And so, let me tell you, is all the talk about "small-town values" and "Barack Obama thinks he's special" and everything else they said at that odious, repulsive, sickening Republican convention. It's all just coded Southern Strategy garbage. I come from a small town, and I promise you, our "values" are exactly the same as the values of city people, except maybe we care a little more about corn subsidies and -- well -- there don't happen to be any black people out here. That's what "small town values" means. The whole thing amounts to "Barack Obama, stay out of our house."
Not that you'd know it from the networks. I've been at home this week, relying on CNN and MSNBC for most of my news because our internet is not quite state-of-the-art, and all they ever talk about is goddamn Sarah Palin. Here is a woman who signifies nothing new about anything and serves only to waste airtime we could be spending on unemployment. But: Hockey mom! Pregnant daughter! Moose stew! Who gives a shit? She's there to wink at their racist, fundamentalist base, and nothing else. Yet her religious fanaticisim gets the cutesy treatment normally reserved for puff pieces about bible-thumpers who run foster homes (awww! babies!), and the only person I've seen on TV to even broach the race issue was Katrina Vanden Heuvel from the Nation -- at which point Larry King nervously cut her off.
Luckily the Obama campaign has its head on its shoulders and continues to, you know, campaign in swing states while McCain's people are focused on these political Special Olympics. Fact is this isn't a predominantly rural country anymore -- you don't win Colorado by turning out mountain men, you win it in the Denver-Boulder-Colorado Springs metropolitan area, and Democrats know it. I'd be THRILLED to watch the McCain campaign dig its own grave by playing to the racist base, because that's a 50%+1 strategy to begin with, one that Bush barely scraped by on; with that kind of thinking, just a little demographic shift or an opponent who scrambles the turnout model is enough to send the other guys to a big party in Atlanta -- and you wake up one morning to learn you're stuck in Hazzard County. Which is where the entire Republican Party belongs.
BUT it won't stop the Republicans, and their useful idiots on the network news, from lecturing us about "patriotism" and the "heartland" until everyone sane has finally gone crazy and everyone crazy sounds sane. My God.
Well... that felt good to get off my chest. See you all next week.
Favorite movie. McCain scores some major points here not only for his unique response, but also for giving some good cinematic history. Director Elia Kazan worked with Marlon Brando on three films. Rather than choosing either of the two more famous collaborations, A Streetcar Named Desire or On the Waterfront, he goes with the lesser-known 
response? The Gentleman from Illinois did not disappoint: he countered with M*A*S*H. By the rules of the Hawley Guide to Pop Culture, anything with Alan Alda automatically gives the contestant one million bonus points. Not even McCain’s Seinfeld, Dexter, and The Wire come close to touching Obama’s Aldaholic lead (he further pulls ahead by saying that one of his kids’ favorites, SpongeBob SquarePants is “pretty funny” because, let’s face it, it is).
