Swinging On a Star

I think it is disgraceful for a Presidential candidate to make a comment about "putting lipstick on a pig" that indirectly alludes to a female opponent. It is sexist and crude.

A pig is an animal with pork on her plate
She grabs all she can for her home state
Her resume's a twisted tale that is untrue
Her policies are Bush hog slop she says are new
It's trying to hide a bald spot with a wig
Or putting lipstick on a pig

But would you like to end a bad war
Restore our respect near and far
And be better of than you are
Then vote Obama, the rock star

Superstar Act Three

Hillary addresses the convention:
(UPDATE: This was the speech Hillary had prepared. After I posted it, we had a little talk and she agreed she needed to deliver a more supportive message. That's why you didn't hear this last night)
I don't know why you love him.
How can I now support him?
I've been changed, I’ve been shortchanged.
I thought I owned this party for myself,
And you picked someone else.
I don't know how to take this.
I don't see why he moves you.
He's a man. He's just a man.
And we've had so many men before,
In that White House place
Why get one more?
Should I bring him down?
Should I scream and shout?
Should I bitch and moan,
Let my feelings out?
I never thought I'd come to this.
What's it all about?
Don't you think it's rather funny,
I should be in this position?
I'm the one who's always been
So calm, so cool, behind the fool,
I let Bill run the show.
He screwed me so.
I never thought I'd come to this.
What's it all about?
Yet, if he made me VP,
I'd accept, I’d act flattered
I could do “hope”. I’ve lived in Hope.
I'd hide my pride, tuck it away
I would be next in line
I’d bide my time
I would be fine
I’d win next time

SUPERSTAR ACT TWO

(scroll down to the previous entry to see act one)

The media hound Barack at the convention

MEDIA
What's the buzz?
Tell me what your platform is?. (Repeat 8 times)

OBAMA
Why should you want to know?
Do not ask about the taxes
Do not ask about health care
Save policy for tomorrow;
Put Ted on display up there.

MEDIA
What's the buzz?
Tell me what your platform is. (Repeat many times)

OBAMA
I could give you facts and figures.
Even give you plans and forecasts.
Even tell you where I'm going.

MEDIA
When do we pull out of the Middle East? (Repeat many times)

OBAMA
Why should you want to know?
Why are you obsessed with timing?
Times and dates I can deny.
If you knew the path we're riding,
You'd understand it less than I.

MEDIA
What's the buzz?
Tell me what your platform is. (Repeat many times)

INTERNET GROUPIE
Let me donate to your campaign a bit. (Repeat 5 times)

OBAMA
Groupie, that is good,
While you prattle through your news cast,
Where and when and who and how,
She alone has tried to give me
What I need right here and now.

MEDIA
What's the buzz?
Tell me what your platform is. (Repeat many times)

Jesus Christ, He's a Superstar

Just as the convention opens, Hillary Clinton takes Barack Obama aside:

My mind is clearer now.
At last all too well
I can see where we all soon will be.
If you strip away The myth from the man,
You will see where we all soon will be. Barack!
You've started to believe
The things they say of You.
You really do believe
This talk of You is true.
And all the good I've done
Will soon get swept away.
You've begun to matter more
Than the things You say.

Listen Barack I don't like what I see.
Like John says, You’re just a celebrity.
And remember, I've been waiting my turn all along.
You have set them all on fire.
They think they've found the new Messiah.
And they'll hurt You when they find they're wrong.

I remember when this whole thing began.
No You on top then, but maybe V P, man.
And believe me, my admiration for You hasn't died.
I never had any of that anyway
Far as I know, You are okay
I don't like You but, really, I tried
Hawaii, your famous son should have stayed a great unknown
Like His father herding goats He'd have made good.
On TV news, You'd look good, reporting the weather, man, in Your 'hood.
You'd have caused nobody harm; no one alarm.

Listen, Barack, do You care for Your race?
Don't You see You must keep in Your place?
We are Democrats; have You forgotten how far down we are?

I am frightened by the crowd.
My supporters are so loud.
They’ll abstain if You go too far.
If You go too far....

Listen, Barack, to the warning I give.
Please remember that I want us to live.
But it's sad to see our chances weakening with every hour.
All your followers are blind.
Too much change is on their minds.
It was beautiful, but now it's sour.
Yes it's all gone sour.

