Monthly Archives: October 2008

Wealth Groupies

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Like “Joe the Plumber” — who is not a licensed plumber, whose first name isn’t Joe, whose boss’s business makes $100K, not $250K and isn’t for sale, and who couldn’t afford it if it were for sale based on his own income of $40K and his outstanding tax lien — a certain sad proportion of white blue-collar men I know are wealth groupies.

Like Joe, they imagine they’ll make big money some day. They imagine themselves rich some day. And so they doggedly vote as if they were rich already, voting over and over again against their own self-interest, because they don’t want to identify with their own economic class — not in their hearts, and not in the voting booth, either.
– Lisa Small on the popularity of Joe the Plumber

Not the Way We Should be Doing It

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“I’m also troubled by, not what Senator McCain says, but what members of the party say. And it is permitted to be said such things as, ‘Well, you know that Mr. Obama is a Muslim.’ Well, the correct answer is, he is not a Muslim, he’s a Christian. He’s always been a Christian. But the really right answer is, what if he is? Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer’s no, that’s not America. Is there something wrong with some seven-year-old Muslim-American kid believing that he or she could be president? Yet, I have heard senior members of my own party drop the suggestion, ‘He’s a Muslim and he might be associated terrorists.’ This is not the way we should be doing it in America.”
– Colin Powell’s endorsement of Barack Obama (via Emptyage)

All This Stuff has a Price Tag

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“In truth, however, I know there are lots of Americans who, whatever their income, believe that the government should get its grubby hands off their money. To them, I’d simply say that if you drive on a highway, walk on a sidewalk, use the postal service, send your kids to public school (or appreciate the fact that public schools keep your neighbors’ kids off the streets), and generally enjoy the fact that 300 million people are able to live in something other than chaos and squalor, you should accept the fact that all this stuff has a price tag.”
–Vanity Fair (via Heilemannr)

How is the Chicken Cooked?

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To put them in perspective, I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. “Can I interest you in the chicken?” she asks. “Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it?”

To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked.
– David Sedaris,Undecided