There have been various rumors that John McCain is such a maverick that he deliberately is running a bad campaign to make sure Barack Obama wins.  Kind of loony conspiracy chatter, but nonetheless amusing.

But after reading some other stuff online, about how McCain wanted Joe Lieberman as his VP candidate and the Republican National Committee wouldn’t go for it, he perhaps picked Sarah Palin because he knew the RNC would accept her, but the majority of American people wouldn’t, kind of in a “if I can’t run my own campaign to win how I want to, I’ll make sure to take you down with me” plan.

Or maybe I’m just beginning to join the tinfoil crowd too…

To me, this was the best speech of the last month of many, many speeches. It makes one doubly sad that he for some reason saw fit to jettison any admirable quality he had, including his ability to speak like this, in 2004. I wish more candidates would campaign as if they had nothing left to lose.

Apparently the two angles to promote Palin for VP are 1) executive experience, the details of which we’ll leave to people not to investigate, and 2) creative reinterpretation of criticism of her into strictly gender terms, by which we may elicit the “grrl power” response from viewing women and cause them to resent Barack Obama as the disempowering ex-boyfriend from their favorite Lifetime original movie.
I don’t mean to mock all American women here, only the ones who’d respond a pander like this – one that’s only slightly less subtle than the “white hands” ad, if it featured black hands rather than white ones, and they were beating a white woman rather than tearing up a job rejection letter.

By the way, has anyone asked if her daughter received a proper education on the use of contraception, as opposed to simply abstinence?

Today I checked the news to see whether Hillary or Peach had won Pennsylvania and saw that Hillary pulled off a 10% victory margin. What this means, of course, is more time for the Republicans to sit back and watch the Democrats tear each other apart, spending the money they could instead use to attack John McCain, and will focus their time and energy on finding every little chink in the armor of the other. Who wins? Not the Democrats.

Barring some miracle turnaround though, I don’t see Hillary overcoming Peach’s 133 delegate lead (according to CNN) before the convention. Of course, the decision to pull out of the race should be hers and hers alone. Still, the increasingly divisive tactics she’s displayed have left me with the impression that she’s determined to win at all costs, which isn’t a good thing.

The funny thing is how I don’t know anyone among my friends on the Left who actually support her. This might have something to do with what Mark mentioned, that expat Americans favor Obama in far greater numbers than they do Clinton. The only friends I have who support Hillary are actually Republicans, who are banking on the fact that enough people in the country will be unable to bring themselves to vote for her, thereby abstaining or voting for McCain. Sure, it’s unscientific, but polling isn’t an exact science either.

As someone who is both Hungarian and American, I’m frequently asked by people over here in Europe as to who I support in the US presidential race. Why it’s called a race, and not a slow limp with one leg in a cast and two crutches under the arms as people throw buckets of money at the participants in a fashion that makes ticker-tape parades seem anti-littering in comparison, I don’t know. Nonetheless, when pressed with this question, I always answer that I support Peach. Some people get what I’m saying, but most give me the same blank look as war supporters when pressed with the question of what actually has been gained by invading Iraq.

By Peach, and please note, I capitalize the P, I mean none other than Barack. My Hungarian friends are probably already thinking how lame of a joke this is, and I’m not about to disagree with them. Still, the word “barack” is the Hungarian word for peach, and that’s reason enough I figure. Right?

Well, actually, it’s not. Honestly, I think Barack represents the greatest amount of change out of the three remaining contenders, and given the past 7+ years, the greater the change, the better. If elected, hopefully he’ll do much better than Sárközy Sarkozy. I still find it funny that I can pronounce the French president’s last name more correctly than the nation that elected him.

Although, for the record, I must admit, I prefer nectarines over peaches.

It’s rather telling when people consider Russian a “race” with its own personality traits and physiological characteristics. You know, kind of the way the world looks when viewed through the character select screen of Street Fighter 2. I think most Americans are conditioned to repress these thoughts, even if they occur – though I confess I still somewhat associate Brazil with fanged savages and static electricity. This process of repression is often derided with the term “political correctness”, but I think we’d find it rather hard to live in a society with such a number of different brands of people, and even more stereotypes about those people, without the knee-jerk negative reaction to stereotyping and generalizing that prevents us from offending those around us nonstop. Now, Americans do get offended a lot still, but imagine the chaos if we all actually said it out loud every time we thought “wow, a black guy on campus” or “those asians probably ate rice for dinner last night”.

If you visit a society without such a diversity coping mechanism, it can be astounding to hear what people will say about other groups they safely assume are out of earshot.