desperate measures.

Why is it okay for the conservatives to criticize liberals for being "elitists", but when we suggest that someone's a country bumpkin, we're being "TOO MEAN"?

They can call us the party of arugula-eating elitists (though all those McCain/Palin stickers in my local Whole Foods parking lot suggest otherwise), but once we say that someone who has barely left the country and lives closer to Canada than the Mainland might be out of touch with the rest of Americans/international relations, we're suddenly being unnecessarily vicious?

Yesterday on Bill Maher, Janeane Garofalo was being vocal about her disgust with the Republican party and she was reprimanded by both the Republican guest and Bill Maher. "You're asking for it", they said, as if her disparaging remarks would cost the Democrats the election.

But um, if being mean and resorting to ad hominem attacks is bad for a party, wouldn't the Republicans have been voted out of power ages ago?

So I'm going to stop being so nice to the Republicans and start rubbing it in their face that John McCain is known to be an asshole. An asshole who forgets his policies on, say, whether birth control should be covered by insurance.

On Facebook, this girl I was marginally friends with in high school posted a picture of her next to a big McCain/Palin sign, smiling. She commented on the picture, saying "My favorite quote from the rally was 'A Vote A Day Keeps Obama Away!'" (First of all, what does that even mean? A vote a DAY?)

So I responded with, "My favorite quote is, 'At least I don't plaster on the makeup like a trollop, you cunt.' From McCain to his wife! What a guy!" How do people even defend that? They can't. He sounds like the biggest douchebag in the world with that quote. So that pissed her off, which makes my little heart skip a beat, and she replied by saying, "Allison that's really not cool and very disrespectful."

The poor thing didn't realize how easily she was baiting me to respond with, "Yeah, seriously. He treats his wife with no respect."

What we need to do is get the focus off Palin. She's a decoy. The Republicans want us to talk about her so that we don't focus on McCain's terrible record, similarity with Bush, and awful policies. We need to focus on how nonsensical it would be for this country to elect Bush 2.0. He has the worst approval rating of any president and has put this country in ruins, so why would we want to elect more of the same?

This is what we need to emphasize. And the fact that McCain is a dick can't hurt, either. I know it's hard, us liberals are so forgiving. But fuck it. We need to ruin this man.

(UPDATE: Arianna Huffington agrees! I hadn't even seen that article before I posted this.)