Drinking game debate - McCain and Obama meet at last

Two days. That's how much time John McCain and his sorry excuse for a presidential campaign has left to try to fool me and my fellow Americans. Two days. Once the Republican candidate finally shares a stage with the Democratic candidate on Friday, none of the lies and half-truths will matter, and nothing will be able to save John McCain from becoming the Bob Dole of the 21st Century.

Before I talk about the debate, I have to mention John McCain’s running mate. A lot of people have asked me why I haven’t written about Sarah Palin. At first, I was waiting until she did one of the Sunday shows. I figured Brokaw or Schieffer or even Stefanopolous would come up with the big "Get," sit her down, and ask her 10 minutes of questions about her positions on the issues and her record. That was the plan — then a month of Sundays passed without her talking to anyone (I don’t count Gibson or Hannity). No interviews with the Washington press corps, no interviews with the press traveling with the McCain campaign, and she won’t let her husband or her employees (civil servants working for the state of Alaska) answer subpoenas. I give her credit for being a fast learner. She’s only been on the national stage for a month and she’s already mastered the Karl Rove playbook on how to simultaneously
ignore the law and the press.

I’m not going to write about Sarah Palin because I only get 800 words per week and I’ve already wasted too many on her. She only matters in as much as she shows how piss-poor John McCain’s judgment is. For this man (of the 1,000-page medical history and the multiple bouts with cancer) to tell me she’s qualified to take over as president and commander in chief insults my intelligence.

Dedicating an entire column to this woman would insult my readers.

Enough about Alaska and its governor. Let’s get back to reality. I’ve been writing about this campaign and the transcendent nature of the Democratic candidate for over 18 months and readers of this column should know by now that I was the first person to go on the record predicting an Obama presidency back in April of 2007. If you’ve paid attention to the campaign at all before now, you’re ahead of the game. The debate on Friday is expected to have a viewing audience of over 100 million people, a good percentage of whom will be tuning in for the first time.

They missed Jeremiah Wright and John Hagee. They didn’t catch Barack Obama’s "bitter" comments in San Francisco or John McCain’s "hundred year war" exchange in New Hampshire. It’s not their fault; they were busy living their lives, raising their kids, going to work, and worrying about how to make ends meet.

With the news from Wall Street last week, you can bet they’re paying attention now. This debate is supposed to be about foreign policy, but look for it to shift to domestic issues after about a minute-and-a-half because it’s the American worker that’s going to be asked to pick up the tab to bail out another one of the country’s biggest investment banks while still paying fees to two banks to take money out of the ATM, and bail out the world’s largest insurance company at a time when most people can’t afford health coverage.

How many times can John McCain say our economy is fundamentally sound before Barack Obama brings up the fact that not every American family is worth over $100 million like the McCains?

How long can John McCain really expect to talk about the "surge" tactic in Iraq and its so-called "success" before Barack Obama brings up the opportunity costs at home of spending $10 billion per month in Iraq with zero return on our investment five years later? How much longer does John McCain think he can focus on his support for the "surge" tactic and hide the fact that he’s been whole-heartedly behind the president’s strategy and policies in Iraq from the beginning?

Who does he think he’s fooling?

As for me, I’ll be watching the debate either on PBS or on C-Span because I don’t want to be watching commercials for deodorant when I could be watching John McCain sweat. I’ll be playing a drinking game that involves taking a shot whenever John McCain says something ridiculous (like "Sarah Palin is ready to be president"),tells a lie (like "the fundamentals of our economy are strong"), or comes up with a ridiculous lie (like "I didn’t know I own eight homes and 13 cars").

Knowing John McCain, I’ll probably have to re-watch Friday’s debate on TiVo on Saturday because I’m gonna be pretty drunk.

Taking comfort in community - When disaster strikes

What a week. Since our last conversation about the Republican convention, the news has basically been all bad. It was seven days of disaster; from man’s inhumanity to man in the form of terrorism, to catastrophic events like hurricanes, to accidental tragedies like train derailments, to economic calamities like widespread corporate greed.

The events of the week have conspired to make petty distinctions and divisions between people essentially meaningless and unite us all in misery. Out of all this sadness, however, I’ve been comforted by the fact that I live in Santa Monica, because I know in my heart that if disaster strikes here, I’ll be all right.

I don’t like talking about the events of Sept. 11, 2001 because most people don’t understand what happened that day. Most people still refer to the "attacks of 9/11" as though it was a military strike against the United States by another country. It wasn’t. It was 19 guys with plastic knives and a love of death who found a weakness in airport security, hijacked four airplanes, and crashed them.

People all over the world were saying "we’re all Americans" and people all over America were saying "we’re all New Yorkers." But the well-meaning people of France were no more American than the well-meaning people of Kansas were New Yorkers.

