Happy Hour Discurso

Today's opining on the public discourse.

The McCain camp has officially bounced their reality check:

We talked the other day about the McCain campaign overplaying the prisoner-of-war card, so much so that even sympathetic reporters have begun questioning McCain for "trivializing" his service.

For its part, the McCain campaign has come to the opposite conclusion.

They will be prepared to show McCain's "home" in Hanoi by using images of his cell. They claim they have not overused the POW element and insist they have "underused it."

There's no indication that McCain aides were kidding.

Underused it. Are. You. Fucking. Kidding. Me?

Just off the top of my poor, POW-abused brain, I can think of the following instances where they've fallen back on the POW plan: in response to the houses dust-up, in campaign commercials, healthcare, foreign policy, every time McCain tells a lame joke... they've played it so fucking often I'm losing count, even their biggest fans in the media are starting to groan, it's become a lame joke, and they still think they're underusing it?

Puh-leeze.

But even though McCains Media admirers are giving him a bit of guff over the whole exploitation of this POW status thing, they're still firmly on his side:

Last week Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) told Politico that he did not know how many homes he and his wife Cindy own. “I’ll have my staff get to you,” McCain said. ThinkProgress noted that even though McCain’s
comment highlights his poor record on the housing crisis and his economic policies that primarily benefit the rich, many in the media leaped to McCain’s defense, saying the gaffe was not “a big deal.”

Today on ABC’s This Week, Time Magazine’s Mark Halperin took the media’s McCain defense a step further, arguing that the fact that McCain doesn’t know how many houses he owns “is going to be one of the worst moments in the entire campaign” — not for McCain, but for Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL):

HALPERIN: My hunch is this is going to end up being one of the worst moments in the entire campaign for one of the candidates but it’s Barack Obama. […] I believe that this opened the door to not just Tony Rezko in that ad, but to bring up Reverend Wright, to bring up his relationship with Bill Ayers.

Talk about reaching. Obama's already survived all that. It was going to come up anyway - you know the wingnuts wouldn't pass up those juicy items in the general election. And no matter how you spin it, the fact remains that McCain looks a fuck of a lot worse than Obama with this.

Gotta love that incisive MSM commentary though, right? What a bunch of fucking morons.

This is the only way to treat such swill:

Griff Jenkins, a Fox Television correspondent, was waiting with a microphone for a crowd of demonstrators on a Denver street today, hoping to catch signs of a breakup of the herd of cats known as the American Left.

[snip]

Griff, an affable pencil neck, went to the middle of the street and waitied for the march to envelop him. Here they came, hordes of scruffy, awful looking people with who knows what on their minds, seemingly capable of World Bank, er, world class anarchy. Fox viewers watched with anticipation on the edges of their scratchy plaid furniture. What would happen?

Griff valiantly held up his mike to the first guy, "What are you demonstrating about?"

"Fuck you," came the reply.

Undaunted, Griff tried again, holding up his blunt instrument to another demonstrator, then another.

Maybe a half dozen answers pretty much exactly the same: Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you. They were mostly smiling, no doubt drenched in cannabisism.

Then Griff hit paydirt: a protester who could (would), speak a sentence. "We don't talk to Fox."

Heh. Way to tell 'em.

(My apologies, my darlings. The political news so far today is thinner than John McCain's hair.)