Beauty is Imperfection

(Originally posted Wednesday, October 08, 2008 )

A live blog from tonight’s presidential debate in Nashville, Tennessee.

–*McCain immediately comes out and starts scribbling something on a note pad. A camera close-up reveals what it says: “You are running for president, John, and this guy is your opponent. You cannot trust him.” Just like the guy with short-term memory loss in Memento.

–*McCain chides Obama for admitting out loud that he would make cross-border incursions into Pakistan. “I promise to do everything Obama is doing, but I wouldn’t be stupid enough to tell you,” McCain says.

–*McCain starts an anecdote about an old veteran he was talking to, but trails off and starts talking about something he was putting together with a glue gun.

–*McCain puts a hip spin on one of his patronizing “My friends…” intros with a new one: “Wassup my homies and beaaatches…”

–*When it comes to the almost impossible situation in Pakistan, where crazed fundamentalist Muslim terrorists have more power than ever and are regrouping in the safe bosom of an unstable nuclear power, both candidates promise to hide from you the horrible horrible truth about how it is now practically impossible to get Osama Bin Laden. Better to lie and tell you how hard they are going to try to get Osama Bin Laden.

–*The Obama Doctrine is laid out: It is a critique of the Bush Doctrine and pretty much nothing else. But it’s still better than the McCain Doctrine which is a full-throated approval of pre-emptive American ultraviolence.

–*McCain gives a shout-out to Israel by promising no new Holocaust. His brave stand against long-dead Adolf Hitler is a slam dunk with shitheads.

–*Tom Brokaw asks a zen koan: Who are you and how do you know for sure that’s who you are? It’s an impossible question to answer, but McCain tries: “The surge is working.”

–*McCain introduces a new puppet character: “John McPlatitude.”

–*McCain says that when we drill for oil offshore in the United States, the knowledge of greater supply will make the prices go down. Given that world oil supply is what affects world oil prices everywhere and that there still isn’t enough we could drill here that would dramatically change the world balance, it’s probably better to instead fall back on an earlier quote from the straight-talking McCain: “The issue of economics is something that I’ve really never understood as well as I should.”

–*The two candidates stood in front of Tom Brokaw’s teleprompter, blocking it for a moment and rendering him wordless. Then they accidentally kicked out the wire that plugs Tom Brokaw into the wall and makes him function.

–*Both candidates try to break the debate rules, including a prohibition of meaningless and disingenuous subterfuge like “America only fights for good.”

–*McCain says there are some things health insurance shouldn’t pay for. Like taking care of sick people.

–*McCain says the way to help regular people during the financial crisis is to stop the spending spree in Washington and buy up all the bad mortgages. Which is like saying “Let’s save all the polar bears and let’s kill all the polar bears.”

–*Still, McCain was sounding pretty socialist with that mortgage idea there. Raise taxes on the rich to Reagan-era levels and you might actually have something.