I, on the other hand, actually was a New Yorker at the time, living in a building near Downtown Brooklyn with a clear view of the towers from my roof. I can tell you that when the first plane hit, we thought it was an accident, but when the second plane hit, we thought it was Armageddon. And I don’t know if it was the fact that there was a sense of relief every time we got on and off the subway safely or the fact that the smell of smoke permeated lower Manhattan for a good six months, but in the aftermath of the horror of that day, New Yorkers were united by a sense of community that defiantly declared, "we are New York City and we will live on."

The same way disaster can focus peoples’ attention on our similarities more than our differences, it can also serve to make government more responsive to the needs of the governed. I considered the pathetically negligent response to Hurricane Katrina to be nothing less than a national embarrassment. In fact, I almost moved to Italy afterward because I didn’t want to live in a country whose government would let thousands of its own people drown in the streets of one of its major cities while millions more watched on television.

But the way the federal, state, and local government responded to Hurricanes
Gustav and Ike went a long way toward restoring my faith.

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin was way out in front of Gustav, showing that he seems to have learned some of the lessons taught (the hard way) by Katrina, and it seemed like the full spectrum of preparedness and response was utilized when it came to Ike.

The only thing that made me happier than seeing the federal, state, and local governments involved in a coordinated effort to help the people of Texas was the fact that my brother (not biological, but "friend" doesn’t do him justice) in Houston was safe and dry when it was all over.

But it was the train wreck in Chatsworth that brought everything back home for me. It reminded me that accidents do happen and can happen anywhere at any time, it made me think about earthquakes and the San Andreas Fault, and it really brought home the fact that the biggest, baddest, most destructive thing on the planet (the Pacific Ocean) is less than a half-mile from where I sleep every night.

It’s absolutely terrifying to think of what could happen if an underwater earthquake led to a tsunami like the one that hit southeast Asia in 2004.

But like I said, the bright spot in all the dark sadness of the past week is the fact that I live in Santa Monica. If disaster strikes here, we’re lucky enough to be blessed with the best health care professionals in fully-equipped state-of-the-art trauma centers, hospitals with hundreds and hundreds of beds, an amazing local Red Cross ready to provide "cot care" for hundreds more at dozens of school gyms and cafeterias, and incredible first responders on par with the NYPD’s "Rescue 1" unit. Not to mention our greatest asset — our people.

We know we’ve got something special here in this town and we know we all have to do whatever we can to keep it that way. I know that if disaster strikes here, we will care for each other because we are SaMo and SaMo is us.

Still out of touch - The Republican convention

The best thing I can say about the four days of cognitive dissonance that was the Republican National Convention is that the balloon drop went well. The rest of it was a mess. It was totally surreal — like Pleasantville meets Fox News — and I realized the Republican Party has gotten so good at lying that they’ve actually started to believe the crap they’re trying to sell us.

First, they tried to act like it was no big deal that they didn’t invite the president. The cover story was he was needed in Washington. The truth is that nobody wants to forget the Bush/Cheney years ever happened more than the Republicans who elected them. It didn’t work, though, because around the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, Hurricane Gustav reminded us all of how badly this administration screwed the pooch three years ago. God knows political stagecraft better than the Republican Party.

The next day, they trotted out Laura Bush and Cindy McCain to take off their "Republican hats," put on their "American hats," and ask people to give money to hurricane victims. But I couldn’t take the first lady seriously talking about disaster relief in a white Oscar de la Renta suit. And I wondered why nobody told Cindy McCain it’s a bad idea to ask the 99.9 percent of us who make less than her to give money while she’s wearing a $300,000 outfit.

They also dusted off Fred Thompson (a.k.a. Foghorn Leghorn), fed him some good old timey dialogue, and had his wife Jerry convince him he was reading for a role in a Mike Nichols movie. He gave a perfectly unconvincing performance droning on about John McCain’s military record, as though crashing five planes is some kind of an accomplishment. The best part was when he talked about Sarah Palin (a.k.a. the Unknown Running Mate) and how her selection as vice president is being covered. In an odd attempt to get us to forget about the fact that he’s a millionaire Hollywood actor, he drawled, "she is from a small town, with small town values, but that’s not good enough for those folks who are attacking her and her family." Sorry, Fred, but I’ve seen "The Hunt for Red October" too many times to buy you playing the "regular guy."

Even cross-dressing Rudy Giuliani got into the act. He talked up the URM’s so-called executive experience, including her time as mayor of a town that’s half the size of Hunter College. And he said he was, "sorry that Barack Obama doesn’t feel that her hometown is cosmopolitan enough, is flashy enough," like he or any of his three wives (especially Judith) would ever move to Wasilla, Alaska.

Then came the URM herself: Sarah Palin, populist pitbull in lipstick. The biggest speech of her life was largely unremarkable but for the fact that she chided a press corps who she won’t allow to interview her and mocked a man who is without a doubt her professional and intellectual superior. "I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a community organizer, except that you have actual responsibilities," she said, apparently forgetting about the time she described her job as, "not rocket science, it’s $6 million and 53 employees." Really, it’s a glorified home owner’s association in a state subsidized by oil companies. The constitutional imperative to take over the presidency at a moment’s notice? That’s closer to rocket science.

