©2008 Stacy Taylor | Spikeorama Web

I feel obligated to post something here just because there’s been so much activity on the comment board of late. Unfortunately, I’m too busy this week doing 2 radio programs a day to really have the time to put together anything in the witty and satirical style to which you have become accustomed. So here, I’ll just blurt something out: Free floating gender bias, per se, is not the reason Hillary is losing the race to Obama. Hillary’s default position seems to be victimhood and indeed this  does play into a societal view that female=weakness. America would probably have no problem with a strong woman occupying the White House. It clearly has a problem, however, electing a weak, victimized woman to that position.

If above comments in any way were offensive to the state of Israel or any of it’s citizens, we offer our deepest and most profound apologies.

The campaign for the presidential nomination hit it’s nadir the day after the Tuesday primary sweep by Barack Obama. Obama’s wife, Michelle, during a Wisconsin campaign stop on behalf of her husband, said this: “Let me tell you, for the first time in my adult life, I am really proud of my country. Not just because Barack is doing well, but I think people are hungry for change.”

Holy Moses, the s**t really hit the fan. Right wing blowhards swarmed like piranhas around a downer school cafeteria Chino Holstein. Brit Hume sniffed and proclaimed Mrs. Obama’s utterance was the typical non-patriotism of an “ultra-liberal”. Bill O’Reilly popped another facial vein and invoked a “lynch mob”. And those guys are the more “reasonable” of the talking goon platoon. God knows what the Coulters, Becks, Hannities, and Limbaughs were snorting. I certainly didn’t wait around to find out.

Even a couple lib callers to my show suggested Michelle would wish she’d spoken more carefully upon further deliberation. And sure enough the apology/disclaimer eventually came from the Obama camp, that, of course, the potential first lady meant that normally she is really proud to be an American, but that this time she was really, really, really proud.

 To which I say “huh?”. I guess I’m really the black hearted traitor in the wood pile. I have a tough time even conceptualizing “proud American”. I guess I’ve always just thought it was a bumper sticker slogan or a trite political banality. Maybe I’ve lived through a little too many “proud American” traditions, from Selma to Saigon, from Watergate to Iran-Contra, from Rodney King to Hurricane Katrina, to believe for more than a minute that the accident of my birth within these borders requires me to choke back tears every time an Ohio astronaut orbits the earth or a California biologist develops a vaccine.

Hell, if this story lasts more than 48 hours, I’ll be almost ashamed to be an American. Let Brit Hume chew on that for a while. Hopefully, he’ll require a heimlich maneuver before he can express his righteous indignation again.

Thoughts on a variety of things:

First, the campaign for President is rapidly boiling down to an Obama/ McCain matchup, unless Hillary pulls out the stops and starts effectively swift-boating Obama on the inexperience thing. The problem with that strategy is that the country never before seemed more ready for an outsider in the White House and ready to blame the Washington insider pols for the mess we’re in. The Hillary-Reid-Pelosi-Hoyer establishment wing of the Democratic party have effectively taken the hope and zeal of the 2006 congressional takeover and ground it into a pile of unappetizing gruel, especially on the Iraq issue, and have concentrated their efforts on the election… at the expense of any meaningful new policies… using the Bush veto as a convenient excuse. So along comes Obama with his eloquence, passion, and outsider credentials and it’s no wonder folks fall into episodic incontinence at one of his campaign stops. And of course McCain, ever the “party maverick”, is the ultimate career politician who checked what was left of his soul at the primary gate when he obscenely groveled before the very “agents of intolerance” (Robertson, Fallwell, et al ) that he decried 8 years ago, while representing the party that a) failed to see 9-11 coming, b) lied us into the quagmire known as Iraq while effectively turning that secular country into a seething hornets nest of Muslim fanaticism, and c) managed to sieze defeat from the jaws of victory in Afghanistan which, if you read the fine print on pape 16 of your daily newspaper, is virtually back in the controlling hands of the Taliban. Oh yeah, and how’s that search for Bin Laden going anyway?

Shaping up to be a slam dunk for whichever Dem gets the nomination, so, naturally, the Repubs have already ratcheted up the Democrats-as-sissies rhetoric with all Gitmo/waterboarding/FISA cultism. Jesus, what’s up with some of these rightie talk show gasbags and their waterboarding fetish? Is that all they’re left with, “We’re the torture party!”? Is this election really going to come down to which party favors wet towels placed over the nostrils of “detainees”?

Bush briefly halted his I’m-the-next-Abe Lincoln self-love fest to remind Chris Wallace of Faux News that the Dems are still the cut-and-run party and that only God fearin’, tough talking, ridin’ high in the saddle chicken hawks like him and Cheney could deal with the threat of “terrorishm”, and talking of all the imaginary terrorist attacks that haven’t taken place on American Soil on the Republican’s watch. What’s the bet that at least one more orange level terror alert goes up sometime between now and November?

So, I’m actually beginning to believe that Obama, with his rhetoric of hope and restoring the stature of U.S. integrity around the world, could be just the right salve for the open wound known as Bush (and his designated ass-kisser, McCain). And even though it’s unlikely that he’ll be any more effective about changing the direction of this country any more than Pelosi-Reid-Clinton-Hoyer at least we’ll feel a hell of a lot better about ourselves for a few months. At least until the forclosure notice is tacked to the front door.

The excruciating 2 week sports nerd fest leading up to the Superbowl finally ended at 3:30 pm Sunday when the actual game began. It felt almost anti-climactic from the start, having to live up….or down…to the endless talk show babble and over analysis that preceeded it. Clearly more “expert” analysis was devoted , and more attention payed, to Tom Brady’s ankle injury than such mundane issues as universal healthcare and immigration reform. And with good reason. Obviously more people are interested in the Superbowl than the  issues that affect America’s future, or more precisely the issues like drivers licenses for illegal aliens that will have virtually zero effect on anyone’s life. Some bloke even included a blow-by-blow of the final few plays of yesterday’s game on this website. And worse yet, more attention was payed to the series of lame-ass commercials that played during the game than the game itself. America does have a multi-faceted way of amusing itself to death.

And it’s probably just as well that so-called Super Tuesday followed Superbowl Sunday this year so we could all take a break from McCain’s war mongering, Romney’s Wall Street pimping, and the lovefest that is now Hillary-Obama.

Actually I only decided to post a blog today for the oppurtunity to include a link to the best political ad of the season, one for Steve Novick, a Deomocrat currently running for U.S. Senate against Gordon Smith in Oregon. Novick has a prosthetic hand which comes into play in this ad which mocks the “which candidate would you like to have a beer with” banality: http://cgi.fark.com/cgi/fark/youtube.pl?IDLink=3372885.