Joe the Creepy Guy You Wouldn't Want Alone in Your House With Your Clogged Pipes: A Halloween Photo Essay:

Two bald men, fates entwined, one whose fortunes are rising, the other whose dreams are quickly tattering like an American flag that's been hanging off a plumbing repair truck since September 12, 2001.

He is always there now, an ominous hulking presence. Yet some wonder, "Why the fuck is Boo Radley stalking the McCains?"

Joe the Monster, created in a focus group lab, now is a beast whose hunger for the spotlight cannot be sated. "Turn around," we may think we should yell at McCain, "for the love of God, turn around." But, the truth is, it's always way more fun to watch the monster attack.

One can sense in Joe the Pumpkinhead's demeanor the thirst for face time with the cameras and reporters, wondering when he can lift his creator up and toss him over the castle wall.

Indeed, even his master McCain must be filled with consternation at the way the beast has learned well the ways to exploit the Everyman persona that the master has tried so hard to foster himself.

Yes, yes, John McCain, this will be one of the faces you will remember on the deathbed of your campaign. You cannot stop the smugness of Joe's self-righteous smirk. On Election Day, no one can hear you scream.

How to Handle the Next Few Days Before Obama Is Elected:
Have you (and the presumptive "you" is a straight dude this time around) ever had one of those nights where you're with a so-hot-it's-unreal woman and she is just hot for your crank, sneaking ass grabs on the street, whispering the promises of hot fucking in your ear, telling you how goddamn wet she is, to the point where you jump in the car and head back to your place, exchanging 80 mile per hour finger fucking and road head, barely able to get up the stairs without throwing each other down and balling like angry mongooses, getting in the door and hitting the bed, ripping your clothes off and then, before you even know what's going where, your cock's slipped inside her pussy, you're fucking away, fucking like there's no tomorrow, not giving a shit if the sun rises in the morning, moaning, thrusting, and, yet, no, no, neither of you can come, and instead you try a different position, a bunch of different positions, 'cause it feels so good and you don't wanna stop until she's quivering like she needs an exorcist and you've blown a load so hard you think your dick might end up looking like Elmer Fudd's rifle after he's fired it with a carrot stuck in the barrel, so you try her on top, you on top, you behind her, her in front, butterfly legs, legs over the head, the backward handstand with a wheelbarrow twist, the dancing white tiger, and more, and what's awesome is that you're staying hard and she's staying wet, it's just so damn fun, and hours and hours are passing, and you're just so fucking sore, she's swollen, you're both exhausted, but you're in this together, goddamnit, you are not stopping until you come because it's not enough, it's just not the fuck enough to stop and say, "Hey, that was fun, we'll try again another time," no, you both wanna shout out the name of some god or other as you both climax and even though it's seemed like it's never gonna end, you know that you gotta keep fucking because the end's gonna feel so, so good?

You ever had that happen to you?

Yes, it is beyond fucking time for this election to be over. Even if you've voted early, you won't be getting your rocks off until Tuesday night. But as we, at long, long last, reach that delicious point where you know you're just about to orgasm, let's be good lovers and savor our time in the sack.

For instance, yesterday, the Republicans who still believed that they had something with which to damage Barack Obama must have died just a little bit inside when the Democratic candidate ridiculed the whole "He's a socialist" thing. Obama said, in a speech in North Carolina, "By the end of the week, he'll be accusing me of being a secret communist because I shared my toys in kindergarten." He repeated the line, adding that he's a "redistributionist" because he shared a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, when campaigning with Bill Clinton in Florida last night. It's one of those moments where, as a morose, put-upon Democrat, you sit up and go, "That's the way it's done, motherfuckers" and wonder what would have happened if Al Gore had openly mocked the lies told about him or if John Kerry had said that the Swift Boaters will next say that the shrapnel in his ass didn't hurt that bad.

It's been one of the remarkable things about the incredibly well-run Obama campaign: they don't take shit from anybody. You wanna talk about Bill Ayers? Well, fuckin' fine, let's talk about it. You wanna talk about socialism? Let's get it out there. The attitude from the campaign towards the McCain campaign is "Fuck those guys." So the accomplishment of last night's Barackomercial was that it didn't even need to mention John McCain, like this is all now about Obama's relationship with the nation: "if you'll invite me into your living rooms for 30 minutes, imagine what I can do in four years." At the end of the day, it has helped make John McCain sound, in every interview now, like a whiny little bitch about shit that people have moved on about.

In his interview with Larry King yesterday, which was a little like watching the Cryptkeeper have a conversation with the grandpa from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre on some kind of 24-hour zombie station broadcast from Hell, McCain pissed and moaned regarding Obama's fundraising, "[W]hat's disturbing about it is that he signed a piece of paper back when he was a long shot candidate. And he signed it, said I won't -- I will take public financing for the presidential campaign if John McCain will. I mean, it's a living document." It's not that it's an entirely unfair accusation (although there was more wiggle room in the "living document" than McCain is letting on), but, dude, there's only five days left. Tell us something we haven't heard in an endless loop.

Oh, sure, they're trying now with this new professor that Obama went to a reception for. McCain keeps bringing up this super secret video of the party that the Los Angeles Times has that must show Obama blowing Rashid Khalidi while Bill Ayers fucks him in the ass because it's become the latest Holy Grail for those who are determined to prove that Obama really hates America. Check out Sarah Palin talking about Khalidi for a little touch of undiluted hatred.

What Palin says is, more or less, why the whole thing fails: "It seems that there is yet another radical professor from the neighborhood who spent a lot of time with Barack Obama." That's right - yet another one. The McCain campaign is trying for a radical associate do-over: "Aw, fuck, people stopped giving a shit about Bill Ayers. Let's try a brown one." Nope. That ship's sailed. And, besides, once it was revealed that McCain chaired a group that gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to fund Khalidi's work, the whole thing became just farcical.

Let us enjoy these last few days and get out the popcorn to watch the splendid sight of the right flopping around like a trout on a dock. The Rude Pundit has no doubt that we'll all come at last come Tuesday night. Yeah, yeah, anything's possible. While you're fucking that hot woman, the building could collapse or her ex-boyfriend could show up. But barring the extraordinary, oh, good lovers, the rewards of bliss shall be yours.

A Brief Comment on Tonight's Television Program:
If you still thought prior to it that Barack Obama was going to rape your white wife and kill your white children, there's no amount of ad time that would change your mind.

Anti-Gay Marriage Propositions 2, 8, and 102: Tell Us Again Why?:
There's many a fucked up belief on the right that the Rude Pundit can understand. He can get his mind around the idea that someone who thinks that life begins at the moment a little tiny sperm nuzzles up to a big ol' egg would want to stop that zygote from being aborted. He gets that people are just naturally greedy fucks who think that lower taxes will make them rich. He comprehends that there are people who are so damaged by 9/11, whether it actually happened to them or not, that they think blowing up some shit somewhere in the area of the actual terrorists will do some good. You name just about any idiotic, demonstrably wrong tenet of some kind of mainstream conservative ideology, and the Rude Pundit would say, "Well, that's idiotic and demonstrably wrong, but, shit, there's reasons people might subscribe to that." But there's one that, no matter who explains it in ways secular and religious, that has absolutely no basis in any kind of space we might refer to as reality. And that's opposing gay marriage.

With the battle engaged this year in California, Florida, and Arizona, we gotta go one more time around the block on this. It's absolutely fucking incomprehensible. And, you know, with a war we seem to have nearly completely forgotten about going on and the economy going down faster than a lesbian porn star in an all-day labia-licking fest, it's just frivolous and childish.

Out in California, the much-discussed Proposition 8, which would amend the Constitution of the state in order to outlaw gay marriage, is an answer to a court decision that overturned an anti-gay marriage statute voted on by the people of California. In order to prevent such a court decision from even happening, some homophobic Arizonans are attempting to preemptively amend that state's constitution with Proposition 102. The same damn thing is what's behind Proposition 2 in Florida, an effort supported by suspiciously suddenly-getting-married bachelor Governor Charlie "Not the Republican VP Candidate" Crist. The idea is that, by amending the state constitutions, those motherfucking judges you've heard so much about who "interpret" the "laws" can't get their filthy hands, the same hands they masturbate with, all over the precious definition of "marriage."

