Nuts & Mutton

Watch the following clip, from CBS News, and wonder why every red-blooded, feeling woman in America is not rushing out to vote early for Obama!

According to a post today on The Daily Beast, “the worst is still to come” in the closing days (13 and counting!!) of the US election.

Negative campaigning may become more apparent as the election looms closer. Even the McCain campaign is reconsidering its earlier decision not to make an issue out of Obama’s pastor, Jeremiah Wright, whose remarks dogged him in the primary, Rick Davis, McCain’s top campaign adviser admitted. “We’re in the process of looking at how we’re going to close this campaign,” Davis told talk radio host Hugh Hewitt.

And he warned that the worst was still to come. “Guys like McCain just don’t have the stomach for it, and because of that the 527 groups are going to have to go very negative in these last two weeks,” he said.

And you thought Swiftboating was dead and gone . . .

So Missus Palin has a voice coach, a makeup artist who’s charging lawyer-type rates, and the GOP is spending a mint on dressing her. So much for the natural, down-home beauty we’ve all been hearing about. Reminds me of the old joke about the bride who, on the honeymoon night, takes off her wig, pulls out her false teeth and glass eye, and unstraps her wooden leg before hopping into bed and leering invitingly at her bemused groom. “Come to bed,” she coos. “I’m thinking I might be better off getting in the drawer with the rest of you,” he replies. Ba-dum-ching.

So, Colin Powell has finally come out for Obama. Does Powell have any credibility since his despicable UN whitewash of the Iraq invasion? Perhaps among Republicans, although I suspect that he, like Clarence Thomas, was one of the GOP’s token African-Americans. The few black faces at the XCel Energy Centre in Minneapolis-St Paul last month reminded me of a quote from a novel I read years ago, in which a black student in a white college said he stood out “like a black-eyed pea in a saucer of milk.”

Joan Walsh praises Powell for this response to the question of whether Obama is Muslim:

“I’m also troubled by, not what Sen. McCain says, but what members of the party say, and it is permitted to be said such things as: “Well, you know that Mr. Obama is a Muslim.” Well, the correct answer is: he is not a Muslim. He’s a Christian. He’s always been a Christian. “But the really right answer is: What if he is? Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer is: No, that’s not America. Is there something wrong with some 7-year-old Muslim-American kid believing he or she can be president?”

It is a far cry from McCain’s response to the question – something along the lines of “No, Senator Obama is not a Muslim, he’s a decent, honourable man.” Duh, what? Although, to be brutally honest, I have no respect for the practitioners of a religion that condones – nay, propagates – the ill-treatment of women, viewing them as the property of men, and turns a blind eye to their abuse by the mad mullahs of Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, to name but a few Islamic theocracies. We need look no further than Obama’s respect for the reproductive rights of women to know that he is not Muslim.

I’m really worried that a little peek at his “nice” side will be enough to make Americans forget that McCain is a querulous, hot-tempered old geezer who should not be allowed within a donkey’s roar of the Nuclear Button (or “noocular” to Missus Palin.) Even as he mounts a charm offensive, finally showing up on Letterman last Thursday, McCain’s sickening robocalls continue. And, as TPM points out, these are not the work of the lunatic fringe of the GOP, they are produced and paid for by the RNC and the McCain campaign.

Anyway, Obama’s turn at the Al Smith dinner was way funnier than McCain’s, so there!

I tried blogging during last night’s debate. Unfortunately, I also drank a little vino blanco, and now I can’t believe what I wrote. Meant every word, mind, but still . . .

How long before Google comes up with something to stop blogging while tiddly?