Call it the Seinfeldization of America, if you want. Somewhere in the last 20 years, a great mass of our fellow citizens decided that transforming every quotidian obligation of their existence into a Sisyphean fucking ordeal was an acceptable substitute for having something to say.
A presidential campaign is like senior year. It takes forever. You mentally check out about halfway through. Everyone gets sick of the jocks and the BMOC types. The hot women are all going out with exactly the WRONG guys. You eagerly anticipate never speaking to or hearing from almost all of these people ever again. And years later, everyone wakes up and realizes that the nerds secretly won.
It is difficult to have a rational conversation about reelecting Barack Obama. The right still likes to believe the left considers him "Obamessiah." Progressives seem to salivate at how pristinely their principles appear next to his shortcomings. And those young enough to not have experienced the soulfucker that was Clinton's second term almost revel in their worldly contempt after seeing their 2008 dreams brought low. Look, ma, I got my political disenchantment badge!
Nate Silver, the famed statistician behind the FiveThirtyEight election forecast blog at the New York Times, is wrong. And gay. At least according to the more virulent elements of right-wing media. That he's wrong is only confirmed by his gayness, just as surely as his gayness is the source of his wrongness. Nate Silver is a tautology of being queer as hell about everything.
If you are a business owner, Mitt Romney has a message for you. Tell your employees that the future depends on voting for Mitt Romney. You can do that, legally. In fact, tell them—the people whose paychecks you sign—that their futures depend on it, too.
Deep down, probably all of us secretly wish that The Onion's version of Vice President Joe Biden were real. Perhaps it's all those gaffes talking—the combined weight of decades of gives-no-fuck moments leading to the suspicion that maybe this is a dude who would be willing to race you for the vice presidency because, face it, your IROC-Z is bullshit. The idea that any iteration of that dude might show up is what makes tomorrow night's vice presidential debate so potentially exciting.
After spending five years watching a diffident political compromiser campaign for and occupy the White House, Democrats were still shocked that Wednesday's debate didn't reveal Barack Obama: Political Nut-Cutter.
The presidential debate will be on all the networks tonight. This explains the sense of dejection you felt on waking this morning and realizing, in some vulnerable corner of your heart, that Detective Olivia Benson won't be getting too close to a case. I'm sorry it had to be this way.
It takes remarkably few complaints about the NFL referee lockout to provoke a chiding comment about "bread and circuses." It's a novel insight, assuming your conversation occurs nearly 2,000 years ago in imperial Rome. But all too often it represents misplaced disengagement. And now, of course, it's over, which makes it even easier to dismiss—a hiccup of labor history remembered only by people who paint themselves blue and stand nearly naked outside in January.
God preserve you if you have any idea what's happening inside Mitt Romney's brain. After a week that was already the worst of his campaign, it's as if the man said, "Oh, yeah? Watch this," and pulled back the hyperdumb levers of his magical farting machine, the Mittlennium Fuckup.
There's an old political line about how a gaffe is merely a case of a politician inadvertently revealing an obvious truth. In that sense, Mitt Romney has been on an honesty rampage for six years. He is the Mr. Bean-like embodiment of every impulse to accidentally thoroughly disrobe before an unwilling nation.
On Wednesday, Rush Limbaugh once again proved that he's unafraid to ask questions the rest of us avoid because the blood vessels to our brains aren't occluded by hog fat and Macanudos. On his radio show, he speculated: "What if Ayman al-Zawahiri and other al-Qaida leaders gave up Osama bin Laden for the express purpose of making Obama look good?" He then followed up, "Do you think that militant Islamists will be as hopeful of getting rid of Israel with a Republican president or with a Democrat president?"
It's that special time of year again, where we remember troops and solemnify 9/11, instead of reducing the whole of our overseas conflicts and anti-terror policy to some D-grade Seinfeldism about airport check-ins, taking our shoes off and whaaaat is the deeeaal with mini-shampoo bottles.
While accepting his party's nomination for President of the United States, Barack Obama defended his record of doing things and renewed his commitment to doing things in the future. If elected, we can be assured of four more years of things. He also has people killed.
While regular-sized Mitt Romney stood inside the Tampa Bay Times Forum, telling regular-sized fables, his 40-foot-high head boomed from the side of a parking garage. The image called for blood-red banners and black bunting, for Dwight Schrute pounding the podium and yelling, "BLOOD ALONE MOVES THE WHEELS OF HISTORY." Instead, Mitt pulled an awkward smile, wincing and unconvincing, unctuously excusing himself into our hearts—the Jim Halpert of the annals American politics.
People get hostile when you want to ask critical questions about someone's money. If it's a profile hailing an entrepreneur as a genius, then things are okay: we're only inquiring about the accumulation of an implicit good. When talk verges on criticism, people get itchy.
It's probably a little unfair to blast Todd Akin (R-Missouri) for his belief in uterine magic, since his entire worldview hinges on a poor Nazarene woman practicing that art over 2000 years ago. Then again, the Archangel Gabriel didn't deliver the Annunciation by sticking a flaming foot in his trumpet, so there's that.