Now, seriously, and without invoking Jeebus or Allahlicious, can someone fucking explain why all this money and time and effort to prevent gay couples from being able to call their marriages "marriages"? 'Cause the only way you can make a case is if you idealize the fucked-up state of straight marriage and/or simply deny that gay people exist. Even allegedly secular "studies" are just great huge piles of horseshit masked in language that sounds rational but that ultimately undermines itself.

Every reason behind the pro-proposition people is just the sweet abyss of tautology. Check out the ad and the fact sheet for the Arizona one. The ad says, more or less, "We need to do it because we need to do it." In the FAQ asserts, "Prop 102 does not take rights away from anyone. Prop 102 simply defines marriage as the union of one man and one woman. Everyone has the right to live as they choose, but no one has the right to redefine marriage for all of society. Voting 'yes' on Prop 102 secures the definition of marriage for future generations." You got that? It doesn't take away any rights, except that it doesn't allow gay couples to marry.

You go to the other pro-proposition sites and it's the same repetitive bullshit. Parents don't want their children to learn about gay people. Or, in the case of the Florida gay haters, it's because God made man and woman and you don't wanna make the baby Jesus cry, do you? Do you?

But none of these are actual reasons. Kids learn all the time about shit that their parents would rather they not know. And, in what is presumptively a nation with separation between church and state, who the fuck cares what "God" thinks? Until that fucker runs for office, fuck what God has to say. No, we all understand that under the soft music and gentle voices of the ads that what's simmering there is hate and fear, motherfuckers, hate and fear. It's the only reason that makes any sense at all. So there's the issue: you wanna be someone who's allied with the hate-and-fear mongers? Is that who you are?

There's some things that are just patently logical. You live in a country that guarantees equal rights for all. That seems pretty fuckin' clear, no? And if government has no role in deciding what a "marriage" is, then why all the fuckin' fuss?

The Rude Pundit Live: Election Eve in NYC:
No, it's not a new stage show. But the Rude Pundit will be sitting and talking with Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake and Lizz Winstead, co-creator of The Daily Show, on Monday, November 3 at 8 p.m. at Winstead's joint, Shoot the Messenger. The theatre is at 45 Bleecker Street in New York City.

The evening will begin with Wake Up World, the mock morning news show featuring Winstead that the Rude Pundit and a bunch of others write damn funny stuff for. Then the Rude Pundit, Jane, and Lizz will go at it, with questions from the audience.

Come on down and kick out the anti-Bush/McCain/Palin jams while we still have 'em to kick around. Tickets are cheap and so are the beers.

The Right Wing: Dying Without Dignity:
The actual threat to Barack Obama from Daniel Cowart and Paul Schlesselman, the pair of skinhead dickwads who were "plotting" to kill him and scores of black children, was somewhere between woolly mammoth bite and polio. Just because a couple of meth-addicted closeted homosexuals hop on the internet and sublimate their urge to sodomize each other by lashing out at others does not a realistic assassination plot make. Besides, and the Rude Pundit means this in the queer sense, it's the gayest murder spree he's heard of in a long, long time. They were gonna wear white tuxedos and top hats while gunning for Obama. Are they angry because Obama's black or because he's said he doesn't support gay marriage?

And then there's this detail: "They planned their first house robbery for last Wednesday but ended up leaving without breaking in. Instead they bought ski masks, food and rope to use in their robbery attempts." You got that? They pussied out of a robbery and went shopping together instead. Oh, Mary, please. It's like they're the worst stereotype of gay dudes. Fuckin' prison's gonna be paradise for these two. Remember: shaved heads are great for teabagging. Everyone's a winner.

Watching McCain supporters, especially the Christian right, scramble for something, anything to stick to Obama has become fine, fine bloodsport. For pure bugfuck insanity at its finest, there's the "Letter from 2012 in Obama’s America" from Focus on the Family Action, the political wing of Dr. James "Blown by Palin" Dobson's Focus on the Family (new motto: "Where Is Our God Now?"). In this 16 page ramble on how the United States has essentially been destroyed because Barack Obama became president with a Democratic congress, Dobson's group officially bends its head between its legs and licks its own taint.

What does the future hold? (It should be noted that the following shit is really part of a real document from a real organization.) According to the future Christian: "The Boy Scouts no longer exist as an organization. They chose to disband rather than be forced to obey the Supreme Court decision that they would have to hire homosexual scoutmasters and allow them to sleep in tents with young boys." Let's just let that one sit without comment.

It gets better. The letter writer makes up tons of supposed Supreme Court decisions: "The Supreme Court in 2011 nullified all Federal Communications Commission restrictions on obscene speech or visual content in radio and TV broadcasts, and television programs at all hours of the day now contain explicit portrayals of sexual acts...In addition, law enforcement officials can no longer stop the distribution of child pornography, after the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that the such distribution violated freedom of speech and interstate commerce laws."

Did the Rude Pundit mention that this goes on for 16 pages? And it's got it all: guns are outlawed, abortion is freely available, universal health care is making euthanasia more common because old people can't get medical attention, and the Bible is banned from the public.

Overseas, "in May, 2010, Al Qaida operatives from Syria and Iran poured into Iraq in a flood and completely overwhelmed the Iraqi security forces. A Taliban-like oppression has now taken over in Iraq, and hundreds of thousands of 'American sympathizers' have been labeled as traitors, imprisoned, tortured, and killed. The number put to death may soon reach into the millions." Russia is resurgent, Israel's been nuked, and punkass President Obama just wants the U.N. to do something.

Seriously, read it all for yourself. It's one of the funniest goddamn things you'll see in weeks, especially for the many items that you'll read and think, "Well, that's not so bad. In fact, I hope that happens," like the prosecution of Bush administration officials for war crimes.

Yes, the right is facing its electoral doom with all the grace, dignity, and intelligence we've come to expect from it. If it was a dying patient, it wouldn't want to be unplugged; that motherfucker would expect its family to blow its savings to keep it on life support. So it goes on, with shouts of "socialist" and "communist" coming from the crowd when John McCain or Sarah Palin mention Obama. How fucking beaten down and deluded do you have to be to listen to and cheer on a guy worth a couple of hundred million tell you that it'd be a shame if he paid more taxes?

Indeed, reading, watching, and listening to this nonsense is like going to a particularly poorly-run day care center where the children sit around in their shit-filled diapers, crying and screaming, where the minimum wagers running the joint threaten any kid who dares to ask for more juice, where the barely articulate toddlers grunt out words they don't understand, and where the four and five year olds plot to beat up that kid who thinks he's smarter than they are. You hear about these places and you think, "Just fuckin' shut the place down. Arrest the people in charge and get those kids some love."

John McCain Wants Us to Forget the Present:
Whenever the Rude Pundit returns to Red State America on one of his sojourns home, he sometimes likes to participate in a little fun he calls "Memoryfucking." Here's how it works: you know all those people you thought about fucking in high school? We're not just talking about the stereotypical prom kings and queens, but also the hot, smart chick that was a study buddy or the ripped athlete that didn't give a shit about any hierarchies. Hell, pretty much we're talking anyone who made your genitals get all a-quiver. Chances are at ten or more years down the road, they've been through some shitty stuff in their lives, had their hearts broken a couple of times, had kids, lost jobs, garroted and buried hobos, the things that make up the real lives of real people, just like you and everyone you know. We're all grown-ups here, right? (And if you're not, pay attention: shit will happen to you.)

