that banal, or is it that somewhere, just below the skin of our modern psyche we understand that all is Lost and there is nothing that we can do about it?

Get it? Do you get it? I don't get it. Oh, wait, I think I get it.

Satire? In a word? Yes. In two words? Absolutely yes. Nom’d’fucking ‘Dieu! It’s the New Yorker! You put a truncheon in some of these people’s hands and we’ve got the SS up and running again, you liberal scoundrels! Thought police! You bastards! This was not the cover of the New Republic or the Drudge Report home page! As New Yorker founder Harold Ross put it to his investors, it [the magazine, you dolts!] was not edited for ‘the little old lady from Dubuque.’

And it would never have found its way into her clammy little hands, and those in the filthy sties of the impressionable Right, were it not for the lefto-Facists in the Holy One’s camp, screaming up and down the cathedral arcade about offense and bad taste. Were these same primrose goose-steppers in Code Orange over any of covers the NYr has done with Bush over the last eight years?

Sacre’Poutine! I am glad at least that Remnick has the perspicacity to defend the cover. “The cover takes a lot of distortions, lies, and misconceptions about the Obamas and puts a mirror up to them to show them for what they are…The idea that we would publish a cover saying these things literally, I think, is just not in the vocabulary of what we do and who we are... We've run many many satirical political covers. Ask the Bush administration how many.”

From Voltaire to Heller and beyond, the destruction, inversion, subversion of Sacred Cows is what’s separated us from the demagogues and the fundamentalists; it is what keeps us from those same reactionary impulses to stymie and suppress the freedoms of others. Remember when the Monkey One once said ‘There ought to be limits to Freedom’? I get the feeling, you know, that it is the same impulse that drives these NeoLibs to Shush and Knuckle Rap.

Why not take offense, not at the content of a Bernie Mac joke as he warmed a $2,300 a plate Obama crowd, but at the fact the joke was CLEARLY unoriginal and OLD? Let’s be real here.

And when will the O Campaign stop constantly stopping to explain itself?

No Joke, people, you cats have got to stop taking yourselves so seriously.

The Other Side of the Knife

“So, apparently, alas, it works both ways,” I moaned to my colleague Frank Belloc, combat psychologist.

“Yep,” he told me, “and that’s where I’m getting most of my work now, now that Obama has pretty much cinched the nomination. Most pundits and journalists have either leveled off or come to terms with what we’re calling ‘Leg Thrilling’ in the business.”

Leg Thrilling, or a newsman’s nervy inability to contain him/herself in the throes of an Obama speech; it had been Frank’s big job to talk them down since Iowa. But now he was working the flip side and, oy, my dear, supple readers, I was in need of it.

“Whereas the sort of blank slate of Obama rhetoric, the amorphous references to change and hope provide a lot of people in this country with a sort of screen on which to project their own best desires and hopes there is another reaction when they come to face anyone who challenges those perceptions and what people are doing then is to project their worst fears and enmities on to them; whomever that might be.”

Indeed. Sacre’Poutine! An old friend, Mugsy Seidel, and I sat down for an innocent glass of wine the other night, ostensibly to discuss the return of foie gras to the menus of his native Chicago. Mugsy runs a number of online poker sites and I’ve always considered him shrewd and savvy; the guy that knows the score, you know? A numbers man, un-inclined to the messy table of emotional politics. Before I knew it, as the second bottle of Vermentino was opened, he lashed out at me. The details too embarrassing to recount, I will say I was galled by his ferocity and his willingness to repaint his conception of me as a race hating, sycophant of women. Moi? Nom de Dieu!

“It’s a harder road to slog through,” Frank told me. “Because you can’t talk to them. Certain people’s beliefs about the Democratic Nominee have turned the subject of him into the new taboo; it’s like abortion meets dad’s affair. You just don’t bring it up. For people like you, I have to say, avoidance is the best deterrent. Just let it lie until after the election. When he becomes President, the hope is that a need will have been satisfied and they will return to normal. There’s also another theory that I think plays into the post election psyche of the country as well; the things that we’ve projected as our core beliefs about Bush are going to come home to roost. I think a lot of people in this country have indulged their lesser natures on the account that as long as he was in charge, it was ok. That’s a whole other ball of wax to contend with.”

