Thursday, October 16, 2008

An American Carol Candidate

I'll keep this one short because I'm not too keen on debate commentary, but I think the following conclusion/point is fairly obvious and striking, and therefore deserving of notice on the blog.

A while back I ran a post about how movie goers unfamiliar with GOP radio and the right wing blogosphere would pretty much need a translator in order to find the "humor" in the movie An American Carol. As you can see from the box office receipts, this little gambit isn't exactly paying off. During last night's debate with Barack Obama, John McCain boldly showed the world that he has adopted the American Carol Approach as his official campaign strategy.

While our more conservatively-conditioned readers are sure to have found the requisite applause lines, the rest of America just couldn't seem to wrap their head around why an angry old man kept on insisting that the young man across from him wanted to kill infants, raise everybody's taxes and pal around with terrorists. I'm pretty sure that by this point in the campaign they've grown a bit tired of the old man telling the young one about how he doesn't understand things that he obviously does. It probably also doesn't help that gramps keeps on claiming that the young whipper-snapper is guilty of doing outrageous things only to see him clearly explain a) that he really didn't do what he was accused of, b) that the accusation failed to contain accurate information and context, and c) here's what he's going to do instead of the ridiculous charge.

You see, while calling equal pay for women a "trial lawyers' dream" and poo-poohing the "health of the mother" as just another petty obstacle in the way of overturning Roe v. Wade may play like gangbusters on Rush or over at the MOB, it probably didn't sit well with that constituency we used to call "soccer moms"...or, perhaps, independent women from Ohio.

Who knew that the creator of Airplane! would be used as a GOP consultant in the 08 presidential campaign?

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