So the Rude Pundit'll call up someone that was a friend, chatty classmate, or neighbor, and...well, let's specify: call her "Susan" (and she could be "Martika" or "Johnny" or lots of other names). The Rude Pundit gives Susan a ring. Says he's in town, they haven't been in touch in a number of years, it'd be nice to catch up. And, truly, the Rude Pundit is interested in knowing about Susan's life. He is interested in the contours and shifts of lives, the things that build up on the teenage foundations of our selves. So the Rude Pundit gets together with Susan and, since most people like to talk about themselves more than they like to hear about others, Susan is glad to speak about all the things that have caused her straight path to CEO ascendancy to make sharp turns, her divorce, her son (at home with her mom right now), it's all so very ordinary that there's a kind of delicate poetry to it.

Inevitably, the talk turns to the past, to the remember whens and whos and "did we really take that purple pill" and "hope the trig teacher didn't mind the herpes" and "yes, that experiment did go horribly awry, you can still hear it howl in the bayou," you know, all the usual shit that lives in the ramshackle houses on Memory Lane. If done right, this is a kind of mutual seduction, a way of saying, "You know, we should have fucked back in high school." Which is fine until one of us says out loud, "You know, we should have fucked back in high school." It's a lie, of course, based on the haze of the past. But, still, we go to a motel and, in the best case, we fuck the night away, part with no promises, just a conclusion to the memory. A punctuation mark on a lie.

But sometimes, some repressed feeling surfaces and we start to talk about possible futures. Ahh, Christ, the worse lie is to think that maybe, just maybe, now we can make a go of it. You can't make up for the past. If all you have is lies, well, then it's time to say good-bye.

At end of the long campaign, all John McCain has as a closing argument is memoryfucking. You remember how he was a prisoner of war? Such a tough guy. You remember that John McCain from 2000? Yeah, he was such a maverick, wasn't he? No, really, he's the same guy. Except he never really was. Oh, sure, maybe a little more so than now. But now's what we've got. And the John McCain of now is a power mad little worm of a man, who cozied up to a popular president and then held on for dear life when that popularity nose-dived. Who turned into a worse version of everything that he once claimed he despised. That's why the rats are abandoning his ship.

The closing argument against John McCain is that the past is done. It's time to walk away from it, stop believing in memories, and see what happens when you head to the future.

Weekend Multimedia Fun:
From Shoot the Messenger, a look at the pride of the MN-6th, Michele Bachmann:

Photos That Make the Rude Pundit Want to Down a Handful of Sam's Club Wedding Cake with a Bottle of Cheap Champagne:


That's people praying at the Modesto rally in support of the California anti-gay marriage measure, Proposition 8, to be voted on this election day.


These people are lined up in Salinas. It's part of a bus tour to whip up anti-gay fever in California.

Although, considering that California's income is based on the entertainment industry, the high-tech industry, and, to some extent, wineries, alienating gay people seems a bit like punching yourself in the crotch repeatedly.

Look at those pictures. What the fuck? It's like every inbred Jed and Jane and their low-forehead children had a sign shoved into their fat fists 'cause they wanna show Jesus how much love is in their hate.

More on this next week.

Sarah Palin Graces James Dobson with an Exquisite Hummer:
How it must have surprised Dr. James Dobson, the founder and chair of Focus on the Family (motto: "Thirty Years of Making You Feel Guilty For Masturbating"), when Republican Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin reached over during a radio interview yesterday and unzipped his pants. Oh, sweet mercies, yes, dick-sucking lips are a gift from God, but those lascivious eyes, like the Levite's concubine, just begging for it, that's pure temptation.

The good Doctor found himself awkwardly unable to become fully erect early in the interview. Then Palin started praising Dobson, saying, "Dr. Dobson, you have been just on the forefront of all of this, of all of this good for so many years. And your reward is going to be in Heaven because I know that you take a lot of shots also but please know that on our end, kind of outsiders looking in at what you have accomplished all these years, if it were not for you, so many of us would be missing the boat in terms of hearing the message and understanding what we can do to further the cause of life, and of ethics in our nation, those things that we should be engaged in. We owe so much to you." At that point, Dobson could have pounded nails in a cross with his rigid dick.

Dobson was logical about it: who is not to say that Palin's willing mouth was not a present from Jesus for the years of good works? Who are we to question the ways of God? Palin had already described herself as "hardcore" and explained how "I had to really be on my knees." Sure, she was talking about her extreme pro-life beliefs and the difficult pregnancy of Trig. But the implication was clear. And when the Lord presents one with such a reward, one has no right to turn it away.

Cock lubed with the Alaska governor's saliva, and you can hear this in the interview, Dobson leaned back and stumbled for words. Palin, though, between yanks and sucks, was unstoppable in her praise for Dobson's staying power: "This is a strong platform...You would maybe have assumed that we would have gotten further away from those strong planks. But no, they're there, they're solid."

Dobson couldn't help himself. He had to know how he compared to John McCain, if the war-injured Republican nominee's prick could stand as firm as he had. Palin, ever the politician, simply offered, "John McCain is solidly there" before pushing her hair aside and taking off her glasses in order to bring Dr. Dobson to climax. She sensed Dobson being tentative, his cock muscle slackening ever so slightly. Don't worry, she assured him, "I know John McCain has been in underdog positions...I’m just fine with the position that we are in today."

He felt a brief pain in his scrotum, and he knew it was time. He smacked his hand on the table as he dribbled out a modicum of prune-flavored semen, which, of course, Palin swallowed like a host from the Pope. Dobson offered to at least finger fuck her, with no obligation: "I know that this is an extremely stressful time for you and we’re not asking you to come now."

Palin declined. But they did both say they hoped "God's wisdom" and "God's perfect will" would prevail on election day. And if it doesn't? If satanic, Muslim, godless, socialist, beast-marked, Cain-descended Obama wins? Well, at least God's work had been done during the interview.

In Brief: Other Political Ideologies Barack Obama Must Follow:
Since the McCain/Palin campaign has decided that because Barack Obama wants to tax people making over $250,000 in taxable income (which means a hell of a lot more than $250,000 in take-home pay) at a slightly higher rate than now, they can call it "socialism." Or, well, they can say that others say it's socialism and that, as McCain called the idea of "spread the wealth," Obama follows "one of the basic tenets of socialism." In doing this, McCain's campaign is focusing in on idiots as their base, the people who don't actually understand what socialism is (and being ably enabled by idiots in the conservative media).

So if all one needs to be a socialist is to believe that those with money should pay a bit more in taxes, if the bar is set so low, what other outre' political philosophies must Barack Obama be following?

1. Barack Obama must be an anarcho-syndicalist because he believes in the power of unions.

2. Barack Obama must be a Whig because he believes in the government's role in building infrastructure and education.

3. Barack Obama must be a Gaullist because he believes in regulating banks.

4. Barack Obama must be a neo-Aristotelianist because he was a community organizer.

5. Barack Obama must be a Dadaist because cow.

Poor Joe the Plumber Is Too Dumb to Just Shut the Fuck Up:
Watching Samuel J. Wurzelbacher, the man known to all by his nom de McCain, "Joe the Plumber," negotiate the media is not unlike watching feeding time at a particularly savage zoo, the kind that doesn't hide the way animals actually behave. Maybe it's the moment that a big, juicy, live rat is put in a tank with a boa constrictor that's not immediately hungry. That cute, white, furry bastard might think it's gonna be able to survive this, but, sure as hell, once that snake gets an appetite, it's down the gullet for Ratso due to no other reason than that's the way it's gotta be.

To complete this analogy, Wurzelbacher appeared on that Fox "news" model of journalistic ethics, Hannity and (to a lesser extent) Colmes. In two lines early in the interview, Wurzelbacher pretty much destroyed whatever sad little argument he might have had about why the rich shouldn't pay more taxes. Sean Hannity, who was practically humping the desk at the thought, asked Wurzelbacher of Barack Obama's tax plan, "Why do you view this as 'socialism,' because that's the word you used?"

Wurzelbacher never even realized the brutal irony and self-contradiction of his answer: "I grew up poor. You know I actually have been on welfare, you know, my parents, you know, a couple different times, and we'd, you know, worked harder and got off of it and then, you know, actually did fairly well."

A moment later, Alan Colmes, who always looks like speaking causes him endless pain, pointed out that Wurzelbacher would actually get a tax cut with Obama's plan. And then, in a line so pathetically filled with denial of who he was and where he came from, Wurzelbacher answered, "To be honest with you. You know I don't think it's right to -- you know, you know, there's principles involved. I don't want to make or have my taxes cut if it means somebody who worked hard or had a better break than I did, and take his money. I don't want his money...I don't want someone else's money who worked hard for it. No."

Did you get that? Joe the Plumber and his parents were on welfare during hard times. But he doesn't want someone else's money and doesn't think it's fair to take money from one person to give it to another person. Can you wrap your mind around that without blowing two or three gaskets?

And there, in a nugget of anti-wisdom, is all the delusional glory of white working class people who support Republicans. Apparently, for them, money for things like welfare or food stamps or whatever, which is fine when they need it, but is socialism when others do, is just pinched out by a money-shitting, giant bald eagle or something. Maybe Jesus jacks off, and where his seed falls, trees with golden apples grow. Maybe Uncle Sam just pukes greenbacks.

It also means, for anyone paying attention, who gives a shit what Wurzelbacher thinks? He's an obvious idiot, not, as Hannity said, offering a manly hand job, "You're the heart and soul swinging that wrench, you're the heart and soul of what makes this country great." No, actually Wurzelbacher is what makes this country a fucking laughingstock and a pathetic inbred cousin of what it could be. There's plenty of working class people who actually do understand how taxation and social safety nets work. They also know that "spreading the wealth," unlike what John McCain says, is what once made America great.

The Rude Pundit thought the initial media frenzy over Wurzelbacher was just another worthless distraction, although, frankly, it's fuckin' John McCain's fault that it happened. But once Wurzelbacher started granting interviews and started appearing on Fox "news" to install his faucets of wisdom, well, then it's welcome to the party, motherfucker, and all bets are off.

Republicans Get Back to Their Roots:
When you've got nothing left, you finally get back to basics. Republicans have tried everything to slow the Obama/Democratic juggernaut this year. And nothing - discussions of tax policy, health care, national security (which has worked so very often), and more - has stuck. So what's left? Time to get old school on some motherfuckers. Time to bring out the arguments that Republicans (and the right wing in general) have used again and again to try to rip this fucking election out of its seemingly inevitable ending. And that means it's time to unleash the ancient demons to divide and conquer or, at the very least, just divide. For instance:

Blackfacing Powell:
We finally know that, now that he's endorsed Barack Obama, Colin Powell is just another nigger to the right wing. Oh, fuck, conservatives couldn't get enough of Powell for so long, loving that he had all those medals and that woolly hair and was black (but not so black as to make others uncomfortable), and that they could even let him in the front door of the White House because they could trot him out to make any despicable cause seem honorable and just. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Powell's finally learning that, at the end of the day, how easy it is to get that coal black smudged on his face so that he's only a brother who, of course, would support a brother because he's a brother. By supporting Obama, he's demonstrating that deep inside his nigger heart was another coon waiting for a chance to bite his generous massa's hand.

It's fuckin' hilarious, innit? To hear how quickly the right has rendered Powell's endorsement as race-based, as the porcine shitbucket that undulates like a human, Rush Limbaugh, couldn't even wait until his show today to attack Powell for that very reason, as Nazi-lovin' Pat Buchanan seconded. And they simply act as if "Well, isn't it obvious?" that he'd do it because of their shared negritude. Powell's learning that no matter how much he's done the bidding of the right, honor and respect is cheap among motherfuckers because, if they'd fuck their mothers, then they would surely fuck you.

So now it's fine to say that the newspapers that endorsed John McCain, and Richard Petty and retired generals and others, only did because McCain's white. Let's have that goddamn discussion.

Why Not Bolsheviks?:
John McCain, in his typically pussy style, has started implying, without directly saying, that Barack Obama's tax policies are "socialism." Look at this little bitch way he's doing it: "You see, he believes in redistributing wealth, not in policies that help us all make more of it. Joe, in his plainspoken way, said this sounded a lot like socialism. And a lot of Americans are thinking along those same lines."

You see that? John McCain's not saying it's socialism, but Joe the fuckin' plumber is sayin' it. And Joe? That cocksucker is talkin' for all Americans now - he's our fuckin' blue collar spokesdude. McCain went on in his punk ass radio address, "In Europe, the Socialist leaders who so admire my opponent are upfront about their objectives." Hey, he's just reporting.

In Fayetteville, North Carolina, which may or may not be "real America" or "real North Carolina," because it's got colleges and it's hard to keep track of what's real in this country anymore, a woman at a diner started yelling, "Socialist, socialist, socialist" at Barack Obama. But because Obama's not a little bitch, he went over to the woman, who refused to engage with him because, ultimately, she's a coward and an idiot who wouldn't know real and actual socialism if it bit her on the ass and yelled, "I'm Socialism." And, truly, do we not know what she really wanted to shout?

Why not just say that Obama is Bolshevik? That he's gonna bring Leninism to the United States? Why not say he's a wild-eyed bohemian bent on bombing shit? (Oh, wait, they're already saying that.) Obama's "socialism" is to pay for a tax credit for the middle class by raising taxes on the wealthy, which would actually pay for far more than just the tax cut. For McCain that's "redistribution of wealth." Tell you what: when Obama proposes gutting the carcasses of the rich for food, taking their land, and giving their possessions to the poor, we can talk.

Hell, at least Michelle Bachman had the guts (briefly) to just say that Obama is anti-American.

Late Post Today:
The Rude Pundit's gotta make sure that the socialists are spreading the wealth. Back later with Colin Powell, Bolsheviks, and more.

Farewell to Cursor:
Way before Huffington Post and long, long before the Daily Beast, Cursor.org was a lefty daily news aggregator that was blissfully straightforward. There was always something to discover there, and its editors were conscientious about linking to the best in progressive journalism. It was one of the sources of inspiration for the Rude Pundit, and that is why it was one of the first links ever put on this blog.

And, goddamnit, it lost its funding and is gone. After over seven years, it shuttered up a week ago. The Rude Pundit will pour a forty on the curb for its loss.

Photos That Make the Rude Pundit Think About Chilling the Perrier-Jouet and Breaking Out the Beluga:


That's President George W. Bush's head propped up on a giant black stone. It seems a bit barbaric, but, to be fair, so have the last eight years. We probably could have waited until January at this point, but the McCain campaign needed a game changer and a definite way to distance itself from this administration.

Bush's head was displayed at the Chamber of Commerce in DC today, where it tried to reassure the nation about the vortex of the economy. Most people couldn't pay attention, though. They were appalled that a disembodied head was speaking in some horrible, garbled, barely human voice-like sound. "Why the fuck is it still talking?" a man in the audience was heard to scream. "It's just a head. Are we living in a nightmare?"

Others just stared, aghast, some vomiting up their danishes and crullers, as the head offered, "America is the best place in the world to start and run a business. America is the most attractive destination for investors around the globe. America is the home of the most talented and enterprising and creative workers in the world. We're a country where all people have the freedom to realize their potential and chase their dreams."

"There is no God, there is no God" a woman sobbed when Bush's head said, "This promise has defined our nation since its founding; this promise will guide us through the challenges we face today; and this promise will continue to define our nation for generations to come." No one could take the words seriously because, indeed, no one could be sure that it wasn't simply the devil speaking through the head. Most just wanted it to stop talking.

The head was taken from the stage to be frozen until it needed to make another appearance, but by that time, it wouldn't be able to speak, because, in all likelihood, all that would be left is the top half of it.

The Third Presidential Debate: Barack Obama Is Not Campaigning to Be Your Friend:
Oh, John McCain, you brought all your sport equipment last night. You brought your baseball and your football. You put on your boxing gloves and your cup. You stretched, warmed up, and took the field, got into the ring, ran onto the court. You stood there with your bat, you took the ball out, you got ready for the kick off, you were waiting for the puck to be dropped. All uniformed up. Unfortunately, Barack Obama didn't show up at Hofstra to play any of your games. In fact, Obama said, more or less, that you should go shove your cleats up your ass and let the grown-ups deal with grown-up problems.

