Obama and McCain on sedatives at first debate

So, the debate was on! How nice of John McCain to take time out from his P.R. photo opps- oh sorry!- I mean single handedly solving the financial crisis, by swooping into Washington to sit at a table with our still current President as he spends his final days in office presiding over the collapse of our economy.

For those of you who don't know, John McCain's "stunt of the week" this week was to dramatically "suspend" his campaign so he could save America by delaying his debate with Obama. He also tried to delay Sarah's debate with Joe Biden, probably after watching Sarah talking to Katie Couric and informing her that the two countries bordering Alaska are "foreign countries" - whew! I'm glad she cleared that up! I always wondered if Russians and Canadians were foreigners, and now, thanks to Sarah, I know that they are!

I thought Obama was far too easy on McCain- he got a few good jabs in, but didn't take the old guy down. Like, in the midst of the current crisis, which bears a resemblance to the savings and loan crisis of the late '80s. McCain should remember this quite vividly, since he was one of the Senators known as the "Keating five" who were investigated for their dealings with Charles Keating, one of the central figures in the crisis. The tax payers ended up bailing out those corrupt bankers, as we will probably be doing with this year's corrupt bankers.

Neither one of them was as animated or strong as I thought they should be since this country is in the middle of this huge crisis. They both seemed pretty chilled out. Obama did say "shredding regulations" and "spending orgy" in his critique, but he didn't dump the corpse of this economy at McCain's feet as he should have. McCain said "I saw this train wreck coming..."

Why the hell didn't Obama say, "Wow John, you saw this train wreck coming and what did you do about it? Did you try to stop it?!"

Also McCain ran from President Bush saying "I opposed Bush's policies on taxes, immigration, torture..." which is complete B.S. because once he decided to run for president he reversed himself on Bush's tax policy, on immigration, on torture and everything else and ran toward Bush. Why did he do that? because it was politically expedient to do that, because all he cares about is winning the presidency and he doesn't care what "principle" he had to compromise to do it. Maybe Obama could have pointed that out. Just sayin'

Anyway, I did learn some things from that crazy old coot McCain:

1. North Koreans are 3 inches shorter than their South Korean neighbors, mainly because that crazy dictator starves them or has an evil "People shrinker" in addition to nukes. Which is bad, because Americans don't want to get shorter, it will ruin the NBA.

2. Israel faces an "existential threat"- does this mean the Israelis are in danger of wearing black turtlenecks drinking coffee, smoke cigarettes and rejecting rationalism and empiricism and having portraits of Jean Paul Sartre everwhere? Israel is under attack by a philosophical school of thought? That and the Iranians! They do need our assistance. Maybe we should send Sarah Palin over there to help- I'm sure she's real good with philosophy 'n' stuff.

3. McCain saw "this trainwreck" meaning the collapse of the U.S. finance system coming, and yet kept saying "The fundamentals of our economy are strong" which means he was lying and he saw a terrible crisis coming and he chose to bury his head in the sand.

I despite the fact that I found the debate to be a huge disappointment, I was heartened by the fact that 40 plus years ago it took Federal agents and a stand-off with Mississippi Governor blocking the door to the University to get James Meredith, a black man just to enroll as a student and now we have a black man running for president. That's pretty cool progress.