~ make no mistake, we have no interest in john mccain. we are mystified by the democrats who go into convulsions of heavy panting with the thought that he will somehow grace them with a kind word. the man is a conservative and a republican. he is not a friend. do democrats think that he will someday reveal himself to be the standard bearer of their party, just because george w. bush tore him to shreds in the 2000 primary? does that mean that we can expect joe lieberman and dick gephardt to jump over to the republicans because john kerry talked shit about them in the democratic primaries? lieberman is a bad example, granted, but the point is that these aren’t real people, like dennis kucinich, who have a sense of honour and dignity; they are machines that will accept anything that they are told will help them advance their careers.
as stated, we are not interested in john mccain, or any of the automatons that are droning at the republican convention. we are interested, however, in language, in both a literal and literary sense. therefore, our interest was piqued when we heard this quote on the radio:
“We are engaged in a hard struggle against a cruel and determined adversary.” -john mccain, republican national convention
this sounds familiar to us, perhaps something that general pershing might say to american soldiers who were about to battle the boche.
“You are going to meet a savage enemy. Meet them like Americans.”-general john pershing, 1918
that is not exactly what we had in mind; we were remembering the phrase ‘tough and determined’, not ‘savage’. a quick search brought us disappointing results.
“We are going into battle against a tough and determined enemy.” -mel gibson, ‘we were soldiers’
has john mccain confused his real service in vietnam with mel gibson’s fake service in a vietnam movie? has the republican strategy for domination become so laced with lies and falsehoods that we are cutting the delineation between reality and fiction? does the arrival of schwarzenegger herald an era of swiping riffs from the most base and visceral of action flicks? if so, we might tune in for the convention after all, if we will hear cheney explaining the failure of the war on terror with a line from ‘road warrior’ or ‘lethal weapon 4’.
outside of this circus, this stealing of lines is the most pathetic display of oratory skills since new york businessmen-cum-politicians stood at the site of the destroyed world trade center and re-delivered speeches, like the gettysburg address, written and given by others, because none of our living ‘leaders’ have the abilities to equal the situation in which we find ourselves.
“game over, man!”
public response: