The election of the first United States president of African descent signals the start of a new day. This is a primarily a political blog with occasional forays into celebrities and other types of feature stories.
Sunday, November 16, 2008
Remembering the 2008 Elections
Best Attempt to Comfort a Conservative's Fears of an Obama Administration
Jon Stewart tries to mollify Bill O'Reilly's fears of an Obama Administration with hot cocoa and a stuffed teddy bear that Bill O'Reilly keeps on calling a "panda bear".
Best Graphics of the Elections
Shepard Fairey designed the now-iconic Obama "Hope" picture.
...which inspired this parody.
When John McCain first selected the much younger Sarah Palin as his running mate, this McCain/Palin parody graphic featuring the late Anna Nicole Smith and her ninety-something second husband J. Howard Marshall began making its rounds throughout the Internet.
A Simpsons-inspired take on the same theme started to circulate.
When Sarah Palin made the following quote in an interview, this graphic also made its rounds through the Internet: "As Putin rears his head and comes into the air space of the United States of America, where do they go? It's Alaska."
Ron Howard did this nostalgia-tnged video urging people to vote. He not only revisited two television series that he became famous for (The Andy Griffith Show and Happy Days) but he also got two of his former co-stars, Andy Griffith and Henry Winkler, to appear as well.
Saturday Night Live hit its stride this election season with frequent skewering of the politicians. Its new creative peak started off during the primary campaign season when the Obama Girl parlayed her Internet fame into an appearance on Saturday Night Live.
Then Amy Poehler as HIllary Clinton appears alongside the real Hillary Clinton.
When Sarah Palin first came on the national scene, many people felt that she resembled Tina Fey, who had recently left the cast of Saturday Night Live. Well, in a genius stroke of casting, Tina Fey was allowed to return to the show playing only one character: Sarah Palin. Thanks to her, the writers, and the election itself (which provided plenty of fodder for satire) the show had its best ratings in years.
Tina Fey's first appearance as Palin came when she appeared alongside Amy Pohler as Hillary Clinton in this hilarious sketch.
The following week Fey and Pohler teamed up again to provide this scathing parody of Sarah Palin's disasterous interview with CBS' Katie Couric. Ironically, Tina Fey basically recited word-by-word Palin's actual words in that interview while doing the occasional over-the-top comic punctuation.
Queen Latifah makes a special guest appearance as moderator Gwen Ifill in this parody of the vice president debate.
President Bush endorses John McCain and Sarah Palin.
The real Sarah Palin meets her doppelganger...
...then makes an appearance on "Weekend Update".
The real John McCain also makes an appearance on the show with Tina Fey portraying his running mate.
Like his running mate before him, John McCain also makes an appearance on "Weekend Update".
The real Sarah Palin makes a return appearance on Saturday Night Live where she talks about what she will do to NBC when she gets sworn in as Vice President.
John McCain also makes a return appearance.
Not to be overlooked, Barack Obama also makes an appearance on the show as he attends the Clintons' Halloween party.
Then there is the scathing parody of MSNBC's Keith Olbermann (played by Ben Affleck) who starts off by trying to portray George W. Bush as a Nazi and ends the sketch by making a special comment against the New York co-op who denied his application on the basis of his cat, Miss Precious Perfect.
The Obama Supporters That Gave the Barack Obama Campaign a Bad Name
In the name of fairness, here is the only two incidents that I can find involving a few Obama supporters that were just as bad as the actions of some of McCain's supporters. First there was a Daily Kos blogger who made this post claiming that Sarah Palin's 17-year-old daughter, Bristol, is really the biological mother of Sarah's infant son, Trig. The original entry has since been deleted but a YouTube video about the rumor still remains.
Most of the evidence supporting this rumor was circumstantial at best and it seemed so unseemly to be gossiping about two minors (a 17-year-old and an infant) who aren't child stars and who didn't choose to be in the public spotlight. It seemed like it was unfair ganging up on two minors because of who their mother is. Things really went crazy when Sarah Palin issued a public statement that not only denied the rumor but added the information that Bristol is pregnant and she plans on having her baby and marrying her baby's 18-year-old father.