John McCain’s speech was notable mostly for what wasn’t said. He didn’t mention President Bush by name, he wasn’t proud of his party’s record, and every time he talked about the people who have messed up Washington, he was talking to the people who have messed up Washington — like anybody believes they’ll just reform themselves. He spent so much time scolding Republicans and promising "change" that I thought he was going to morph into Barack Obama in a racially appropriate homage to Michael Jackson’s "Black or White" video.

McCain went on "Face the Nation" Sunday and promised to appoint Democrats (plural) to serve in his White House and his cabinet. "It’s gonna be the best people in America, the smartest people in America...We’ve got to have people who are the best and the brightest...I’ll also ask people who have struggled out there in the trenches to help people, to volunteer in their communities, who understand these problems at that level."

He’s so out of touch with reality that he doesn’t even realize that the person he’s describing is Barack Obama. He can think about that as they stand together at Ground Zero tomorrow, and for the next eight years. As for those lying Republicans, they can go sit in the corner for eight years and think about what they’ve done.

One bad Obama rap - Please, rapper, don't help

Having been born in the 1970's, raised on rap. I’m not ashamed to admit I love rap music. That said, readers of this column should know by now that I refuse to listen to rappers when they talk. I refuse to listen to most rappers when they rap, too, but that’s a topic for another day. My problem this week is that some rappers have started to get involved in the presidential election. Have you ever heard the expression "beware of Greeks bearing gifts?" That sums up how I feel about rappers who want to get political. It started about a month ago. Somebody asked Barack Obama what he was listening to on his iPod and he happened to mention the rapper Ludacris (a.k.a. Chris Bridges). Apparently, this inspired the rapper in question to write a verse that I’m sure he thinks is "political" because it mentions President Bush, Hillary Clinton, Jesse Jackson, John McCain, and the White House. Here is part of it:

Said I handled his biz and I’m one of his favorite rappers
Well give Luda a special pardon if I’m ever in the slammer
Better yet put him in office, make me your vice president
Hillary hated on you, so that b...h is irrelevant
Jesse talking slick and apologizing for what?
If you said it then you meant it how you want it have a gut!
And all you other politicians trying to hate on my man,
watch us win a majority vote in every state on my man
You can’t stop what’s bout to happen, we 'bout to make history
The first black president is destined and it’s meant to be
The threats ain’t fazing us, the nooses or the jokes
So get off your ass, black people, it’s time to get out and vote!
Paint the White House black and I’m sure that’s got ‘em terrified
McCain don’t belong in any chair unless he’s paralyzed
Yeah I said it cause Bush is mentally handicapped
Ball up all of his speeches and I throw ‘em like candy wrap
‘cause what you talking I hear nothing even relevant
and you the worst of all 43 presidents!

Yo, Luda, lemme holla at you for a minute. Most white people don’t understand what you’re saying most of the time, so they focus on the parts they can decipher like "watch us win a majority vote in every state" and "paint the White House black." And some of them will get skerred [sic]. Though we both know you have no idea what you’re talking about when it comes to politics, a lot of white people will blame Barack for your stupidity. They will take every rhyme you’ve ever said and try to attach your words to our next president. I guarantee you that some right-winger somewhere is mashing up footage of Barack looking scary with your song "Move, B...h (Get Out the Way)." Is that what you want?

Just as Mr. Bridges’ (yes, I used his government name) contribution had started to fade into memory, Sean "Diddy" Combs decided to get involved. I had been waiting for his "Vote or Die" campaign to get mobilized, so imagine my disappointment when his first foray into this election cycle wasn’t a PSA featuring any of the dozens of celebs who are already on the Obama train. Instead, it was a vlog (video Weblog) posting of his criticism of John McCain’s selection of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate — featuring a spinning close-up that is so dizzying it would make Michael Bay proud.

In the span of about two minutes, Mr. Combs (yes, I used his government name, too) manages to embarrass himself more than those times he shared a stage with Jimmy Page and Sting.

The best (worst) part is when he wonders, "Alaska, motherf....r? What is the reality in Alaska? There’s not even no crackheads in Alaska. No black people. There’s not even no, like, crime...Ya’ll need to get versed on black policies, on youth policies. We the future." He proceeds to tell Sen. McCain no fewer than a half-dozen times that he is "bugging the (expletive) out." I don’t know if you realize this, Sean, but you can’t use the phrase "bugging out" to tell a fighter pilot he’s made a mistake — he won’t get it.

I just wish rappers would leave the job of sounding smart about politics to those of us who actually are. Because the only thing worse than the idea of Barack losing this election is the idea that it could have been lost because some idiot like Bridges or Combs got the bright idea to get involved.

To Chris and Sean: I’ve got nothing but love for you, but please step off.