Last night's debate was something of a critical wounding of the Atwater/Rove school of political evisceration. Simply put, Obama's attitude to all the lawn darts McCain brought - the Ayers nonsense, the ACORN stupidity, the Obama-kills-babies lie, the "present" vote bullshit, and more - was to react and behave like it was all nonsensical, stupid, lying bullshit. He answered every accusation directly, but with a near-mournful attitude, as if to say, "Really, John? This is really what you want to talk about?" What Barack Obama did last night was to school John McCain in the rhetoric of crisis and McCain could only sputter and rage as he kept trying to get Obama to play with him. He may as well have been pleading, "C'mooon."

Obama's approach to the whole campaign has been incredibly straightforward: He is not running to be your buddy, Americans. He is running to be your president. He's not gonna say he likes your fuckin' pork rinds just to make you like him. (The times he veered briefly into that kind of pandering were just embarrassing, and he's avoided them since the primaries.) And he's not gonna stand for the kind of fucktardery that's taken down Democrats the last two elections, as well as during the Reagan/Bush years. Yeah, he addressed each thing that McCain mentioned, but he cut McCain's nuts off and held them up for McCain to see when he turned it back on the Republican: "I think the fact that this has become such an important part of your campaign, Senator McCain, says more about your campaign than it says about me."

At that moment, Barack Obama pretty much dragged Karl Rove out onto the stage, pulled down that fat fuck's pants, pointed at his tiny dick, and laughed. As for McCain, it was more or less the end of the election. He may as well have said, "Fuck it. My bitch is rich, so, honey, start the jet and let's go to Cabo."

McCain had one line he had practiced real good, and he waited for his chance to use it like a trapdoor spider hidden in the dirt hopes prey passes by. When the Arizona senator said his "Senator Obama, I am not President Bush" line, he looked like the kid at the spelling bee who knows he spelled his word correctly. But it didn't leave a mark on Obama. Time and again, when McCain tried to flailingly stab at Obama, the Democrat just calmly moved an inch or two one way or the other, leaving McCain stumbling, trying to get his footing back. That smile Obama kept on his face? It was the knowledge that McCain had charged at Obama and ended up falling off a cliff. The Rude Pundit's favorite grin was when Obama realized that all McCain had was Joe the fuckin' Plumber.

Look at just one thing here. When the whole issue of trade with Colombia came up (something that most people don't give a shit about), McCain, ever the motherfucker, lectured, "But maybe you ought to travel down there and visit them and maybe you could understand it a lot better." Without even pausing, Obama launched into a defense of workers' rights in that country, which hewed to his theme of giving power back to the disempowered. What the fuck was McCain gonna say to the fact that union organizers are being killed in Colombia? Oh, yeah, he tried to bring up Hugo Chavez, but, as ever, Obama smiled that smile of the leopard that knows he's faster than the old gazelle he's taking down.

And when McCain said that "women's health" is an extremist position in abortion policy, a fuckin' army of Sarah Palins wasn't gonna save him.

Don't believe anyone who says McCain won or that it was even close. He was an angry leprechaun screaming at the man who stole his pot of gold. And, at the end of the day, John McCain seemed less like a major party candidate and more like a pissed-off Dad telling his college-aged daughter who she can and can't date, and, for no rational reason he can explain, he certainly doesn't want her fucking around with the black guy. Unfortunately for him, she's all grown up now and can make her own decisions.

A Brief Observation on Tonight's Fisticuffs:
If you keep tossing shit into a strong, cool wind, you will end up covered in shit.

Joe the Plumber?:
Wait, wait, wait - that sounds familiar. (Link way NSFW).

That's right: Neighborhood Watch 30, a fine amateur porn video, with the following description: "Joe the plumber is an expert when it comes to cleaning pipes. By coincidence, Kaylynne has several pipes in serious need of a reaming! And as we all know, a hard plumber is good to find."

Joe the plumber is doing just fine.

What Obama Should Say (Rude Version), Part 3:
If, at tonight's debate at Hofstra, John McCain mans up and actually attacks Obama on Bill Ayers, and the Democratic candidate doesn't say, "Goddamn, Johnny Maverick, you don't know what everyone else knows. It's over, motherfucker. Whether you wanna admit it or not, it's over. Put this cocksucker in the history books and scribble down, 'Landslide' next to it, 'cause, unless you find me in bed with a dead white boy, it's finished. Now, you need to decide how you wanna walk to the guillotine. You can go up to that platform, put your head down nice, and accept your fate, go out with a little honor. Or you can be a punk ass bitch and try to run away or cry or punch the guards or piss yourself. But either way, man, your fuckin' stringy-haired head is comin' off.

"You know why you're done? Because everyone's fucking tired of the Vietnam War. Not only that, but the Vietnam War doesn't fucking matter anymore to most of the people in the country. It's passed its political expiration date, motherfucker, and that means your story doesn't matter. And Ayers doesn't matter. None of the same fuckin' arguments hold water. We got our own goddamned war and our own goddamned ripped-up and shattered vets filling the VA hospitals. It means you're not as fuckin' special as you once were, Maverick Man. So shove your bullshit about Ayers up your ass. Forty years ago might not seem like that long to you, but to most people, it's a fuckin' lifetime.

"You lost, man, you lost because all the shit you been shoveling into a giant pile has finally tipped over and covered you in turds. I'll tell you what I'm gonna do. Right here, right now, I'm take out this skull. You see it? You know whose skull it is? It's Ronald Reagan's. And now I'm gonna take out my dick and fuck his skull, right in his eyehole where his lying-ass twinkling eyeballs used to be. Watch me fuck the Gipper's skull, man, watch me turn it into my bony bitch. Damn, that was good fuckin'. And then, once I'm president, I'm gonna get Milton Friedman's skull and fuck the shit out of that. And I'm gonna get William Rehnquist's skull and fuck it. And then I'm gonna get William F. Buckley's skull, even if it's still got meat on it, and I'm gonna fuck it in the mouth. I'm gonna skull fuck all those people who turned this country into a bullshit version of what it was. Shit, I'm gonna fuck Dick Cheney's skull while he's still using it, maybe get Joe Biden to double team it with me, fuckin' his skull until his poisoned fuckin' heart explodes.

"And as for you, Johnny Maverick? No, I won't skull fuck you. But, shit, you're not calling out motherfuckers who say they wanna kill me? What kind of pussy are you? You know we gotta work together. But you're gonna spend a little time suckin' dicks, mine and Biden's, and you can call 'em 'my friends,' 'cause you're gonna know 'em well. See, with 60 Democratic senators, you and Lieberman can form your own party of smug fuckers who have outlived their usefulness.

"Oh, and I'll be sending some badass motherfuckers from my Justice Department to Alaska to fuckin' anal probe and prosecute the fuck out of Little Miss Sarah and her trailer trash husband," then the debate will be worthless.

It's All Been a Lie: The Source of Republican Rage:
God, we've all had those days. When you wake up in the morning and look across the bed to see the guy you've been fucking for the last however long - months, years, maybe even a couple of decades. And you finally realize what a complete fucking loser he is. Yeah, yeah, it's been fun. All those insane nights out, trips overseas, the time you had a threesome with that British dude, deep conversations over glasses of wine where, you now realize, he fell asleep just a little bit before you got to your point. But now, now, you're staring at him, thinking, "That fucker can't hold a job, he's always getting into fights in bars here and abroad, doesn't clean up shit around the apartment, and expects me to give him money whenever he wants new clothes and shit."

It's a stunning kind of moment, when you feel helpless and you think, "Fuck, I've based a chunk of my life around this asshole. What am I gonna do?" Now, you can blame yourself - your life, your decisions. But that's just way too goddamn hard: you gotta look yourself in the mirror every day. You blame him. But that requires action: you gotta toss his ass out and learn to live life on your own. No, the easiest thing is to push down that ball of unease and lash out at others: the motherfucking bosses that fired him, the dicks at the bars who bumped him, anyone, fuck, Christ, anyone so that you don't have to face the horrible truth: what you have believed is a lie and you have lived that lie for years now.

