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Hemlock Saturday
Jack Kevorkian, Where Art Thou?
Pierre Tristam / Candide’s Notebooks, October 25, 2008
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Off-center |
Ladies and liberals of the jury, I’m depressed this morning. I don’t like the trends. I don’t like the way the goddamn “narrative,” that word more deserving of Gitmo than any human being on the face of the planet save three, is taking shape: the media scrambling for a come-from-behind storyline, a Rocky-like finish, and what do you know, the old white geezer beating the young black upstart. I don’t like the way commentators left and right are KY-jellying poll numbers with their tightening fantasies, creating a self-fulfilling prophesy out of momentum manufactured, in those same collapsing factories of the Midwest, the way McPalin manufactured that bogus Joe-the-bigot populism by making themselves seem, despite their $150,000 wardrobe and leave-no-hedgefund behind pathology, more in touch with people they won’t touch with a ten-foot Taser than the Democrats.
It hasn’t helped that Joe Biden lived up to his downside, but nor should it be helping that the Republicans’ own gift for revealing who they really are keeps unwrapping before our eyes. Yet it doesn’t seem to. New Hampshire is again within the margin of error. Virginia may have been an illusion. North Carolina will remember Jesse Helms. Missouri will go Branson on America’s ass. Florida will live up to its penile look and mentality. And on election night there they’ll be, the resurrected duo, triumphal with gloats from the gook-hater and bleats from the moose-hunter. Ohdave, who managed to scoop this post with his comment, tells me not to worry, that “Fortunately for all of us, this kind of campaigning isn’t working in 2008.”
Rasmussen just posted the day’s tracking poll showing Obama with an eight-point lead, matching the biggest lead of the year in what’s reputed to be the most reliable pollster in the land (Rasmussen is conservative, but usually nails it). Still, I couldn’t possibly be feeling more Jewish about this. I’m with Richard Lewis and Larry David. All despair, and not even a piece of liver to relieve me. The ledge looks awfully appealing, and come Nov. 4 it’ll be a choice between two leaps.
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