And The Rock Cried Out, No Hiding Place

This campaign has been remarkable for a lot of reasons, but the top one is, to be as specific as possible, that it has been utterly insane. Think back on the climate of '00--we'd just impeached a popular president because he'd been caught lying about cheating on his wife. Ridiculous. His running mate was horribly mocked for having claimed to invent the Internet. Idiotic. In '04, a war hero ran for president, and we spent much of the campaign arguing over whether he'd faked his wounds to get more medals. Absurd.

With these as our benchmarks, where does Joe the Plumber fit in? The Michelle Obama "whitey" video? The entire Sarah Palin candidacy? Barack Obama's birth certificate? Lipstick on a pig? "Maverick"?

How about all of these wacky stories in the context of a country that's spiraling into chaos?

One reason I haven't been posting too often (there are a few) is that this situation is simply too exhausting to process and get much of anything else done. Tactic after tactic, I'm constantly floored at...well, what, exactly? How strange what they're doing is? How unconvincing? How small and inappropriate for the gravity of the times?

Maybe it's that there's always another layer to this tasty onion. Take Joe the Plumber, the random undecided voter who wanted to know if Obama would raise his taxes as a small business owner. Except really a McCain campaign plant, not named Joe, not a licensed plumber, not an undecided voter, not a small business owner, and doesn't believe in progressive taxation. Oh, and he's got some strange ideas about Israel, he owes a ton in taxes, he's thinking of running for Congress, and he's recording a country album. And we're hearing from him, and about him, every day. Did I get all that?

No, I didn't. They also liked this so much that they gave us Tito the Builder, and so on, and so forth.

What. The. Fuck.

I could go on about the constant Sarah Palin revelations (in the broad categories of corruption, incompetence, extremism, and bizarre family issues), but I don't have the space. My favorite fun fact about her is the fact that even though their family is wealthy and prominent, her oldest two children have both dropped out of high school (as has her winner of a son-in-law-to-be), and the other two have basically missed this entire semester. Real responsible parenting there, Miss Wasilla. You don't have to match Bar and Poppy's feat of getting their idiot through an Ivy grad degree, but you really can't get them through twelfth grade at a fucking local high school?

But there is a curious paradox at work, and that this stupidity has effectively made the country as a whole smarter. When you're in danger of losing your job and/or your home, and a candidate for president is running around treating the election like a big joke, there's a good chance you're going to get pissed off. These embarrassingly, pathetically small tactics are purging the GOP of people it needs to win elections. And who's going to be making decisions about the direction of the party when it loses? The people who are left, who aren't exactly the cream of the crop. At the moment they're furious that the LA Times hasn't released a video of Obama attending a party with a Palestinian colleague of his who isn't even strongly anti-Israel. What are they going to come up with to bring him down in '12, evidence that he once forgot to leave feedback after buying something on eBay?

I don't kid myself that the guy who wrote that op-ed has seen the light and is now one of those pragmatic Obamacons. But maybe he's not particularly proud of these tactics, and maybe someday he'll be part of a new coalition that dispenses with the wedge issues, trickle-down, massive military spending, and all the rest of the crap that's weighing half of the country down. I like to think so. We need an honest and decent opposition party that gives us real choices. And I like his taste in entertainment.