Winner! ?

Sacre’Poutine! Is it over? It can’t be over, can it? Of course it isn’t, but for now we are in the wash of the ‘clinch’. The junior Senator is the presumptive nominee and Margaret will just have to deal with that. Whether she will find the satisfaction of a joint ticket, it remains to be seen. Right now, too look at it, Barack Obama could walk into the White House unassisted; if you are watching the major non-Fox press, history has not only been made, this election is history. CNN and MSNBC have had their coronation, Olbermann has spat, perhaps, his last screed against HRC, Matthews giddily rubbed off his penultimate nut and it is all smiles in Blitzerland.

I don’t know, you know, so much time, so little attention to span for you, the Americans. Certainly, McCain is proving equally as poor a speaker as… well… I won’t mention it. But there is talk about the governor of Alaska, the extraordinarily popular Sarah Palin, a fiscally conservative, right to life, lifetime NRA member and former beauty queen who still has the good looks of a sexy librarian in a film I ha… ahem.

The race is long and not yet half over. Many members of the press and friends have emailed and called to express their exhaustion and happiness to see this settled, but I wonder if it had gone to the convention, still as inevitable a conclusion as was achieved this week, the wash of the ‘clinch’ might have borne more weight.

How Soon is Now?

Let’s get it over with already, no? Perhaps just maybe once this is settled the Obamaniacs can cease their inane chatter. Sacre Poutine! They remind me of apologists for x-tian rock when they insist and ceaselessly insist that their campaign is cleaner than HRC’s, their tactics the noble strides of holy warriors against the X chromosome chicanery of the infidel; let us be clear, what is passing for a ‘new’ kind of politics is the politics of the inexperienced and the naïve. Perhaps, again, when all the dust here settles we will begin to see it for what it is; once the Republicans have their attack ready and rolling.

Obama isn’t going to like it, Michele definitely isn’t going to like it, and these Obamazoids would rather drink hemlock than admit it, much less consume the requisite crow required to get behind it, but this rarified campaign is going to need the grit of a Clinton to win this election and that’s the end of it. When they have extinguished the empty calorie diet of femo-bashing and find themselves again with a policy-less, indefinable concept of change and little more than an elite guard of over-educated, wide eyed liberal, plastic saber waving monkeys to get them to the White House, what is to say then? This is not to include the ninety percent of black Americans voting Democratic in these primaries and caucuses thus far; as a group always an important segment of the party’s voting base and, it appears obvious, showing more strongly than ever before. They certainly form a backbone that can not be forgotten in this race; but where they could not be ignored in the past (in far fewer numbers, the others disenfranchised and uninterested in the democratic process (in 2006 29% of black Americans expressed no confidence in the country’s election system and that they did not believe their vote would be counted accurately), nor can another, larger segment: the white, working class voter. Alay, I know, I know, I know what that is supposed to sound like! Nom Dieu! All of a sudden we are paying attention to the voice of the, how you call it, cracker? It is hardly romantic politic, in the Thomas Paine style, I know, but what can you say? These are different times and we cannot define them by ourselves. Is Jim Webb going to bring a unity to the party? Bill Richardson? And don’t begin to say the name of Edwards! In the parlance of your football, this is like giving the ball to the quarterback of interceptions! You may as well put Kerry, or Gore, back in the game with ten minutes remaining. I don’t think I need to remind you of the season record. The Republicans have won seven contests to the Democrat’s three since Nixon first won the presidency in 1968. Available on the sidelines right now are members of two of those winning teams. But no, it’s ok, I completely understand… it would not be right, I’m sure you have all that you need to blame her later with… after a war hero with a hot wife wins the moms of soccer in the final minutes of the game. You will feel noble in the defeat.

This is politics. Like rock and roll it can not be half assed, watered down, or explained. Madonna or Amy Grant? Metallica or Seventh Day Slumber? Ronnie James Dio or Michael W. Smith? Let’s go, Americans! Get with it!