Of course I didn’t watch the ‘debate’; seeing two barely-distinguishable stuffed shirts exchange banalities is not my idea of a good time. But the general consensus that Rombama ate Obromney’s lunch fills me with vindictive glee. The snidely professorial President was aparently no match for the boardroom bully.
Join the club. My wife and a friend of hers had tickets to watch the “debate” on a big-ass screen downtown at the Newseum (spit), but I chose not to watch it myself; even though there may have been some prime cartoon material in it, I just couldn’t work up the stomach for it.
After listening to the hucksters at MSNBC — or “the Left” as the clowns at Politico.com like to call them — busting bloodvessels all over the place at the quality of the Boy Emperor’s performance last night, I might have to find the courage to watch the next one.
Apparently, last night there was a lot of gushing and fawning and pandering to The Middle Class™; that and the slogan “Middle Class First” which was so popular at the Donkeycratic Convention have got the germ of a cartoon going, but… m’ehhh.
Yes. Is there any phrase more unmeaning and yawn-worthy than ‘middle class’?
What really kills my ass is the way the Democrats and Liberals make all this noise about the Middle Class™ — while ignoring the poor, of course — and think they’re such bad-assed progressives about it.
My wife fell asleep 15 minutes into an incomprehensible, dizzying colloquy on taxes, or something like that, and as my head began to explode, I changed channels and watched happy, fun-loving imperalists (my hated Yankees) douse each other with Champagne: a nice contrast to the joyless Emperor and Would-Be Emperor. I also happily contemplated how Anarchist-Occupy-Loving Oakland took out Bush’s Texans, and how a guy with a “ferr’n” sounding name, Cabrera, won the Triple Crown for the Capital-forsaken town of Detroit.
Oh, I did switch back to watch what turned into a drubbing. What an unappealing pair of dime’s-worth-of-difference plutocrats.
I mean, really, I know The Media are saying how Mitt opened a can of whupp-ass on Nobama, but whatever the case: Watching these two men for 90 min is damn near impossible. No wonder, once again, more than half the country is of a SMBIVAn mindset.
Well, I’ve downloaded an mpeg4 of the complete video posted by the New York Times and plan to watch it in digestible chunks, perhaps a half hour at a time, until I can’t stand anymore and cue up an old episode of MST3K. My wife sat through the whole thing at a big event at the Newseum (spit) and seemed entirely into it. Ugh.
In spite of the horror stories I’m reading here, I feel like I really do owe it to myself, seeing as how I’m supposed to be a political cartoonist and all.
Wow, the Yankees won their division, huh? I’m afraid I haven’t followed pro sports very closely since about the mid ’80s, when I finally got fed up with the bloated player contracts and the raging corporatism and Drug War propaganda.
Meanwhile, down here in the Maw Of The Beast, the Nationals have nabbed the NL East, but I’m having a hard time getting Pennant Fever because I can’t forget how we got the goddamn’ team in the first place.
Karen, too, fell asleep, muttering that she couldn’t take another minute of this. I watched on, noting how Obama is such an arrogant prick and can’t stand to be challenged. Mitt just kept on lying, much to his advantage. The hapless moderator, Jim Lehrer, reminded me of my semi-senile grandfather lasciviously showing me a keychain full of pictures of naked women in my parents’ kitchen, urging me not to tell anyone. MJS has given up facebook for an early Lent, so he may have missed this post I put up today: “I saw on facebook last night a comment that the US government should give up waterboarding and make suspected terrorists watch the presidential debates in an endless loop. They would confess to anything, even the Lincoln assassination! Karen and I laughed about this in the middle of the night.”
Well, as usual, The Onion is the only outlet reporting the straight, raw truth:
http://www.theonion.com/articles/sasha-obama-asks-father-why-he-was-acting-like-suc,29795/
Well, I’m about a half hour into it, and maaa-aaan, is it tedious. In fact, it’s even worse than when the candidates are slinging incendiary rhetoric around. It’s so goddamn’ bland, so fucking banal, that it just makes me want to tear my own face off.
At first, I was thinking that if only I could snag some weed, I might find some ironic absurdity in it, but now, at around the 34-minute mark, I’m thinking I couldn’t find any cartoon material in here if I bonged a whole goddamn’ ounce.
There might be a cartoon in the fact that I heard the Middle Class™ sucked up to at least a dozen times in the first fifteen minutes, and I heard Obummer say “we do best when the middle class is doing well” at least twice in the first fifteen minutes.
Mind you, I was born and raised middle class — in a nice family, with nice parents, in the nice suburban neighborhoods of Washington DC — and I gotta tell ya from experience… the middle class is where the narrow-mindedness, the materialism, the shallowness, the selfishness, pretty much everything annoying and infuriating about this country lives. Y’know that old Pete Seeger song? Well, that’s the kind of neighborhood I spent my entire adolescence growing up in — a subdivision that was brand-new in 1971 when my parents bought a house there after Dad retired from the Army, a Little Box On The Hillside in a neighborhood with big-ass pristine lawns and houses based on perhaps three or four designs in four or five different colors, looking as if they were stamped out onto the lots by a giant machine. That’s where I lived in all of high school, and where I came home to from college at Christmas and for the summer… and, man, was it grim — grim, and fucking desolate.
But, aaaaaa-aanyway… I’m at about the 42-minute mark in the “debate”, and there’s not a cartoon idea to be found, and my eyes are starting to glaze over, so I’m going to make a note of where I left off, turn this shit off and rinse out my brain with some MST3K — specifically, Episode 513, The Brain That Wouldn’t Die... and I invite you all to join me: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2B6pXQOGegw