I always knew The Penguin was a Republican…
SpiralTruth
Just another post-modern quest for meaning.
The great Canadian election of 2008 saw Slick Steve Harper slide into another Conservative minority. To be honest, Layton’s a bit of a loudmouth and Stéphane Dion reminds you of that kid at school who used to get his head dunked in the toilet every lunch hour. If the left had anything to offer, it was Elizabeth May from the Green Party – refreshing in her intelligence and her tact. Just remember while you’re busy gloating, you wicked bunch of stuffy punk conquistadors, 62.37% of us voted for the left wingers – don’t piss us off too much and we’ll be too lazy to organize and yank your asses out of office. Every once in a while, we do organize, you see. And when we do, it will be talked about for decades. That’s just how we roll. When we finally get around to it, we can put on a pretty good show.
And so, as the majority of Canada retreats to lick it’s wounds and find someone (anyone!) on the left with the ambition (that’s what we’re lacking, make no mistake) to make it to the top, we can now do what we’ve all been secretly itching to do – focus our full attention on our neighbors to the south.
If videos like this are any indication, this election promises to be a spectacle the likes of which we have never seen – and may never see again for many years to come. Hold onto your seats, ladies and gentlemen, because with only two weeks left in this race, the great American political carnival has only just begun.
John McCain announced today that he loves being the underdog and, “My friends, we’ve got ‘em just where we want ‘em!” And, you know, this sounds like a pretty authentic statement from a guy who thought the U.S. could have won in Vietnam if they’d just stayed a little longer and who doesn’t believe in a time-line for withdrawal from Iraq. With McCain appearing (finally) on David Letterman and Sarah Palin making her debut on Saturday Night Live, it looks like it’s all style over substance from here on in, which is sort of funny when you remember that this is an accusation normally made against Barack Obama. It’s hard not to feel a bit sorry for John McCain. It’s like watching your own grandpa make a fool out of himself on prime time TV. You’d like to coax him out of the spotlight somehow. “Grandpa, it’s time for your nap.” But it’s no use. The Republican machine has been brought up to full steam, and it will not even consider the possibility of failure, even if that would mean saving the poor old man some dignity.
As Rolling Stone’s Make Believe Maverick article points out, McCain’s sources of dignity may indeed be fictional. Among the many insights into his history, we find that McCain “had a knack for stalling out his planes in midflight” and that it was only his family’s influence that allowed him to fly long enough to be shot down over North Vietnam. Sort of makes the whole POW story a little less compelling, doesn’t it? Now, I’m not sure I trust that Rolling Stone is composed of top notch investigative journalists, but the story does raise a lot of interesting questions about the real John McCain – and he wanted this campaign to be about character, right?
Alas, Colin Powell made sure to deliver another blow to everyone’s favorite underdog today by publicly endorsing Obama.
I like Powell. I’m still surprised that he sticks by the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq and is a member of the Republican Party, given that he’s always seemed to be much more diplomatic and responsible than that, but in my mind he makes up for it by giving great props to the guy who will be the next President so long as rational folks can outnumber the idiots at the voting stations.
Elizabeth May just about won my vote (and may still) with this statement:
We believe, as in the recent theories of Richard Florida, that there is such a thing as a creative class. And the creative class leads to investment, leads to greater economic activity, leads to community health.
It isn’t just that she shares my taste in sociological reading. The Green Party’s entire platform, on everything from the economy to the environment to foreign policy, rewards and protects creativity, which is often undervalued by the powers that be.
We’re becoming a culture of managers in North America, but to be good and effective, managers have to manage something. Every society needs a sustainable level of production to support the managerial class. Florida’s book looks at the emerging creative class, which represents a refreshing middle ground between a factory worker and a manager.
The classic structure has been that the factory worker works his way up into various levels of management. The emerging creative class adds another option for movement, one where instead of moving up or down on a ladder, you tend to move laterally. Creative jobs are generally more fun and higher paying than assembly line work, but unlike management, they involve creating something, which ensures that our economy is fueled by real production. And, as the managerial class adjusts to handle this new style of worker, I think we’re getting better managers.
Check out Jed Lewison’s post about John McCain urging the Bush administration to simply skip the Congressional approval on the infamous bailout bill. Not sure what I think about the bill itself, as there are a lot of interesting questions being raised now as to how necessary it actually is, but it’s definitely scary for a presidential candidate to be advocating the skipping of processes designed to protect ordinary people. This bailout would only be as good as the controls put on it to avoid more irresponsibility on Wall Street with tax payers’ money, so to skip this process is in my mind pretty foolhardy, no matter how important the bailout may seem.