I suppose when your candidate has poor debate skills, bad policy ideas, and no experience and bad judgment (Biden? Puh-lease), you gotta attack the <i.other</i> rich guy with what you got. Yeah, John McCain married a rich woman. Obama’s a rich guy too. Just not as rich. Seems you didn’t like that attack when your candidate, the richest Senator, was the kept man. There was lots of hysteria over it, if I remember correctly. I’m sure discussing this is going to distract people from Obama’s lack of a real resume. So, yeah. Go for it.

“Joe then guffawed at the time they got bad service at the local Italian restaurant, then his mom bought the place, fired the staff and turned it into a candle shop.  You might know it, it’s called “Yankee Candle”?  Just a small store.  A side business.  A side to a side business, really.”

Pulling shit out of your ass, posting it and hiding behind it as snark is not a service.  Its not funny, its not constructive and in this particular case, its just plain bullshit.  Preaching to the choir whilst flinging poo is not my idea of a good liberal blogger.

If I want plain bullshit I’ll tune into some variation of Fox News.

Maybe it’s just 7:30 AM, but the Yankee Candle bit actually confused me for a few minutes. I eventually decided I had to go see the article for myself. =P

Oh, the ripe smell of troll in the morning!

I have to say, I also was confused by the Yankee Candle but (and annoyed when it turned out not to be true). And I love this site! So, yeah, maybe less with the spuriousness…

Seems you didn’t like that attack when your candidate, the richest Senator, was the kept man.

Payback’s a bitch, isn’t it, Sharon?

Most people learned on the playground that if they can’t take it, they shouldn’t dish it out, but Republicans always go running to the teacher crying, “I called him a doofushead so he called me a doofushead and that’s not FFFAAAAIIIIIRRRR!!!!!!”

Maybe Mommy will dry your tears and give you a cookie and explain to you why attacking someone for, say, being a rich gigolo sets you up to be attacked if your guy does the exact same thing.

And Sharon - Republicans have been trying to play this sort of class resentment since at least Dukakis.  If these are the standards upon which you’ve elected two generations of Bushes, then you’ve got to live by them. 

Indeed, “Obama’s an elitist! Obama’s an elitist!” has been the sole focus of the McCain campaign recently. It’s hysterical that as soon as that gets successfully turned back on McCain, we get a pivot to saying “Big deal - that doesn’t matter.” So what? It mattered a week ago and now that the truth is out there, it doesn’t matter?

Obama’s lack of a real resume

And other than taking bribes, missing votes, and changing positions so quickly and so often he has to have a permanent turnstyle attendant with him at all time, what’s on McCain’s resume? Oh right. POW! POW! POW! POW! POW!

Maybe just too believable?

Pretty much.

“Preaching to the choir whilst flinging poo is not my idea of a good liberal blogger.”

Sounds like a great blogger to me.  If I wanted super-serious policy analyasis devoid of snark I would not go looking for it here (at least not in every single post).  There is plenty of that out there on the other internets.  Jesse is awesome because he is smart and at the same time funny. 

If you don’t like his style then there’s the (figurative) door.

When you’re the son of an admiral, you’re not growing up middle class. The upper echelons of the military are less pampered today, but in the pre-vietnam era commanding officers had drivers, orderlies, stewards, pretty much the whole uniformed office and household staff. And kids taking a trolley may sound egalitarian, but even that ain’t particularly. It’s like the kid of some bigwig today roughing it by calling a cab instead of having dad’s chauffeur drive them.

Seems you didn’t like that attack when your candidate, the richest Senator, was the kept man. There was lots of hysteria over it, if I remember correctly.

Sharon, it is entirely possible that there is a segment of voters who respond well to these attacks and like seeing the rich wife mocked and the candidate ridiculed for being fabulously wealthy. Obviously, the republicans found voters who responded. Well, they deserve to be represented, and if Obama decides to ask for their votes by ridiculing McCain’s out-of-touchness on the issue, who am I to argue?

Sharon, why do you hate the those American voters… the ones who, four years ago, were on your side? Are you going to stab them in the back now?

Look, McCain doesn’t kow how many houses “he” has because Cindy doesn’t tell him.  That information is on a “need to know” basis, and he doesn’t need to know. 

He is a boy toy, a trinket she bought with daddy’s money, and he will always remain a trinket and a tool. 

It is the new Madonna female liberation. 

Women buy their trophy husbands now and pay their way to the Presidency (but only if he acts nice and says “Please!”) , like that women who bought boy toy John Kerry in the last round.

So go ask Cindy.  It’s her President.  She bought him fair and square.

to paint a patently false picture of his childhood

And even if it were true, most of the reason it plays as “middle class” is because it’s one big anachronism. 

Seriously, the best they could come up with was “I took public transportation back in the 40’s?”

