So it's come to this. There is so inhumanly little to write about now the football's ended and everyone's stopped killing each other and gone out in the sunshine, that I'm being forced to pass comment on the US Presidential election hopefuls, even if I don't have anything more than a half-arsed opinion and half an hour to kill before I can respectably start drinking in earnest.
I've tried to hold off passing comment on this issue because I was desperately trying to be the one and only blog on the entire fucking internet that hasn't, and because I think you have to be a very special kind of sad to dedicate your life to analysing something you cannot possibly influence with your reader base of 15. But anyway, here's my opinion - Hillary Clinton is a lunatic and I'm glad she's losing the democratic nomination to Obama, even though Obama is a touchy-feely idiot who thinks kisses and cuddles will make Iran play nice. John McCain sewed up the Republican nomination a lifetime ago, and the Old Timeless One is probably going to win unless he keels over and dies from a heart attack between now and November, but at 71 we'd better hope he doesn't pick anyone too mental as his Vice President.
I can't get past the sheer scale of hypocritical bullshit being spouted by Hillary Clinton, though. Most of it is bordering on the hilarious, and seeing people lapping it up wherever she goes really does make you wonder about the average American understanding of politics, or even short-term history - Hillary Clinton, born into a well-off Illinois family, attended a wealthy college and studied Law at Yale before heading straight into a career in politics, is about as blue collar and 'of the people' as I am an iguana. You have to wonder, then, where she gets these speeches about it being time for someone who understands the common worker to lead the country from - presumably the same place she got her fairy about landing in Bosnia under sniper fire, i.e. that frighteningly diseased brain of hers.
Barack Obama isn't much better, though - he might not have the bizarre for-the-children banning zeal that Clinton posesses which makes her want to outlaw everything from computer games to pictures of kissing, but he certainly has some very odd ideas about how international politics works, especially when dealing with the illegal and the insane. His Command and Conquer ideas that because the Russians had more nuclear weapons than the Iranians the Russians were more of a threat simply doesn't fly. In a reality where the Russians could never fire because, as nationalistic as their leaders were, they knew it would mean their own obliteration while the Iranians are fanatical and insane enough to try to obliterate one of America's allies and expect the Holy Shield of Islam to protect them, dismissing Iran as less likely to use nuclear weapons than the Russians is quite spectacularly naive.
Alright, so Clinton's assertion that she would 'obliterate' Iran at the first sign of trouble - and let's face it, they're always throwing out 'signs of trouble'', Ahmadinejad alone is a walking PR nightmare with the world's biggest superpower breathing down your neck - is also a bit of a far cry from the sense of quiet menace that the US should be putting out and a bit too close to the current administration's policy of 'exporting freedom' by shooting the place up, but at least she realises the threat they pose, and doesn't think she has to tank-rush the Russians before they develop any Overlord tanks. I've probably got my Command and Conquers mixed up there, but I don't care enough to correct it, so mentally correct it yourselves.
Still, other than the assorted independent crackpots, the Prius-driving Greens and the anarchy-without-inconvenience Libertarians, we're left with only one candidate left to review: John McCain. He's old, he's the Republican nominee and his campaign thus far has been a carbon copy of former Democratic challenger John Kerry's "I'm Not George Bush" campaign, right down to the Vietnam war hero stuff - John Kerry might have received the same amount of US medals as McCain, but didn't spend six years having his bollocks hooked up to a car battery to get them, so McCain probably just about edges him for the Captain America vote.
I'm not that au fait (poncy for 'familiar') with McCain's policies, but I know that a large swathe of the Republican electorate don't like him because he's not a Christian fundamentalist, which could be a good or a bad thing - he might not be as willing to fight back against Iranian aggression, but is equally less likely to come out with PR gaffes like George W. Bush's claim that the Lord speaks to him personally every night and told him, personally, to invade Iraq. Frankly I think the all-powerful creator of Earth and the universe has more important things to do than kicking off wars for the hell of it, but you never know.
Either way, it doesn't look like we're going to get anyone perfect - Hillary will protect America's interests but will outlaw everything interesting, Obama thinks he can solve any problem with a parachute drop on the enemy's ore refinery, and McCain has to appease the baying crowd of the Christian right or might even die and leave us with some unelected anus who wasn't even trusted to run for a proper term, and we've had quite enough of that with Gordon Brown after Blair fucked off to start his I Did It All For Jesus tour.
