The Third Presidential Debate: Barack Obama Is Not Campaigning to Be Your Friend:
Oh, John McCain, you brought all your sport equipment last night. You brought your baseball and your football. You put on your boxing gloves and your cup. You stretched, warmed up, and took the field, got into the ring, ran onto the court. You stood there with your bat, you took the ball out, you got ready for the kick off, you were waiting for the puck to be dropped. All uniformed up. Unfortunately, Barack Obama didn't show up at Hofstra to play any of your games. In fact, Obama said, more or less, that you should go shove your cleats up your ass and let the grown-ups deal with grown-up problems.

Last night's debate was something of a critical wounding of the Atwater/Rove school of political evisceration. Simply put, Obama's attitude to all the lawn darts McCain brought - the Ayers nonsense, the ACORN stupidity, the Obama-kills-babies lie, the "present" vote bullshit, and more - was to react and behave like it was all nonsensical, stupid, lying bullshit. He answered every accusation directly, but with a near-mournful attitude, as if to say, "Really, John? This is really what you want to talk about?" What Barack Obama did last night was to school John McCain in the rhetoric of crisis and McCain could only sputter and rage as he kept trying to get Obama to play with him. He may as well have been pleading, "C'mooon."

Obama's approach to the whole campaign has been incredibly straightforward: He is not running to be your buddy, Americans. He is running to be your president. He's not gonna say he likes your fuckin' pork rinds just to make you like him. (The times he veered briefly into that kind of pandering were just embarrassing, and he's avoided them since the primaries.) And he's not gonna stand for the kind of fucktardery that's taken down Democrats the last two elections, as well as during the Reagan/Bush years. Yeah, he addressed each thing that McCain mentioned, but he cut McCain's nuts off and held them up for McCain to see when he turned it back on the Republican: "I think the fact that this has become such an important part of your campaign, Senator McCain, says more about your campaign than it says about me."

At that moment, Barack Obama pretty much dragged Karl Rove out onto the stage, pulled down that fat fuck's pants, pointed at his tiny dick, and laughed. As for McCain, it was more or less the end of the election. He may as well have said, "Fuck it. My bitch is rich, so, honey, start the jet and let's go to Cabo."

McCain had one line he had practiced real good, and he waited for his chance to use it like a trapdoor spider hidden in the dirt hopes prey passes by. When the Arizona senator said his "Senator Obama, I am not President Bush" line, he looked like the kid at the spelling bee who knows he spelled his word correctly. But it didn't leave a mark on Obama. Time and again, when McCain tried to flailingly stab at Obama, the Democrat just calmly moved an inch or two one way or the other, leaving McCain stumbling, trying to get his footing back. That smile Obama kept on his face? It was the knowledge that McCain had charged at Obama and ended up falling off a cliff. The Rude Pundit's favorite grin was when Obama realized that all McCain had was Joe the fuckin' Plumber.

Look at just one thing here. When the whole issue of trade with Colombia came up (something that most people don't give a shit about), McCain, ever the motherfucker, lectured, "But maybe you ought to travel down there and visit them and maybe you could understand it a lot better." Without even pausing, Obama launched into a defense of workers' rights in that country, which hewed to his theme of giving power back to the disempowered. What the fuck was McCain gonna say to the fact that union organizers are being killed in Colombia? Oh, yeah, he tried to bring up Hugo Chavez, but, as ever, Obama smiled that smile of the leopard that knows he's faster than the old gazelle he's taking down.

And when McCain said that "women's health" is an extremist position in abortion policy, a fuckin' army of Sarah Palins wasn't gonna save him.

Don't believe anyone who says McCain won or that it was even close. He was an angry leprechaun screaming at the man who stole his pot of gold. And, at the end of the day, John McCain seemed less like a major party candidate and more like a pissed-off Dad telling his college-aged daughter who she can and can't date, and, for no rational reason he can explain, he certainly doesn't want her fucking around with the black guy. Unfortunately for him, she's all grown up now and can make her own decisions.