Of Sex, Libido and the $150,000 Clothing Spree: Notes on the Incredible Arousal of Sarah Palin

Could Sarah Palin have been hiding a repressed libido? The many faces and transformations of Sarah Palin since joining the McCain presidential ticket are shockingly telling. Those changing faces have fascinated me so much (and perhaps you too?) that I have decided to conduct a small and very brief psychoanalysis of Sarah Palin’s awakening libidinal impulses in the context of her $150,000 clothing spree.

Let me begin with what I called “the incredible arousal of Sarah Palin” in the title of this article. And I want to be as purposefully ambiguous and cowardly as possible, hence my decision to hide my duplicity and duplicitous thoughts behind the many meanings of the word “arousal,” which, indeed, can mean “stimulation,” “awakening,” “excitement”, among many other meanings and insinuations which I prefer not to list here. Read more

Of John McCain and His America: It Is Apocalypse Now

It all began with the “Barack-Obama-is-an-Arab” lady at a McCain town hall meeting in Lakeville, Minnesota last week. Responding to what she naturally thought had become the official, cathartic McCain/Palin electoral mantra, the woman, a certain Gayle Quinnell, stated that she did not trust Barack Obama because Barack Obama, she had read (in some McCain/Palin literature), was an Arab.

To which John McCain, in a telling “reap what you sow” moment, responded:

“No, ma’am. He’s a decent family man, citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues, and that’s what this campaign is all about.”

What’s troubling in McCain’s answer are a number of dangerous innuendoes which are not immediately apparent to most people, but which are striking to those with enough intellectual sense (Am I being elitist here? Well, hell).

McCain’s answer suffers from a fundamental flaw which, as I said, is not immediately apparent to most people, until, of course, one realizes that McCain did not defend Obama on the grounds that Obama was, indeed, as American as John McCain and Gayle Quinnell themselves were.  Rather, he “defended” Obama on the more tenuous ground that his opponent was a “decent” family man and “a citizen.” Read more

Watch: What if John McCain wanted to lose?

An October 14 article by Sam Stein on the Huffington Post this week got me thinking. As I read it more and more, one interesting idea came to me: “What if John McCain actually wanted to lose?”

The gist of Sam Stein’s article is summarized in the first four paragraphs of the article as so:

Matthew Dowd, a prominent political consultant and chief strategist for George W. Bush’s reelection campaign eviscerated John McCain on Tuesday for his choice of Sarah Palin as vice president.

Dowd proclaimed that, in his heart of hearts, McCain knew he put the country at risk with his VP choice and that he would “have to live” with that fact for the rest of his career.

“They didn’t let John McCain pick the person he wanted to pick as VP,” Dowd declared during the Time Warner Summit panel. “When Sarah Palin got picked instead of Joe Lieberman, which I fundamentally believed would have given John McCain the best opportunity in this race… as soon as he picked Palin, that whole ready versus not ready argument was not credible.”

Saying that Palin was a “net negative” on the ticket, he went on: “[McCain] knows, in his gut, that he put somebody unqualified on the ballot. He knows that in his gut, and when this race is over that is something he will have to live with… He put somebody unqualified on that ballot and he put the country at risk, he knows that.” Read more

Obama Won Third Debate, But Failed (or Chose Not?) to Go for the Jugular

While all post-debate snap polls and focus group surveys taken right after the Wednesday night debate gave Barack Obama an overwhelming win over his presidential rival John McCain (in my opinion more on style than sheer will to win and force the issue), there are a few areas of the debate in which the Democratic candidate could have crushed John McCain, but failed to do so. I saw three great openings which Barack Obama failed to take advantage of during the debate. Here are some of the few answers or retorts that Obama could have used to crush John McCain once and for all: Read more

Here Comes The McCain/Palin Kitchen Sink: Obama Must Duck, This Way.

Here we go again, with McCain planning a last-ditch effort, a sort of 29-day kitchen-sink blitz, aimed at unseating Barack Obama before the crucial November 4 vote. Various news reports, including the McCain campaign itself on various talk shows this Sunday, have all pointed to a new kitchen-sink strategy aimed at emphasizing Barack Obama’s past associations (Ayers, Wright, Rezko, etc.) with a view to questioning both his judgment and patriotism. Read more