Sure, there's a great deal of racist hatred going on at rallies for John McCain and Sarah Palin, what with all the monkeys with Obama clothes and calls that Obama ought to be killed. But, as with much hatred directed at the left, most of it is simply the barbaric half-articulate bleats of misdirected frustration cried out by idiots in denial about how fucked up their country and their lives have been for the better part of the last three decades. And their own complicity in their own undoing.

Oh, children, you may not remember, but there was a time when the thought was that government ought to at least pretend to represent those who didn't have the means to represent themselves. But part of the Reagan "revolution" (if by "revolution," you mean, "extreme pro-capitalist economic policies that fucked over most of the nation and made almost everyone not rich less free") was the codification of the idea that what's good for the rich is what's good for the country. Post-Great Depression, the government at least gave lip service to and often acted to directly help the poor. From Reagan on, that was seen as bullshit. And the fuckin' hilarious part was that because of Reagan's decision to bring religion and cultural issues into the mix, he got a lot of dirt poor assholes to believe him. Shit, that was some fine snow job.

But what's happened in the last couple of years, starting with Hurricane Katrina and climaxing (one hopes) with the economic crisis of the last month, all those idiots who really think that the Dow Jones Industrial Average reflects something about their lives other than how deeply they're fucked have had to face the nightmare that the ideology they had staked their lives and their children's lives on was a fairy tale. And that God wasn't gonna do jack shit to make it all better.

When some tool yells, "Terrorist" or some such shit while McCain is yammering on or when Sarah Palin is saying some stupid ass thing she doesn't understand, it's because that person can't face the truth. It's easier to make Barack Obama and vaguely defined "liberals" and "Democrats" into the villains than the people who keep telling them, "No, no, all evidence to the contrary, that dude in your bed's a great guy and everyone else is just trying to dick you over."

Columbus Day: Which Candidate Gives a Damn About Indians?:
The only time the Rude Pundit ever celebrated Columbus Day, other than making Pinta macaroni art, was by accident. He was sitting at an outdoor cafe' in the North Beach section of San Francisco, drinking wine with friends on a gorgeous October mid-day in 1992, when, well into the third bottle, we noticed that the streets were suddenly lined with people. We had been about to get the check, but instead, we ordered another bottle of red, slapped our foreheads, thinking, "Oh, fuck, it's Columbus Day and we're in Little Italy," and leaned back to watch the parade.

It was the 500th anniversary of Columbus's blind trust that God existed just to make sure that he would get rich and dark people would be slaves. And down at Fisherman's Wharf, a different event was going on, the Native American protest of Columbus and his not-so-merry band of drunk, white, greedy sodomizers sailing the ocean blue. We headed in that direction, hearing louder and louder chants as we got closer. Finally, down at the waterfront, we were blocked from going further, but we saw that the riot police had headed in to stop the protesters from stopping the parade and its organizers' effort to re-enact Columbus's landing. By that point, the white people had met the indigenous people (and their sympathizers, who way outnumbered anyone who descended from anyone actually native) and, as usual, things were not going to go well.

So, on this election year Columbus Day, a mere 516 years since Chris C. fucked up a perfectly nice beach in the Dominican Republic, let's take just a sec to see how the election is playing in Indian country.

A quick check of the campaign websites pretty much tells the entire story: Obama's got an entire section of his dedicated to Indian issues. He's hired Wizi Garriott as his campaign's First Americans vote director, who has been working with young Native leaders on outreach to engage the tribal communities in the election. And Obama's been endorsed by the councils and leaders of many tribes.

McCain? Well, he's got a page that says how long he's been on relevant committees. Which is cool since there's 20 tribes in Arizona, but some are dubious about McCain's record of accomplishment, other than holding hearings now and then. In an ironic twist, considering his love of the dice, McCain has been quite the advocate for tighter regulation on Indian casinos, which doesn't sit well with many a native. Shit, casinos have been a nice, slow Indian vengeance on white people for a couple of decades now (and a place for income for intensely poverty-stricken ares). They don't want him to fuck with that. It's a naked play for evangelical votes and an obvious attempt to distance himself from Ralph Reed and Jack Abramoff.

Bottom line: even though Indians traditionally vote Democratic, the party is not taking those votes for granted. Republicans? Like so many others throughout history, they've pretty much just written the tribes off.

Weekend Multimedia Fun:
From Shoot the Messenger, an ad about John McCain and Sarah Palin's favorite new energy source, clean coal:

In Defense of Bill Ayers, Part 2: Repentance Is Not an Option:
Perhaps a man who killed children by bombing civilian villages in the Vietnam War ought not call others "terrorists." Just sayin'.

Several people have written in to the Rude Pundit to praise Bill Ayers, the University of Illinois, Chicago professor of education who was once a member of the radical 60s and 70s group the Weather Underground and whose vague association with Barack Obama has become the last all-in of the McCain campaign. McCain is now talking openly about the Ayers/Obama connection and has put out an ad that questions the judgment of Obama because of Ayers.

Probably one should question Robert McNeil and Jim Lehrer, who featured Ayers as an expert on education in Chicago on their PBS news show in 1995 without mentioning the Weathermen. So when Barack Obama was first meeting him, it was as that expert on education. Far from being a "washed-up terrorist," as McCain called him, Ayers is actually a beloved and important teacher, one who has probably done more positive things for more people on balance than the aforementioned child bomber and his sportscaster running mate.

But don't take it from the Rude Pundit. Here's what people who know Bill Ayers said:

Sharon H. writes, "I pal around with terrorists. I consider Bill Ayers a friend. This thing on Bill has been blown way, way out of proportion. It is not relevant to America today...I first met Bill Ayers when I was completing a degree in education in Chicago. I was not a student at UIC but really wanted to sit in on Bill's classes. I had read practically everything he had written and found that our philosophy of education in the lives of children were pretty much the same.

"So I sat in on his class. After class I told Bill that I wanted to continue to sit in and he invited me to sit in on both of his classes that semester. His lectures were brilliant and thought-provoking. Moreover, he not only encouraged everyone to engage in the dialogue, he found value in what you, as his student had to say...

"Later, in 2005 when I managed a summer recruitment program for pre-service teachers at Chicago Public Schools, I called upon Bill to talk to 200 soon-to-be teachers. He did so willingly and asked for nothing in return. He spoke for over ninety minutes and answered questions. too. The students were mesmerized by his intelligence, depth of knowledge and passion for education and his wit. Yes, they were very impressed with Bill Ayers and indicated so on their program exit surveys. Nowadays, our paths cross at the various educational and volunteer functions around the city. As far as arrogance, I've never seen it. When we see each other around town, I'm always greeted by him with a hug and a kiss. Then he talks lovingly amount his grandchild and his growing older, and then asks about mine."

John K. says, "I'm a former student of Bill Ayers. In 2003, I was returning to teaching after 25 years in advertising and had to take a couple courses to bring my certificate up to date. One of the courses I took at UIC was called 'Improving Learning Environments,' taught by Ayers.

"I remember his comments in class as being a little more political than your friend does, but that could be explained by the fact that I took this class 5 years ago, rather than the 10 or so of your friend. Bush had started to fuck things up, we invaded Iraq that semester, and – perhaps – I was a tad more attuned to Ayers' history...

"You see, I had met Ayers back in the day. He and a bunch of SDS-ers had come to Northern Illinois University in the late '60s to talk about a recent trip to Cuba. While I don't remember too much of the talk, I do remember that – even though I was in the SDS back then, too – they all struck me as being just a little bit too far gone on the 'true-believer' spectrum for my comfort...

"[Ayers] is an excellent teacher, dedicated to what he does, and comes across as
spectacularly sincere (there's that true believer stuff again) about making schools more responsive to the needs of students, especially those in impoverished, urban areas. He didn't talk too much about the 'old days,' but he did apply the same world view that led him to the Weathermen to events going on that semester."

