Author: Gatemouth

A lot of hue and cry has been raised about the format of tonight’s Vice Presidential debate, specifically about the brevity of the answers and the lack of follow-up questions.

Pish-tosh says I.

Forcing concision on both Joe Biden and Sarah Palin cuts both ways, since hearing more of Palin generally subtracts, rather than adds, to the sum total of the world's knowledge, while cutting off Joe Biden’s amount of words is often somewhat analogous to limiting the supply of rope to someone who is chronically depressed.

Most importantly, follow-up questions serve no useful purpose in explicating the thoughts of Sarah Palin, who usually has run out of things to say on the first go-round and then just endlessly repeats her buzzwords without any form or substance until one cries uncle.

Many blame the Republicans for the failure of the distasteful, but necessary, Bush Bailout the other day in the House. And surely, those spineless weasels deserve whatever blame they got. “We would have stood tall like real men, but Nancy Pelosi made fun of our penis size and we just couldn’t get it up.”

OK fuckers, find just one Republican member of Congress who will admit that’s what caused his change of heart. Just one.

It would be easier to get Sarah Palin to admit to Katie that she wants to incarcerate doctors or ban the morning-after pill; or to get Palin to admit she doesn’t want to incarcerate doctors or ban the morning-after pill.

One would think that in this day and age, political party organizations would go out of their way to avoid the appearance of impropriety, if not actual impropriety itself.

One would be proven wrong. At least in Brooklyn.

I’ve just gotten my hands on a questionnaire sent out by the Party to prospective candidates for Brooklyn Borough President. The questionnaire includes a section on “Land Use”. The section notes that “Borough Presidents appoint representatives to local community boards and the City Planning commission, which vote on land use and zoning actions under the NYC Uniform Land Use Review Procedure.”

“John McCain listened to all sides so he could help focus the debate on finding a bipartisan resolution that is in the interest of taxpayers and homeowners. The Democratic interests stood together in opposition to an agreement that would accommodate additional taxpayer protections"—Statement by the McCain campaign.

It’s a funny kind of bi-partisanship that depends upon demonizing the people you’re purportedly committed to working together with. McCain may be extending his hand and reaching across the aisle, but the hand doing the reaching is grasping a baseball bat.

Perhaps I’d underestimated John McCain.

Yesterday, I made fun of McCain's “suspending” his campaign until Congress passed some sort of plan to address the meltdown of our markets. At the time McCain made his announcement, Congress seemed poise to pass a flawed plan which bore some resemblance to the even more flawed proposal put forward by the President.

As negotiations proceeded, leaders from both parties announced that a piece of the action was at hand. Robert Bennett, the ranking Republican on the Senate Banking Committee said “I now expect we will indeed have a plan that can pass the House, pass the Senate, be signed by the president." Calling it “one of the most productive sessions”  he'd ever seen, Bennett said “we focused on solving the problem, rather than posturing politically.”

'The issue of economics is not something I've understood as well as I should. I've got Greenspan's book." —John McCain

Well thank goodness he hasn’t read it. As Dubya’s MBA has proven, a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing, and McCain has not yet attained even that level.

Nonetheless, in a society where the public yearns to have a few aspects of their lives protected in some manner from the vicissitudes of the marketplace (things like their retirement and their healthcare), the McCain platform and the McCain record is one of advocating that market forces be unleashed in the manner of a mad and rabid dog to render their magic and transform our society in ways unimaginable to those not suffering from acid-induced nightmares.

Kevin Powell 11,046 32.84%

Edolphus Towns 22,586 67.16%

“That is why I am proud to say I will be a candidate for Congress again in 2010. The campaign has already begun because of you”

—Kevin Powell 9/12/08

“Anybody else, I'd say what's gonna happen to you would be a lesson to you. Only you're gonna need more than one lesson. And you're gonna get more than one lesson.”

–Boss Jim Gettys in “Citizen Kane”

This is the second time (here’s the first) the opening of one of my pieces on the political travails of Hip-hop philosopher and boy genius Kevin Powell has contained a quote from the cinematic legacy of Orson Welles, a man whose talent for genius had much in common with Kevin Powell’s ego; both were exceeded only by their owner’s talent for self-destruction.