the everyday adventures of sabrina

i’m not certain what the deal is with all the republican furor over mccain potentially being the nominee. didn’t people used to like him? i mean, wasn’t the ‘maverick’ thing formerly cool? and, c’moonnnnn…. you can’t seriously be all that rah-rah mitt freaking romney. if you took away his max factor pancake makeup, the man would cry. and really, why are people calling mccain a socialist? i guess i missed the part where he got all buddy-buddy with hugo chavez.

although, in retrospect, maybe the “mccain is unacceptable!” factor only needs one datum in order to be understood — i find him not completely unacceptable, myself. if liberals like him (despite him being completely batshit insane, natch), then clearly he is EBIL!

(and, hey, dear ann coulter — very funny hannity & colmes segment (and y’all won’t hear me use that particular f-word as regards ann coulter often, so savor it) aside: nobody actually believes that you will campaign or vote for hillary. there are limits on the amounts of disbelief even big ole sci-fi dorks such as myself can suspend.)

but anyways. so, i think i’ve mentioned this, i’m voting obama on tuesday. (i decided against voting early. i could’ve done so, and lent that voice to early returns gossipping, but i decided i would really prefer to take part in SUPER DUPER ULTRA MEGA FANTASTIC! tuesday festivities. maybe this will be the time i am finally selected to take part in an exit poll, my lifelong ambition! (come on! you know that wicker park is going to be highly contested! COUNT THE HIPSTER VOTE, GALLUP!) … also, the early voting polling place was much farther away from my house than my regular polling place, and y’all, i am very lazy.) i’ve been a little bit conflicted about my choices. i liked bill richardson, but he dropped out (boo!). that pretty much left clinton and obama. (edwards is too shrill about THE MINERS!!!!!, and kucinich is too batshit crazy, and everybody else (who?) was too irrelevant (who???). so there you go. election by moderately short attention span.)

now clinton, i’ve been saying for ages, since i was still pissed off about Bush v. Gore, that i looked forward to voting for her for president. however, i take it back. she’s really irritating the crap out of me, and i think she’s being somewhat unkind, and i think she expects women to vote for her as her due. which, just, no. also, bill is rapidly losing what respect and goodwill i had for him (and i still have my Clinton/Gore ’92 campaign buttons up on the wall behind me; i was an original signatory for MoveOn’s original purpose (long since abandoned and gotten shriekier and far more annoying; you all know it’s true); i happily voted for him in ’96 and loved him pretty much unquestioningly up until about six months ago.). what nastiness hillary refuses to emit, he takes care of. the “fairy tale” remark was just plain meanspirited — and for someone who campaigned to the music of Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t Stop (Thinking About Tomorrow),” hypocritical. he’s behaving like a spoiled brat, and i don’t really much care for that. and if hillary and her handlers are refusing to rein him in now, i have no trust that he would remain in the East Wing… and i’m just not interested in flushing away the twenty-second amendment. so, sorry, hill, i guess i changed my mind, at least for now.

also, hillary, no one is buying the ’35 years of experience’ thing. 35 years of work experience, sure — 35 years of leading the free world, not so much. you kinda blew it with that one.

i was a little slow to get behind obama, too, though. i honestly still have not gotten over his saying, when elected to the senate, that he wouldn’t run for president in 2008. i’m still a little peeved about that. listen, we’ve just gotten hastert out of the house and people are betting on Das Oberfuehrer taking his seat (dude, don’t give me shit about hyperbolizing to make that joke either; he is such a fucking Nazi i can’t even buy his ice cream, and i am not a boycott-prone person); i don’t want to see illinois lose federal democratic representation, and if obama runs for president and resigns his seat or damages his chances for either his reelection, or replacing him with another democrat, before eventually losing the election, i am going to be omigodsopissed. (i mean, i liked peter fitzgerald; he disagreed with me on most everything, and every time i wrote him a letter asking him to do something he wrote me one back explaining why he’d done exactly the opposite, but at least he had some sort of, you know, integrity and sense of personal accountability, and weird stuff like that which is unusual in the united states congress, so that was nice. but anyways, i don’t expect to get another decent republican like him any time soon. seems the trend is towards shrill and shouty ones who pretty much want liberals to all die in a fire. dang… now i want to write fitzgerald fan mail.) anyhoo. i shall be very cranky if obama screws illinois over in a failed attempt to become president.

that said… i think he’d make a pretty good president. i really enjoy watching him speak; he’s very well-spoken and sort of human. (i was reading something recently where someone was off-put initially by his pausing during off-the-cuff responses, as opposed to hillary’s polished and immediate responses, but then he realized that obama was actually thinking out a response as he went rather than spouting a pre-planned statement, and changed his mind, saying he preferred obama’s method. i like it, too.) i don’t agree with everything on his platform — specifically and most significantly, his view that “civil unions are okay but gay marriages are not” (which is about as close to being a single-issue voter as i get; i intensely dislike the hypocrisy of the federal government allegedly not being in the business of enforcing religious standards and yet the only single bar to entry to a legal state marriage for otherwise-qualified adults is in effect a religious one), though that’s at least much more progressive than the right. (don’t even get me started on mike huckabee.) i think he’s pretty reasonable in most areas, though, and perhaps the most important distinction for me is even if i don’t necessarily agree (and, unlike a lot of people, apparently, i think it’s okay to vote for a person who isn’t 100% in line with me on everything) with his position, at least i’m reasonably sure he put some thought into it, personally, rather than just picking up some talking points memorandum and memorizing it. i can trust obama to think issues through, consider consequences, clearly communicate about them, and come to a conclusion that is more acceptable to me than other candidates. honestly, as sad as it makes me, i just don’t trust hillary to do that. and, on a personal note, i vastly prefer his high road approach to dealing with all the incessant attack bullshit; clinton’s campaign has flung so much shit and yet he remains, apart from the odd snark here and there, above the fray — in one-on-one interviews where the reporter tries to feed him lines to make him catty about clinton, which he uniformly dodges, but especially with regard to clinton’s “but she’s a GIIIIRRRRRRRL” and “OMG obama’s a cokehead drug dealer ‘cos he’s BLACK!” out-of-control campaign staff. seriously, hill, i don’t know which is worse, if you are doing this deliberately-and-yet-incompetently, or if you cannot control your people, but either way, i want none of it.

so, on super duper ultra uber fantastico amazing tuesday, i shall be standing in line to cast my vote for barack obama. i don’t think i’ll be alone.