The Nashville Debate: The Impotent Always Lose Out to the Virile:
Last night's debate was not unlike watching a grown man and his elderly friend on a vacation hire a couple of high-priced hookers in Vegas to come over to their suite at the Wynn. The old guy, call him "Sidney," keeps talking about how bad he wants to fuck some young 'tang; the younger guy, who, what the fuck, let's call "Barry," - hey, he's cool with whatever goes down. The women arrive, and, after a few drinks, a couple of dances, a little stripper action, Barry takes one of the whores back to his bedroom and shuts the door. Sidney, sitting there with this hot young piece of ass, keeps telling her what to do, to grab his crank, to go down on him some, but he can't get it up. He's popped Viagra, snorted coke, and the best he can get is a mushy half-mast prick that couldn't penetrate pudding.

He can hear Barry, obviously fucking away, his hooker's cries seeming almost real. And that just pisses Sidney off. He blames the girl, he blames the room, he blames the whiskey, getting angrier and angrier. He keeps trying to bang his pussy-for-hire, but that just makes him seem weaker and weaker. Finally, diminished, flaccid, and tired, Sidney gives up. "I am so very old now," he tells the hooker, who knows when it's time to move to comfort mode, checking her watch and hearing her friend still getting nailed, thinking about heading into the other room for a threesome.

So it was that Barack Obama demonstrated, again and again, that he can't be shaken. It was, after a while, kind of pathetic, as John McCain again and again threw shit at Obama, who was Zen-like in his ability to swat it all away like so many flies. One of the only honest things McCain said the entire evening was "Americans are angry, they're upset, and they're a little fearful." That being so, who do you think they want to tell them it's gonna be okay? The frantic, snapping, gnarled pseudo-dwarf or the soothing-voiced, elegant tall man? McCain was so bizarre and scary that if he had said, "Free beer for all," it would have seemed like a threat.

Obama walked through this debate. Like Biden last week, he knew he only had to hold the ball or whatever useful sports metaphor you wanna insert there. He didn't reveal anything new. He was there to offer, as he has been this whole time, "a steady hand on the tiller," as McCain said we need in America. But also a steady hand that's steering the ship in a different direction. His one blatant punch, accusing McCain of being an irrational hothead in foreign affairs, with "this is the guy who sang, 'Bomb, bomb, bomb Iran,' who called for the annihilation of North Korea. That I don't think is an example of 'speaking softly,'" landed hard, a gut punch from which McCain didn't recover the rest of the evening.

Some damn talking head on CNN or MSNBC (they blur after a while) said that by not bringing up all the Bill Ayers nonsense that Sarah "Witchcraft-Free Since 2005" Palin was pissing out of her mouth all weekend, McCain was in essence distancing himself from his running mate and couldn't be that vicious. Bullshit. The only reason McCain didn't bring up Ayers is because he didn't have an opening. And as much of a dick as McCain is, he at least had sense enough not to repeat Palin's "fuck you" to the questions. But McCain's rage and impotence on display made him seem like a grandpa trying to keep up with his grade school grandson while playing tennis on a Wii.

In the course of repeating talking points, which they both did, which made the debate pretty fucking boring for anyone who has paid attention, you could almost hear America roll its collective eyes every time McCain asserted his maverickiness in voting against his own party or with his repetition of the earmarks canard. It was over. McCain no longer had any charm. He got no laughs for his little digs or self-effacing remarks. And by the time he nearly went all Jack Nicholson on Obama, with his "that one" line (which was about who voted on an energy bill), the election was, for all intents and purposes, done.

At the end of the evening, McCain was a defeated man. He knew it as he got the fuck off the stage as soon as possible and as Obama stayed behind to talk to individuals in the audience. In military terms, that's called "ceding territory" or "retreat" or "surrender."