On January 20th, 2009, President Barack Obama will be inaugurated.
I’m sobbing my eyes out here with relief.
Let us see if we can get this planet back on track.
Now I can sleep.
|
||||
On January 20th, 2009, President Barack Obama will be inaugurated. I’m sobbing my eyes out here with relief. Let us see if we can get this planet back on track. Now I can sleep. That’s understandable, considering that what the majority of the American people seem to want right now is not John McCain. John McCain, in his own words. Worth watching it if only for the rocking Adam and the Ants track, “Kings of the Wild Frontier” in the background. That’s one hell of a beat. Lets hear it again without Captain Crazy talking all over it: This is not photoshopped. John Sidney McCain III, when startled, reverts back to his gargoylic ancestry. It is particularly effective at frightening away all manner of witchery and evil spirits. Sadly, it is less effective on debate moderators and political rivals. Of course, Obama, being the Antichrist, is immune anyway. Although you cannot tell from this picture, special glands in John McCain’s neck and back would also have released a foul tasting mucous designed to deter predators and investigative journalists. While this seldom proves useful in and of itself, many of McCain’s supporters enjoy the hallucinogenic effects they can experience by licking him. That’s in general. Air Quotes are annoying. They make you look condescending, not intriguingly post-ironic. Using air quotes around “Women’s Health” in the way that you did, makes you look like a callous unfeeling patriarch who thinks of women more as property than as individuals with the right to choose what happens to their own bodies. I thought you were supposed to be trying to pretend not to be one of them, even if your running mate, Sarah Palin, makes no effort at all to hide her feelings? Opposing abortion even in the case of rape? Seriously? You really think the American people, as a whole, are going to go for that? Or was your choice of Vice President also supposed to be ironic? Perhaps, given both your records on opposing equal pay for women, you picked a woman VP in order to save the tax payer a few bucks? Senator McCain, seriously, air quotes are so 80s. That does make them about 30 years more modern than your views on women’s rights, but still, you’d be well served to stop using them. Also it makes you look like Dr Evil. Some might say that is a step up from being compared to Gollum though. Hmm, has this post been overly partisan? Let us even things out with this “lovely” piece of “music”. From the Telegraph:
He’s not even bothering to pretend any more. The world is counting the days til he’s gone, and we can get things back to some degree of sanity. Seeing as we have no footage of this incident, lets take a trip down memory lane and revisit one of President Bush’s other great foreign diplomacy hits. Christopher Hitchens is a man who I find profoundly irritating most of the time. He has perfected the art of arrogance to the level that even when he is saying something I agree with (It’s about 50:50), I still mostly want him to shut up. He has frequently been an apologist for Bush’s interventionist policies, and the ensuing misery that perpetuates from them. However he is nothing if not a complicated man, and he was recently willing to put himself through something pretty unpleasant for a piece in Vanity Fair. I hope his experience, and his conclusions, will inform his future pronouncements.
If waterboarding is neither torture nor bad nor dangerous, then any public official that supports it should be willing to go through a similar experience to Mr Hitchens. As he pointed out himself, with a safe word and knowing he’d be tucked up in his own bed at the end of the day, it only hints at the awfulness that the real thing must offer after days of sleep deprivation, casual brutality, and not knowing when or if you’d ever see your family again, let alone a lawyer. If an official refuses to try it out (as they would if they have any sense), surely that is an admission that it is dangerous and cruel, and thus illegal. That was depressing. Let’s end with a song! Recently, at TED, the Technology, Entertainment, Design conference, Al Gore spoke about the challenges facing our world: I guess it’s too late for him to break into the Democratic nomination now. The remaining Democratic runners have been rather quiet on the most important issue of our time. Hilary Clinton and Republican John McCain even want to suspend petrol tax (18 cents a gallon) for the summer. While that might be a temporary help to low-income drivers, the vast amount of money it would cost would be far better spent on fuel conservation, such as subsidising fuel-economic vehicles, and promoting car-pooling. Not to mention that gas taxes are ringfenced for maintaining road infrastructure, so the long-term cost to the public purse would be far greater than any short-term gain. Oddly, the idea of a windfall tax on those oil producers enjoying a profit bonanza has not occurred to any of the Presidential nominees. Such a windfall tax could pay for a gas tax holiday, subsidised fuel, and more besides. |