Hypocrisy and Lies.

John McCain looks so uncomfortable next to his running mate. At campaign events, while she speaks he stands off to the side and squints and half-smiles and shrugs, and generally looks as stiff and out of touch as he is. His vice presidential candidate has completely upstaged him, and I bet that’s OK with him. After all, as long as he continues to ride his crazy bump in the polls, supplied by the rallying masses of “you’re not better than me,” disaffected Americans who see the tantalizing possibility of someone as poorly qualified as themselves reaching higher office, who cares if he’s upstaged for now? After all, it’s going to make him President, at least until he keels over from general oldness and fatigue from keeping up all this incessant hypocrisy and lying.

You have noticed the hypocrisy and the lies, right? It would be hard to miss them when the McCain camp is meting them out hand over fist. There’s the “celebrity” argument, an advertisement for which has shown on local TV here in Denver at least twice tonight. In the ad, a voice asks what you have when you take away Obama’s “celebrity,” then answers that it’s nothing but “more of the same.” Couldn’t we just insert Sarah Palin’s name in place of Obama’s? And what about the “experience” argument? Same thing. Then there’s the newest ad in which McCain and Palin are presented one after the other in rapid succession, newspaper headlines across their proud countenances trumpeting all the big, fat lies of their “accomplishments” as a pair of pioneering mavericks who have bucked the system left and right. Hey - there’s Palin’s famed “thanks but no thanks” position again, which has been debunked as an untruth for several days now – yet the McCain crew has the audacity to stick it in an ad knowing that makes it as good as true as far as the American public is concerned.

Obama continues to refuse to get down into the mud with the Republican strategists and instead maintains that Americans want to discuss the issues. He won’t say anything negative about Sarah Palin, and while I applaud him for his restraint, I’ll admit that when something as important as the future of our country is at stake, it would be nice if for once the Democrats could just play the game as nastily as the Republicans and wipe the floor with them.

I’d love to think that the high road wins, but if you take a look at our society it doesn’t seem to be the case. America is made up of people who are generally more interested in watching their fellow citizens implode on reality TV than in the finer points of foreign affairs, and they seem to attribute an interest in such lofty concepts as the Constitution solely to the effete intellectual elite. The Republican strategists, who by and large are a part of the effete intellectual elite themselves, are banking on that as they fire the cannonball of Sarah Palin into our collective consciousness. They’re gambling, and it’s not really much of a gamble at all, that today’s unqualified Americans will fall all over themselves to see themselves reflected in the White House.