I could trot out what my grandmother’s life was like (she’s about McCain’s age, but definitely did NOT have an Admiral for a father), in comparison, but you know it’s Saturday morning and I really don’t feel like it. 

OK, a few sentences: My grandmother only had one pair of shoes per year, and if she grew out of them in summer, tough shit.  My grandmother’s family got their first car circa 1950.  My grandmother spent her childhood (the Depression) in and out of Salvation Army children’s homes, because her parents had too many mouths to feed, crops were bad, times were hard, etc.  And her family was not close to either end of the economic spectrum.  They were probably better off than a lot of people—they owned their own farm, the kids were allowed to finish out high school.

“we were on allowances like everybody else. We lived in rental housing. We never owned a home. We were taking school busses. We were taking the old streetcars (with) tokens. So that’s the life that we grew up in.”

Good answer, good answer!

“My father had no idea about the family business, what oil leases he owned in Oklahoma.”

Joe McCain, who makes his home in Washington’s Northern Virginia suburbs, chuckled when recalling that “one time, she bought a house to remodel” in Southeast Washington

Fail, fail, fail!!

I was pretty much raised upper middle class. Sure, I could focus more on when I was young and my parents were just starting out in life to push my more middle class origins, but the truth is my parents were well-to-do and I’m on my way to being the same. But even I have no idea how one gets “oil leases” that one derives income from, and my parents would never have “bought a house to remodel” just randomly without consulting the other. Seriously, that’s a completely different class experience than what most people have.

“My father had no idea about the family business, what oil leases he owned in Oklahoma.”

Joe McCain, who makes his home in Washington’s Northern Virginia suburbs, chuckled when recalling that “one time, she bought a house to remodel” in Southeast Washington

Because surely, when I think of the phrase “middle class,” the very first things that come to mind are oil leases in Oklahoma and flipping houses on a whim.

Really, who doesn’t own oil leases in Oklahoma and flips houses on a whim?

Anybody ever see that Family Guy segment where there is an old woman as one of the cast on 90210?  They are talking about how an upcoming test is expected to be hard and this crazy old woman pipes in by saying “Barbara Stanwyck and I used to take the TROLLEY!”

John McCain is that old woman.

Lets hope they take McSame to the grocery store sometime - let him scan some grocs himself even?

John McCain is that old woman.

McCain 08: Remembers when this was orange groves as far as the eye could see.

Richard Ben Cramer should advise your campaign.  Abigail Johnson should remove her Chafee Irae.

“...and we wore an onion on our belt, which was the style at the time.” —Joe McCain

I suppose when your candidate has poor debate skills, bad policy ideas, and no experience and bad judgment (Biden? Puh-lease),

Do you think you’re talking about Obama? Seriously? The guy with a decade of experience in elected office? The guy whose VP pick is being nearly universally praised by everybody not on the GOP payroll? The guy who even Republicans have to admit has stellar speaking skills?

The guy in this race who isn’‘t out to lower his own taxes? That guy?

He is a boy toy, a trinket she bought with daddy’s money, and he will always remain a trinket and a tool.

It is the new Madonna female liberation.

Women buy their trophy husbands now and pay their way to the Presidency (but only if he acts nice and says “Please!”) , like that women who bought boy toy John Kerry in the last round.

Blaming well-off or liberated women for men’s shortcomings ain’t so “new”, Bill.

Big Time Woman
(Wilton Crawley, 1930)

Who’s that woman with the sparklin’ dress,
A diamond brocade on her chest?
She’s a big time woman
From way out west!

Automobiles, a cozy home,
But you always see her all alone.
She’s a big time woman
From way out west!

    Oh, the way she treats those New York men,
    I know it’s a sin.
    She keeps them askin’ the same darn thing,
    All over again!

Every fella has a winnin’ smile,
But she treats them all just like a child.
She’s a big time woman
From way out west!

It’s that damn sufferage, now they have their own homes and automobiles, and can call their own shots.

McCain may be a “kept man”, and that may be a narrative that works against his base, but Cindy’s wealth isn’t the point—McCain’s stubborn, carefree and clueless inability to understand the American people is what is being discovered here.

And I keep misspelling “suffrage” because we shouldn’t have to be fighting for it all over again.

Jesse:  You forgot to load the Yankee Candle reference with unicorns or some other giveaway.

If you’re ever in Deerfield and wonder what that awful smell is, it’s Ristorante McCain.

I don’t get the candle thing. Flat joke?

I have a question for the McCain supporters who show up here.

If he’s so out of touch with his household budget, <i>why should he be trusted with the nation’s treasury<i>?

STREETCARS?? Oh my god, was John McCain’s first job as a Newsie? Or did he shine shoes for a nickel, which he would bite to make sure it wasn’t counterfeit?

Streetcars is hilarious.