Thursday, August 21, 2008

Not Ready to Lead

The clearest signal that Barack Obama's campaign message is achieving traction with voters is the fact that he is losing the election.

For months Obama and his people have been pounding home the message that a vote for McCain is a vote for a third term for George Bush. Little do the Obama people realize that despite Bush's abysmal approval ratings--or perhaps, in some horribly twisted, quintessentially American gesture of self destruction, because of them--a third term of Bush is exactly what the voters want.

"W, The Warlord," read the parodies of the Bush bumpersticker, but to many people, I am convinced, they aren't parodies at all, they are a more direct expression than the originals of Americans' yearning for The End, one final, spastic, grotesque orgy of violence that takes us, and all the foreigners who hate us, down together.

Ever since 1955, when Fess Parker stood at the Alamo in the closing shot of the Davy Crockett series, swinging his rifle like a club, fending off the enclosing Mexicans, that's been our subconscious national dream, to do down swinging in glory taking as many of the encroaching aliens with us as possible, and John McCain is the candidate most likely to make the dream a reality.

The two issues, I read, that have made the difference for the McCain campaign in the past few weeks are offshore drilling (the heroin addict's answer to addiction is finding more heroin) and getting tough with the Russians (for "Remember the Alamo" substitute "We are all Georgians"). I've watched America waste years, lives, and treasure trying to remake Iraq in our image. After that experience it seems perfectly apt that we should all burn in nuclear fire to save South Ossetia for democracy.

Obama's problem, we are told, is that he lacks experience. Maybe this means his brain has not been sufficient pickled by the ways of Washington to achieve the level of madness attained by McCain. I really don't believe that's the problem the voters are having with Obama, though. It's not that he's too sane for their tastes, it's that his skin is the wrong damned color.

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