Listen, Barack, we're about to begin.
Please remember I've the best chance to win.
C'mon, c'mon
Give the nomination to me ...
C'mon, c'mon
Give the nomination to me ...

Free Falling

Way back at the beginning of the Presidential campaign (God, we were so innocent then)Hillary Clinton's biggest problem was what theme song to use. For a time, she was using Tom Petty's "American Girl", because people often don't really listen to lyrics. "American Girl" contains the wonderfully prophetic lyric, "God, it's so painful, Something that’s so close, And still so far out of reach.” At the time, Hillary's nomination was consideered inevitable. Now you can find myriad stories on "What went wrong?"
Was it this or this or this or this or this? People look at Obama without a flag lapel pin and decide that he is unpatriotic. Do people look at the fit of Hillary's pantsuits and decide that she must be smuggling illegal aliens strapped to her thighs (a practice which may or may not be un-American but is a crime of fashion, which is what women in public life are judged on)?
None of these is the reason she lost. She lost because she was considered inevitable. As soon as people got that message, Hillary Clinton became Bruce Willis in "The Sixth Sense". Some kid should have told her, "My secret is I see dead candidates." Barack Obama was the underdog. Americans love an underdog, right? Not exactly. The reason we root for the underdog is that we love to see the mighty fall. "The Tortoise and the Hare" is not a popular fable because tortoises are cute and cuddly (they are not); it is popular because we want to see the smug, self-assured hare take a fall. America loved Britney Spears until she became too successful, then we ate up the scandal rags who dragged her down. When Hillary became recognized as inevitable, she might as well have gotten drunk and driven around with Chelsea on her lap (a fantasy I've had ever since Chelsey matured).
Many years ago the Dallas Cowboys were dubbed "America's Team" and that's when America began to hate them. But the biggest sports evil is the New York Yankees, the "Damn Yankees" (they are so hated there is a play about the dream of their defeat.) The Yankees are hated because for so many years they have been the best team, the team to beat. We''ll root for any underdog to beat them. When Hillary Clinton began her long campaign for the Presidency, she moved to New York, became a Senator and adopted the Yankees are her favorite team. How could she miss the implications? Did it never occur to her to pick the Mets? And what state does Senator Obama represent? Illinois, home of the Cubs. Who wouldn't root for the Cubs to whip the Yankees? (Side note: the "inevitable" Republican nominee at the beginning was Rudy Giuliani, who is from what state?)
Toward the end, Hillary got it. Senator Obama became inevitable in some people's eyes. Hillary started comparing herself to Rocky going up against Apollo Creed. She switched Tom Petty songs and chose "Won't Back Down". It started to work, but it was too late. For a while she seemed to be "Runnin' Down a Dream", but she was actually just "Free Fallin'"

Underdog = grounded

Thanks to all who clicked over to Humor Blogs. This blog is moving up the favorites list. Click over there often to push it up to the top 30. I'm the underdog here!

Could She Be a June Bridesmaid?

Yesterday Hillary Clinton was defending her refusal to confront reality and drop out of the Democratic primary. She wondered why sane people were urging her to do so before June, “My husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June, right?” she told the Sioux Falls Argus Leader. “We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California. You know, I just, I don't understand it.”
Many people were upset by this comment because she clearly declared that her husband’s nomination was a tragedy on the scale of Bobby Kennedy being assassinated. Some reporters seem to think people were upset because they understood her to say, “if I’m lucky, Barack Obama will be shot” or perhaps they heard the actual coded message in her words which was “if you want me to win, someone, please, shoot Barack Obama.”
Perhaps she just meant to say, “You never know what might happen; fairy tales can come true”.
There may be less of a problem with what some people inferred from her comments than with what she implied with the examples she gave. Bill Clinton was not dodging sniper fire as he ran to safety in California in June: he had “effectively won the Democratic Party's nomination after winning the New York Primary in early April.” Or maybe as early as March.
Whether Kennedy’s nomination in 1968 was certain until stopped by an assassin’s bullet is less clear, but many people believe that “(Hubert) Humphrey was the likely nominee, and RFK's own campaign manager … wrote in his memoirs that Kennedy's chances of winning the nomination had been slim, even after his win in California.”
If Clinton dropped out and Obama subsequently died (no need to assume he is shot), Clinton would get the nomination anyway, so it is not an excuse for staying in the race. Does she, however need an excuse for what she said? She did, of course, express regret… that people were offended.
Perhaps when Hillary said, “You know, I just, I don't understand it.” she meant to say, “I just don’t get it.”
Perhaps she meant to say, “It’s not over until the fat lady** sings”:

“Does anybody here recall my husband’s primary?
Can you tell me what took so long?
He didn’t win until he won California
I think in June, but I could be wrong

Does anybody here recall Humphrey’s victory?
Can you tell me what took so long?
He won after Kennedy was shot in California
That day in June, but I could be wrong

Does anybody here recall my inevitability?
Can you tell me where it’s gone?
You think you saw it disappear with my comments.
I’ll turn it around, but I could be wrong.”

**If anyone took my reference to the “fat lady” to mean Hillary Clinton and if they see that in a negative way and if they are offended, I regret that.

Pea Brain From West VA

Barack Obama was trounced in West Virginia because some white voters hate Muslims, some white voters fear black people and some white voters distust anyone named Hussein.
(Funny thing: Hillary Clinton has not been called upon to denounce or repudiate the views of her supporters.)
Back when Nixon was President Merle Haggard recorded a song about the righteousness of not being a peace-living, pot-smoking, liberal-ass hippie, called "Okie From Muskogee." Later Kinky Friedman did a parody of it called "Asshole From El Paso." I will borrow the lyrics to render my thoughts on the under-educated, hard working, white voters of West Virginia.

We don’t open minds up in West V A
We don’t think out thoughts, we just believe
We don’t find antebellum ideas passe
We like bein’ white, and real naïve

I’m proud to be a pea brain from West V A
A place where evolution takes a fall
We all keep our gene pools in the fam’ly
And white people’s still the bestest race of all

We know that Obama is a Muslim
His middle name’s Hussein, it must be true
He takes his oath of office on the Ko-ran
And hates us like all them kind of people do

I’m proud to be a pea brain from West V A
A place where evolution takes a fall
We all keep our gene pools in the fam’ly
And white people’s still the bestest race of all

Flag pins on one’s label prove you’re Amurican
A turban on your head would be obscene
We prefer white hoods as fashion statements
Deliverance is the best flick ever screened

We still paint the stars and bars on the outhouse
In good old West Virginia, U S A

I realize that not everyone in West VA is sitting in a backwoods shack droolin' to the sound of dueling banjos. The song is directed at ignorant racists everywhere: the ones I knew in California, and the ones I know in Ohio and - soon to take the national racist spotlight from West VA - Kentucky.

It's The Economists, Stupid!

NOTE: This was timely when I wrote it at my old blog site, which was temporarily unusable.

For some time Republicans have been calling out Democrats as “liberals” like Salem religious zealots branding people as witches. Republicans have successfully imbued the word “liberal” with the meaning of: evil, wretched Democrat who stoops to repairing the world and tolerating diversity. So what label can a Democrat apply to another Democrat to mark that person with the sign of the beast so ye shall know him? That word is “elitist”. Elitists are those demons who suffer from education and are often afflicted with advanced degrees and, worse, money: they know “stuff” and they profit from that.
Good Democrats should eschew elitism. For example, closet ivy-league-graduate and rich person (until she blew it all on campaigning) Hillary Clinton was recently “Sen. Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and …whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me." As a person who has the misfortune to be quadruple whammied, being white and male and educated and having a well-paying job (which I mistakenly believed I was working hard at), I say these liberals need to be more tolerant of elitists. I am growing bitter and starting to cling to my spirituality, my fine wine and my mistrust of people stupider than I.