The Obama supporters pretty much left Bristol Palin alone after Barack Obama issued a statement saying that he had no intention of making an issue out of Bristol's pregnancy. However, that hasn't stopped gossip websites from trying to learn anything new about Bristol Palin, whose baby is due sometime this winter.
There is one other ugly incident involving an Obama supporter that I could find that comes close to rivaling the excesses of some of John McCain supporters. Wait until Keith Olbermann gets to the #1 Worst Person in the World to see the story of Chad Michael Morrisette, a guy whose Halloween decorations included a Sarah Palin dummy being hung by a noose and a John McCain dummy that looks like he's on fire in the chimney.
The McCain Supporters That Gave John McCain's Campaign a Bad Name
McCain supporters act like a bunch of right-wing war-loving racist rednecks during a rally in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania on October 8, 2008.
The supporters at a Sarah Palin rally in Richmond, Virginia are simiarly scary.
A supporter yells "Obama bin Ladin" at a rally while Sarah Palin kept on speaking about Barack Obama.
Then there is the supporter who yell out the "N" word while Sarah Palin kept on speaking and said nothing about it.
Supporters yell out "Terrorist!" and "Kill Him!" when John McCain speaks about Barack Obama
The frequent emphasis of the campaign that there is a "real" America located in the rural areas of the so-called Red States that are majority white has led to some supporters to spread this idea that there is only one "real" America and make their own YouTube videos like this one.
Rev. Arnold Conrad, a pastor at a McCain rally, prays that God must ensure a McCain win because other people are praying to their God and if McCain loses then God's reputation will be ruined and someone else's God will prevail.
On top of all that is Ashley Todd, a John McCain campaign volunteer who claimed that a big black male Barack Obama supporter attacked her at an ATM machine in an attempted robbery and branded a letter "B" on her face when her attacker saw a John McCain bumpersticker on her car. The big problems with her story are that the letter "B" was written backwards (which suggested that Todd wrote the "B" herself while facing a mirror) and the camera at the ATM machine where she said she was attacked didn't show any images of her taken on the night that she said she was attacked. Ashley Todd finally admitted that she made the whole story up and she also said that she has a history of mental problems.
But the McCain supporter who really takes the grand prize of "The Worst Supporter Who Gave the McCain Campaign a Bad Name" is Shirley Nagel, who, on Halloween night, refused to hand out candy to any trick or treaters whose parents supported Barack Obama. That's right, she took out her disdain of Obama on innocent children, some of whom were way too young to understand anything about the presidential election or even current events.
Larry Flynt, the publisher of Hustler magazine, came out with a porn movie titled Nalin' Palin starring a woman who looked a lot like Sarah Palin.
Worst Publicity Stunt
John McCain announced that he was temporarily suspending his campaign to help deal with the financial crisis and called on Barack Obama to do the same. This publicity stunt proved embarrasing when McCain canceled his appearance on David Letterman's show at the last minute on the grounds that he had to fly back to DC to vote when, instead, he actually appeared on The CBS Evening News, which is shot in the same building as Letterman's show. Letterman had his revenge when he turned his cameras to the feed from The CBS Evening News that showed John McCain being prepared for his interview with Katie Couric at the same time that Letterman's show was being taped.
John McCain sings The Beach Boys' "Barbara Ann" using the lyrics "Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran".
John McCain couldn't remember how many houses he owns.
During the last presidential debate, John McCain kept on bringing up Joe the Plumber, a man who encountered Barack Obama during one of his campaign stops expressing his concern that Barack Obama's plan for taxing people making over $250,000 a year would hinder his efforts to purchase the company where he currently worked as a plumber.
McCain's frequent references made Joe Wurzelbacher into an instant celebrity until the media did some digging and found that Wurzelbacher didn't have a plumbing license, was nowhere near purchasing any plumbing business, may not have paid some of his taxes, and he may have even spent some time on welfare in the past despite the fact that he said that he didn't like the government providing money to people without working for it.
Barack Obama was pretty sharp in responding quickly to the negative campaign ads directed against him compared with John Kerry doing very little to respond to the attack ads against him that were put out by the so-called "Swift Boat Veterans for the Truth" in 2004. But a certain celebrity who is usually depicted in the media as an airhead is the one who had the best response to one of John McCain's negative campaign ads. Here is the infamous negative campaign ad, which spliced in images of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton to imply that Barack Obama is just another vacuous celebrity.
