Election Day

Voting is sexy. Unless you’re voting for John McCain.

Of interest to my classmates

I thought some of my classmates would be interested in these for our Writing for the Web class.

First, when it comes to finding exactly where the lines of reality blur in the election campaign, there’s FactCheck.org. This is an unaffiliated website, part of the Annenberg Foundation, that fact-checks just about everything involving the political landscape, from campaign ads to the latest rumours about McCain or Obama in your inbox. From their website:

“There’s slime in your inbox, attack ads on TV and falsehoods on the radio. Welcome to election season.”

Want to know if Obama really voted for killing unborn babies, or if McCain supported loan guarantees for the auto industry? Check it out.

 

Second is Rocketboom. I know this one’s been around a while, but in case you haven’t heard of it, it’s one of the most popular and successful vlogs (video blogs) on the net. It blends news with absurdity, opinion, and fluff, and sometimes the stretches they make to be clever and trendy test my patience, but with an anchor that looks like that I’ll forgive some lolcats references.

The really sad thing…

… is how well McCain is doing in the polls lately, and that it’s actually bolstered by Palin. Arianna Huffington nails it with this one:

“As predicted, the fact that she didn’t know anything wasn’t a bug, it was a feature. She’s perfect for the neocons: likeable on the outside, a blank slate on the inside. To borrow from an old cliché, if Sarah Palin didn’t exist, the neocons would have had to invent her.

In fact, this is how one former White House aide describes her: “She’s bright and she’s a blank page. She’s going places and it’s worth going there with her.”"

Who’s the fish supposed to be?

If the McCain campaign wants to insist that Sarah Palin is in fact a pig, I say let them:

“For me, this surreal moment – like the entire surrealism of the past ten days – is not really about Sarah Palin or Barack Obama or pigs or fish or lipstick. It’s about John McCain. The one thing I always thought I knew about him is that he is a decent and honest person. When he knows, as every sane person must, that Obama did not in any conceivable sense mean that Sarah Palin is a pig, what did he do? Did he come out and say so and end this charade? Or did he acquiesce in and thereby enable the mindless Rovianism that is now the core feature of his campaign?”