As far as that past, here's Ayers himself in an August 1996 interview on the PBS Newshour: "I'm sure there are people who think that the opposition to the war was wrong and would like to re-write that history, but the opposition to the war was right, and the opposition came from all quarters, and those who opposed it should be proud of that and should say they're proud of that. To apologize for that opposition would be, I think, a perversion. To apologize for militantly opposing racism, which I think is needed now more than ever, to me is a perversion. On a personal level, are there things that I did wrong like every human being? There are thousands of things that you might do differently, you might re-think after the fact. But in terms of throwing oneself against the war in the 1960's and 70's, that was the right thing to do."

Finally, Ayers' wife, Bernadine Dohrn, herself a professor, told a reporter from the Toronto Star in October 2003 when a film on the Weathermen was opening, "I think the substance of what we stood for was absolutely right...The tactics, and some of our rhetoric, those are different questions."

For any reasonable member of the media who took, say, five minutes to look at who Bill Ayers is, Obama's association with him would not only make sense, but, considering how active the two of them were in the same issues in Chicago, unavoidable.

Ayers' story is a powerful one - from activist revolting against the system to activist learning to use the system so he can cause change. What pisses off conservatives is that he's unrepentant. He hasn't begged forgiveness from the public. He hasn't admitted regret for his actions. He has simply decided that bombs weren't the way to create revolution. That it can happen by teaching teachers to show their students, especially kids in poverty, how to be active, engaged citizens, which in these days of sheep-like complacency is revolutionary indeed. And terrifying to those currently holding power.

Correction: Dohrn's first name is Bernadine, not Bernadette, as first posted.

In Defense of Bill Ayers: He's a Professor:
The right-wing and the McCain campaign continue to push the Barack Obama-Bill Ayers association because, truly, it is the last desperate, craven move they can make to slow the Obama train before it smashes them like a herd of deer on the tracks at the wrong time. It's an idiotic move because, unlike every other specious attempt to take down a Democrat with lies and insinuation, it doesn't involve an actual action by the candidate. Think about it: Willie Horton? Well, Michael Dukakis did support the furlough program as governor. Bill Clinton? Well, he did get blown by that woman. Max Cleland? Well, he did want union protection for Homeland Security employees. It was all spin and bullshit, yes, but it was at least based on things the actual candidates actually did.

Not so with Ayers. As Keith Olbermann and Obama flack Robert Gibbs have shown, once you start to go down the road of "people what you know," that way lies madness.

But these bastards are not letting it go. The McCain campaign released an online ad that flatly asserts that Obama is unfit to be president because he knows William Ayers, even quoting such unbiased sources as the National Review to impugn Obama's work on a charitable organization. Dick "Hooker Toe Sucker" Morris and Eileen McGann say that "Barack Obama should have run screaming at the sight of William Ayers" in the mid-1990s. Morris and McGann also say that the only reason Ayers and his wife didn't go to jail for the bombings they were involved in as part of the Weather Underground was that the charges were thrown out for illegal FBI evidence gathering. They leave out the fact that Ayers turned himself in.

In fact, by the mid-1990s, when Obama encountered him, Ayers was a major figure in the field of education, a professor at the University of Illinois, Chicago, who was routinely praised by Chicago Mayor Richard Daley for his work on elementary and early childhood education. In other words, in the dark ages before the Google began working its stalker-like miracles, who the fuck cared who Ayers was? He was the dude who wrote books on empowering students in the classroom and on problems with the juvenile justice system.

The Rude Pundit has a friend who was a student in one of Ayers' classes during the time Barack Obama was working with Ayers, over a decade ago. So he called up the friend and asked about the crazy ass bomber. This is what the friend had to say:

"There was nothing radical about Ayers. He did not talk about radical political beliefs in the class. He was a reformer, not a revolutionary. He didn't say anything anti-American. In fact, he didn't mention the government or economics or anything that didn't have to do with research and education.

"He never brought up his past. He did not talk about his radical days. I'd say 95% of the students didn't know anything about him other than he was a great professor. Students were told by other students to take him. They raved about him. And he was a brilliant, smart guy. A captivating teacher. We were in awe of him, of his charisma, and we just sat there listening to him talk about his teaching experiences and research. He filled the room.

"He kept pushing our creativity. He didn't want us to do boring projects. And he encouraged dialogue in the classroom. He practiced what he preached. Even now, when I see him, he remembers me and the work I did in his class."

And lest you think that the Rude Pundit's friend is just ready to drop to his knees and give Ayers a hummer, he adds, "He had the biggest ego and he was a name dropper who thrived on attention. A very self-centered guy. While I think he's trying to stay out of things right now, I know he's loving all of this." Can you hold those two thoughts in your head at once: egomaniac and great teacher? Can you hold these two: former violent radical and important scholar/citizen?

Oh, yeah. Big bad radical bomber William Ayers just got elected to the faculty senate at UIC. No doubt when he votes on changes to the prerequisites for computer science courses, it'll be with an itchy trigger finger.

Anyone else out there a student now or a former student of Bill Ayers? Tell the Rude Pundit your story, good or bad. Send it to "rudepundit[at]yahoo[dot]com". Let's try to end this insanity.

The Nashville Debate: The Impotent Always Lose Out to the Virile:
Last night's debate was not unlike watching a grown man and his elderly friend on a vacation hire a couple of high-priced hookers in Vegas to come over to their suite at the Wynn. The old guy, call him "Sidney," keeps talking about how bad he wants to fuck some young 'tang; the younger guy, who, what the fuck, let's call "Barry," - hey, he's cool with whatever goes down. The women arrive, and, after a few drinks, a couple of dances, a little stripper action, Barry takes one of the whores back to his bedroom and shuts the door. Sidney, sitting there with this hot young piece of ass, keeps telling her what to do, to grab his crank, to go down on him some, but he can't get it up. He's popped Viagra, snorted coke, and the best he can get is a mushy half-mast prick that couldn't penetrate pudding.

He can hear Barry, obviously fucking away, his hooker's cries seeming almost real. And that just pisses Sidney off. He blames the girl, he blames the room, he blames the whiskey, getting angrier and angrier. He keeps trying to bang his pussy-for-hire, but that just makes him seem weaker and weaker. Finally, diminished, flaccid, and tired, Sidney gives up. "I am so very old now," he tells the hooker, who knows when it's time to move to comfort mode, checking her watch and hearing her friend still getting nailed, thinking about heading into the other room for a threesome.

So it was that Barack Obama demonstrated, again and again, that he can't be shaken. It was, after a while, kind of pathetic, as John McCain again and again threw shit at Obama, who was Zen-like in his ability to swat it all away like so many flies. One of the only honest things McCain said the entire evening was "Americans are angry, they're upset, and they're a little fearful." That being so, who do you think they want to tell them it's gonna be okay? The frantic, snapping, gnarled pseudo-dwarf or the soothing-voiced, elegant tall man? McCain was so bizarre and scary that if he had said, "Free beer for all," it would have seemed like a threat.

Obama walked through this debate. Like Biden last week, he knew he only had to hold the ball or whatever useful sports metaphor you wanna insert there. He didn't reveal anything new. He was there to offer, as he has been this whole time, "a steady hand on the tiller," as McCain said we need in America. But also a steady hand that's steering the ship in a different direction. His one blatant punch, accusing McCain of being an irrational hothead in foreign affairs, with "this is the guy who sang, 'Bomb, bomb, bomb Iran,' who called for the annihilation of North Korea. That I don't think is an example of 'speaking softly,'" landed hard, a gut punch from which McCain didn't recover the rest of the evening.

Some damn talking head on CNN or MSNBC (they blur after a while) said that by not bringing up all the Bill Ayers nonsense that Sarah "Witchcraft-Free Since 2005" Palin was pissing out of her mouth all weekend, McCain was in essence distancing himself from his running mate and couldn't be that vicious. Bullshit. The only reason McCain didn't bring up Ayers is because he didn't have an opening. And as much of a dick as McCain is, he at least had sense enough not to repeat Palin's "fuck you" to the questions. But McCain's rage and impotence on display made him seem like a grandpa trying to keep up with his grade school grandson while playing tennis on a Wii.