That ad inflamed Paris Hilton's parents, Kathy and Rick, because, ironically, they made a donation to the McCain campaign a few weeks before the ad was made. But it was Paris Hilton who got the last laugh, as shown in this video.
The Right Wing Bashing of Sarah Palin Has Just Begun
Fox News' Carl Cameron went on the air with Shepard Smith to reveal all of those less-than-endearing "off the record" stuff about Sarah Palin that he said he got from members of John McCain's campaign staff. Among the juicy stuff:
1. She didn't know what countries were part of the NAFTA agreement.
2. She thought that Africa was a country, not a continent consisting of many different countries.
3. She was frequently expressed her anger to the staff, especially about her disasterous interview with Katie Couric. Yet she didn't accept any preparations for that interview.
Okay, Sarah Palin wasn't the brightest political candidate who has ever ran for higher office. While you could fault Sarah Palin for her lack of knowledge of foreign policy or even foreign countries, John McCain must have the lion's share in this debacle since he was the one who selected her at the expense of other more-experienced Republicans. John McCain was the one who selected this person who wasn't well known outside of Alaska based on only one previous short interview mainly because he wanted to court the base of Christian conservatives who were never comfortable with him. Had he focused his efforts on independents and conservative Democrats by picking a more moderate Republican, he probably would've done better in the elections than he did. Had he upheld his "maverick" reputation by making an unconventional choice of Senator Joe Lieberman as his running mate, he definitely would've given Obama a run for his money.
Look, it's pretty stupid to place the blame on Sarah Palin when it was John McCain who selected her as his running mate.
Two days ago I took part in a historic election. I've finally recuperated from the hoopla to write about this.
The next day I was tired and suffering from a major headache because I was still reeling from the drinking the night before, which I wrote about in the last entry.
My husband and I got to the polls in the morning. There was somewhat of a line but it wasn't nearly as bad as the other polling places that I've heard about (where there were waits as long as 8 hours). We were in and out in about a half an hour.
We both selected Barack Obama. Even though he had been ahead in the polls, we were both worried about a possible last-minute upset.
That afternoon I had a doctor's appointment (just a physical examination in preparation for surgery that I'm having later this month). I was kind of drained afterwards so I went to Border's to browse through some books. Afterwards I walked over to a nearby Starbucks because the entire coffee chain was giving away a free cup of coffee to anyone sporting the "I Voted" sticker that people got after they finished voting. The free coffee was nothing fancy--it was just an eight-ounce cup of black coffee--but it was free. I did add some cream, sugar, and spices in order to make it palatable.
That very night my husband and I went to an election watching party that was held at the home of one of my husband's co-workers. The people there were nice but my stomach became jumpy again. I think my body was still reeling from the hard drinking and eating greasy food the night before so I wasn't in a total party state of mind. I managed to drink only one glass of white wine before my body decided that it had enough drinking. I ate some food as well. It was better food than what I had at The Quarter House in Silver Spring the night before but my stomach was reeling from the eating after a while so I stopped eating as well.
After a while my husband and I headed home where we watched television and learned about the shocking news that America had elected its first African-American president. I had such a hard time thinking that this was a reality that I stayed up late into the wee hours for the second night in a row. I saw footage of a gathering in Chicago where I saw the Rev. Jesse Jackson's face in the crowd and his eyes were brimming with tears. I also saw Oprah Winfrey in the crowd as well.
In the meantime the news coverage cut over to Phoenix where I saw John McCain give his concession speech. In a way, his speech was a pretty class act and it was too bad he didn't make more such classy speeches during his campaign. It wasn't until past midnight when the news coverage went back to Chicago where Barack Obama, his wife Michelle and their two daughters emerged on the stage and he gave an amazing victory speech.
I didn't go to bed until 1 a.m. that night. When I woke up the next morning, I wasn't sure whether what I saw was a dream or a reality until I saw The Washington Post. Yes, we really did make history. November 4, 2008 will be the most memorable Election Day for me ever.
