Well, I guess that settles it.
If you or anyone you know is basing your vote on which candidate you'd like to have at your summer cookout, please stay home election day.
How bad do things have to get before we stop talking about first ladies and flag pins and ministers and cookouts? I didn't need to see Obama bowl or Hillary Clinton drink or Bush chop wood or Kerry windsurf or Clinton play the saxophone. Just stop. We're in a trillion dollar war; we're at record foreclosure levels; we've radicalized future generations of middle eastern kids who have watched us kill a hundred thousand Iraqis, we've got 50 million Americans without health insurance while US military spending is up 65% since Bush took office, our levels of health care/education rank near the bottom of the industrialized world while our levels of incarceration are the highest in recorded history, we've seen essential civil liberties eroded, we are on the brink of a pretty thorough environmental and economic collapse; median income is down during the past 7 years; real wages for averages Americans have flatlined since the early 1970s, we have less personal savings than anytime since the Depression, and more Americans are below the poverty line today than they were yesterday, unless you are an oil company CEO or a major shareholder in the military industrial complex, your answer to that old Reagan campaign question "are you better off than you were four years ago" is almost certainly no.
I've got two graduate degrees and am cutting my own hair 'cause I don't have 20 bucks a month to spend on haircuts.
Why the fuck does anyone care which candidate would be more fun to eat bratwurst with? Have you been to the grocery store in the past year? Who can afford a cookout anyway?
It's the Gilded Age. We are living in the Gilded Age. Or the last days of Pompeii.
Stop talking about cookouts. Or saying the New Yorker, of all things, is racist. To see liberals who celebrate Stephen Colbert, liberals who all grew up understanding Jonathan Swift, who have read Doonesbury all of their lives suddenly not understand a satirical magazine cover made me cringe all week. Stop. Seriously - stop.
We torture. We spy on American citizens. We detain suspects with charge or lawyers. Did you not see that a bank failed last week? Who do you suppose will pay for the coming bailouts? What additional legacies of a quarter century of deregulation will come out of your pocket?
We slaughter foreigners and let Americans die while our standard of living slips further and further away from us; if there were an orange alert level for the current threats to our lives based on the last quarter century of domestic and foreign policy it would have exploded into a supernova in the past four years.
Any rational person would be scared to death about what's coming tomorrow, hoarding beefaroni and shotgun shells.
Who would you rather have at your cookout? Seriously?
McCain, right? Old dude, good stories, probably would nap early and you could hit on his most likely unfulfilled wife. Yeah. That's the stuff. Glad we resolved this. Good talk.
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