Take This Job

For a long time Republicans have tagged Democrats with the liberal label like Salem religous zealots calling out witches. Being laneled as a liberal means one is so evil, so vile as to actual care about people and be tolerant of diversity. But what can one Democrat label another in order to tag him as "not like us"? "Elitist". An elistist is someone horrifyingly knowledgeable or educated in a wealthier-than-thou manner. Closet educated and wealthy person, Hillary Clinton favors a gas tax "holiday". Her husband's former toady, Geoirge Snuffleupagus challenged her, asking, "can you name an economist who thinks this makes sense?", she replied, "I'm not going to put my lot in with economists" because they went to Ivy league schools, made a lot of money and they know stuff. They are elitists like Obama who rightly thinks people are bitter but makes the mistake of saying it out loud.
In other news, men are suffering more from the supposed recession than women. Barack Obama is so elitist that he owns his own elitist economist, Austan Goolsbee, who said: "Because the unemployed are disproportionately men, they may especially benefit from Obama's program to get us out of recession." I don't know exactly what he means by that except that a guy named Barack Obama ought to surround him self with people named something more ordinary than Austan Goolsby.
What offends me about the elist label is that it is an attempt to carve out and villanize a class of people simply because they had the misfortune to graduate from college or perhaps be afflicted with even more advanced degrees. They are not real people like the "working men and women" of this great country. True, their work is simple: what does a CEO or CFO of a company really need ever do? And people in academic ivory towers, researching diseases or researching econmic solutions to hunger and poverty, come on, that's not real work.
So get yourself a real job, and comfort yourself with your church, your guns and your fear of different people, especially elitists. If your not sure, the easy way to identify the worthless elitist is that they go by three letter designations, PhD, CFO, CEO, esq. SOB and like that.

They Shoot Horses, Don't They

Headline: "Big Brown wins. Filly finishes second and is euthanized."
Wow, the Democrats are really getting serious.
Oh. That was about the Kentucky Derby.
It would really liven up the primaries, though, wouldn't it?

Variations on a Theme

(UPDATED 1/27) Everyone is familiar with the inappropriate songs played at weddings, such as the stalker song, “I’ll Be Watching You.” I submit that Eric Clapton’s “Wonderful Tonight” should be on the list: “We go a party, And everyone turns to see, This beautiful lady, That's walking around with me…………Its time to go home now, And Ive got an aching head, So I give her the car keys, She helps me to bed”. Sure, any guy would love an arm-candy, live-in, designated driver sleeping in his bed, but the guy doesn’t say that OUT LOUD. Clapton actually put it in a song! And people play this as a tribute to a bride!
In a similar way, political candidates choose theme songs based on the title and forget to review the lyrics. This article points out some excellent examples.

John McCain recently dispensed with the classic, Chuck Berry tune, “Johnny B Goode” in favor of Abba’s “Take a Chance on Me.” I don’t object to this because he switched from a rocking song by a real American to a lame disco song by some unisex Swedes. And the new song is fairly appropriate for McCain, being about somebody who is rejected once, asking for a do over, and the lyrics, “Gonna do my very best and it ain’t no lie If you put me to the test, if you let me try” fit his message. What’s wrong about this lyric is that John McCain has gone from Johnny B Goode who overcomes humble beginnings, achieving self-made success, to being John Cusack standing outside your house with a boombox over his head, willing to "Say Anything" to get a date your vote.
Somebody asking you to “Take a Chance on Me” is a pitiable loser. It doesn’t have to be that way. Dirty Harry asks a similar question in a more assertive manner: “I know what you're thinking. ‘Did he fire six shots or only five?’ Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement I kind of lost track myself. But being as this is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world, and would blow your head clean off, you've got to ask yourself a question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?” Mr. Harry is asking “Do you want to take a chance on me” in a very testosterone-fueled, active way. However, he’s suggesting there may be very drastic, negative consequences if you do, which is not McCain’s intended message (I assume), so he's better off with old Johnny B
McCain is not the only politician these days with a soft message. Barack Obama uses “Higher and Higher” which says nothing about what he will do for you but is about what your love does for him, which seems like the negative flip side of JFK’s message. Speaking of which, Obama talks about giving America “hope”. John Kennedy’s theme song was “High Hopes” back in 1960. Martin Luther King had a dream back in the 60’s. We no longer have time to take a chance on hopes and dreams. We need someone to wake up and give us some results, not hope. Hope is the thing with feathers. Things with feathers, can't be held, they fly away, like birds. By offering “hope”, Obama is giving us the bird! Maybe “Free Bird” would be a good campaign song.
Hillary Clinton has taken to saying, "Some believe you can get change by hoping for it. I believe you get change by working hard.” I've noticed that Obama has recently spoken less about hope and more about change. Here's a good song for one of them about change, with a message for the Bush Republicans: "Ch-ch-changes, Wheres your shame? Youve left us up to our necks in it." But change just for change's sake is not enough. As Billy Joel has said at many weddings, "Don't go changin', to try and please me. Won't change the color of my state.... I Love you just the way you are. Now drive me home and put me to bed."