Fuck it, I reckon McCain will win. It's probably the least of the three evils, too.
Goodnight.
I've tried to hold off passing comment on this issue because I was desperately trying to be the one and only blog on the entire fucking internet that hasn't, and because I think you have to be a very special kind of sad to dedicate your life to analysing something you cannot possibly influence with your reader base of 15. But anyway, here's my opinion - Hillary Clinton is a lunatic and I'm glad she's losing the democratic nomination to Obama, even though Obama is a touchy-feely idiot who thinks kisses and cuddles will make Iran play nice. John McCain sewed up the Republican nomination a lifetime ago, and the Old Timeless One is probably going to win unless he keels over and dies from a heart attack between now and November, but at 71 we'd better hope he doesn't pick anyone too mental as his Vice President.
I can't get past the sheer scale of hypocritical bullshit being spouted by Hillary Clinton, though. Most of it is bordering on the hilarious, and seeing people lapping it up wherever she goes really does make you wonder about the average American understanding of politics, or even short-term history - Hillary Clinton, born into a well-off Illinois family, attended a wealthy college and studied Law at Yale before heading straight into a career in politics, is about as blue collar and 'of the people' as I am an iguana. You have to wonder, then, where she gets these speeches about it being time for someone who understands the common worker to lead the country from - presumably the same place she got her fairy about landing in Bosnia under sniper fire, i.e. that frighteningly diseased brain of hers.
Barack Obama isn't much better, though - he might not have the bizarre for-the-children banning zeal that Clinton posesses which makes her want to outlaw everything from computer games to pictures of kissing, but he certainly has some very odd ideas about how international politics works, especially when dealing with the illegal and the insane. His Command and Conquer ideas that because the Russians had more nuclear weapons than the Iranians the Russians were more of a threat simply doesn't fly. In a reality where the Russians could never fire because, as nationalistic as their leaders were, they knew it would mean their own obliteration while the Iranians are fanatical and insane enough to try to obliterate one of America's allies and expect the Holy Shield of Islam to protect them, dismissing Iran as less likely to use nuclear weapons than the Russians is quite spectacularly naive.
Alright, so Clinton's assertion that she would 'obliterate' Iran at the first sign of trouble - and let's face it, they're always throwing out 'signs of trouble'', Ahmadinejad alone is a walking PR nightmare with the world's biggest superpower breathing down your neck - is also a bit of a far cry from the sense of quiet menace that the US should be putting out and a bit too close to the current administration's policy of 'exporting freedom' by shooting the place up, but at least she realises the threat they pose, and doesn't think she has to tank-rush the Russians before they develop any Overlord tanks. I've probably got my Command and Conquers mixed up there, but I don't care enough to correct it, so mentally correct it yourselves.
Still, other than the assorted independent crackpots, the Prius-driving Greens and the anarchy-without-inconvenience Libertarians, we're left with only one candidate left to review: John McCain. He's old, he's the Republican nominee and his campaign thus far has been a carbon copy of former Democratic challenger John Kerry's "I'm Not George Bush" campaign, right down to the Vietnam war hero stuff - John Kerry might have received the same amount of US medals as McCain, but didn't spend six years having his bollocks hooked up to a car battery to get them, so McCain probably just about edges him for the Captain America vote.
I'm not that au fait (poncy for 'familiar') with McCain's policies, but I know that a large swathe of the Republican electorate don't like him because he's not a Christian fundamentalist, which could be a good or a bad thing - he might not be as willing to fight back against Iranian aggression, but is equally less likely to come out with PR gaffes like George W. Bush's claim that the Lord speaks to him personally every night and told him, personally, to invade Iraq. Frankly I think the all-powerful creator of Earth and the universe has more important things to do than kicking off wars for the hell of it, but you never know.
Either way, it doesn't look like we're going to get anyone perfect - Hillary will protect America's interests but will outlaw everything interesting, Obama thinks he can solve any problem with a parachute drop on the enemy's ore refinery, and McCain has to appease the baying crowd of the Christian right or might even die and leave us with some unelected anus who wasn't even trusted to run for a proper term, and we've had quite enough of that with Gordon Brown after Blair fucked off to start his I Did It All For Jesus tour.
Fuck it, I reckon McCain will win. It's probably the least of the three evils, too.
Goodnight.
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