In the course of repeating talking points, which they both did, which made the debate pretty fucking boring for anyone who has paid attention, you could almost hear America roll its collective eyes every time McCain asserted his maverickiness in voting against his own party or with his repetition of the earmarks canard. It was over. McCain no longer had any charm. He got no laughs for his little digs or self-effacing remarks. And by the time he nearly went all Jack Nicholson on Obama, with his "that one" line (which was about who voted on an energy bill), the election was, for all intents and purposes, done.

At the end of the evening, McCain was a defeated man. He knew it as he got the fuck off the stage as soon as possible and as Obama stayed behind to talk to individuals in the audience. In military terms, that's called "ceding territory" or "retreat" or "surrender."

A Brief Observation Regarding Tonight's Fisticuffs:
Oh, McCain, girlfriend, a mixture of passive aggression and bitchiness does not a president make.

More tomorrow on how "that one" did.

Breaking Brokaw:
The Rude Pundit wants to punch Tom Brokaw in his stupid, slurring, fucking face every time he scolds the candidates about time.

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Karl Rove's Folly:
In the basement of his house, late at night, long after most people have gone to bed, Karl Rove sits at his computer, ready for another session. He's got a bowl of Doritos and a cold beer on the desk near his mouse pad. He's got a small vibrator shoved into his asshole, just enough to tickle but not put pressure on his prostate. Turned on high, he gets hard almost immediately. He is not wearing pants. Rove clicks on the YouTube clip he's got ready to go. And he grabs his erect dick, not much bigger than a ten year-old's thumb, and starts yanking as soon as Sarah Palin's voice begins.

Yeah, yeah, he says as he hears Palin accuse Barack Obama of "palling around with terrorists." Goddamn beautiful. Sure, it's complete and utter bullshit. Hell, if anyone gave a shit about truth, someone oughta say that William Ayers turned himself in for his crimes, ready to go to be punished. It just so happened that the FBI fucked up the case against him, so he walked. But truth is for losers who live in a real world. Palin is a dreamer on a win streak.

Oh, she's amazing, Rove thinks, slowing down, not wanting to come just yet, squeezing his balls to pain and turning the vibrator down.

Of course, McCain will lose this time, Rove knows. Now that Keating's come back, he's done. And as the top of the ticket, with two more debates for him to shake and sputter and fuck up, he's doomed. Schmidt blew it right after the convention, that idiot child. But that's not the point. The country's an impatient beast. Four years of Obama and a Democratic Congress trying to clean up the mess left behind by the Bush administration trashing the country like Keith Moon on a whiskey bender in an L.A. hotel suite, and it's over. How much can get done in such a short period? And who will be blamed in 2012? People will be begging for Republicans to come in and save the day. And Rove will be there, with Palin as his front, ready to storm the White House once more.

Palin is the perfection of Rovean cynicism. She is George W. Bush without the sense of royal privilege that wealth imparts. She is all context without substance. He watches her sneer at the notion that Obama, this high yellow intellectual with his faggoty ways, could dare be the man that John McCain is, that she is. Yes, as a thinker, she is a tabula rasa, but he will be Svengali to her Trilby some day. He will mold her skill at wielding the hunting knife and show her that the point is not to treat your opponent like a moose to be gutted, but like a pig waiting to be bled. He will hand her the scalpel; he will then give her the axe.

Rove clicks on a video of Palin at the debate, winking in slow motion, again and again, her lips parted just enough for rough insert of his dick, and he turns the vibrator back up, leaning into it more, trying to press it against his prostate, and he begins to viciously jack it, finally spewing stinking spooge all over the screen, all over Palin's 2-dimensional face and glasses.

He leans forward, sweaty, balls aching, asshole throbbing, and kisses Palin, rubbing his face against his own semen and against her cheek. "You are untamed and wild," he whispers to her phantom image, "but you exist only because of me."

Joe Biden Beats Up a Woman With Glasses:
Christ Almighty, could Republicans just stop pretending here? Regarding the debate between Joe Biden and Sarah Palin, David "Where's the Salad Bar, Applebee's?" Brooks, with his deep understanding of "real" people, actually said in the New York Times that Palin was "vibrant and tactically clever." In the Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan proclaimed, "She killed...She is the political equivalent of cardiac paddles" to the McCain campaign. All over, conservatives were tripping on each others' tongues trying to proclaim Palin triumphant. Except they leave out one crucial factor. She lost the debate.

No, no. Let's take this further. Joe Biden kicked Sarah Palin's perky ass from one end of that stage to another. It was humiliating, watching the bizarro display of Palin, this talking points automaton set on "spunk," absolutely failing to impart any cogent thoughts or cohesive answers or even string together the surprisingly full sentences she spoke into anything like a policy. Here's just a few observations:

1. Joe Biden never, not once in the whole debate, referred to Palin as just "Sarah." It was the perfect rhetorical strategy, to show respect to her office and also not allowing her to keep claiming how she's just an ordinary person. Nope, she's a "governor" and therefore a politician. Also, his smile at Palin could have been interpreted as almost fatherly. But it seemed like he realized that she really was just a dipshit in lipstick and he could put himself on cruise control.

2. She called herself or McCain "mavericks" at least half a dozen times. You know how to prove you're not a "maverick"? By saying you're a maverick. (And Biden had the definitive answer to the whole line with his "He has not been a maverick" rant.)

3. The debate was more or less over when Palin declared to Biden when the Republican hadn't given a response to a question about deregulation, "I may not answer the questions the way that either the moderator or you want to hear." That meant that, for Palin, it wasn't a debate. It was a stump speech. It's one thing for a candidate to repeat lines from campaign appearances. It's quite another to declare you're just not gonna engage. Noonan saw this as a positive: "As far as Mrs. Palin was concerned, Gwen Ifill was not there, and Joe Biden was not there. Sarah and the camera were there."

It's like going to a Chinese restaurant and demanding Argentinean food. It's absurd. Go to the right fucking restaurant. It's like paying a hot hooker to give you a blow job at your place, but she just wants to drink your liquor and steal your iPhone. Well, you can surmise, lesson learned.

4. In fact, let's take a couple of examples here. When she was asked what her "Achilles' heel" was as a candidate (a stupid fucking question, by the way), she didn't even make a pass at it, only rambling through her qualifications. And she went off on a strange education-related tangent when she and Biden were talking about general middle class-related issues. She wanted to cram in what she had memorized about McCain's education policies and, goddamnit, no one's gonna stop her. How many times did she say, "I wanna talk about" shit?

5. Several times, Palin scolded Biden for daring to blame the Bush administration for their fuck-ups, saying, "[T]here's just too much finger-pointing backwards." Yet she claimed about McCain, "He knows to learn from the mistakes and blunders we have seen in the war in Iraq." Now, the Rude Pundit's no genius of linguistic parsing, but, well, fuck, isn't that the same fucking thing? And what kind of fucking idiot doesn't think it's important to acknowledge what causes climate changes in order to solve climate changes? "Hey, you've got HIV, but we're not gonna study anything to see how the virus works, we're just gonna inject you with a bunch of shit and hope for the best."

You know what? Forget it. The Rude Pundit's disgusted talking about this nothing, this nobody, this perfect amalgamation of Machiavelli and Chauncey Gardiner. She's sound and fury, motherfuckers, sound and fury with a funny accent. If she's the future of American politics, then we are goddamned. Biden wiped the floor with her. Facts trump bullshit folksiness. Don't let anyone tell you different.

Correction: An earlier version of this post quoted Sarah Palin, from the CNN transcript of the debate, as saying, "I may not answer the questions that either the moderator or you want to hear." However, Palin's exact wording was "I may not answer the questions the way that either the moderator or you want to hear." The text above has been corrected. But the point still stands: she refused to answer the actual questions that were asked her, she didn't give a shit if she answered them, and she's a fucking dimwit.