Patton Oswalt has a good piece on McCain. He compares McCain to the defeated hacks he’d run into in the comedy club – guys with talent who, for whatever reason, hadn’t made it and had essentially given up, going for cheap laughs and pandering to the least common denominator.
There’s a part in every human you can reach that laughs and thinks and maybe disagrees with you, but stays intrigued with you, in the long run. And that’s how you build a career and a body of work. It takes longer, but every minute is fun. And you never have to swallow anything that tastes sickening.
Then there’s the part of people that goes, “Whoooooo!” at shit they already agree with. That part’s easy to connect with, and you feel sticky and tired afterwards when you cash your check. You’re entertaining people whose company you would never entertain. Or, in the words of Peter Schaffer, you’re “…distinguished by people who don’t know how to distinguish.”
McCain knows the answers to the Ayers question, and the Rezko question, and the Reverend Wright question. But he knows there are people out there – the “under-informed voter” in the words of a McCain campaign advisor – who don’t. And these people couldn’t understand the complexities of the answers if those answers were laid out before them in block letters.
He says that these defeated comics were generally very nice people but they got angry when they saw new comics starting out by going for the cheap laughs. “For the love of God, at least they came to their mediocrity through long years of struggle capped off by deep, cosmic defeat. But to start out that way? That was an insult to the harsh journey they’d survived.” So, Oswalt wonders, what sort of anger must McCain feel when he has to deal with Palin who must seem like one of those young, happy hacks.
McCain mentioned again today in a speech in Albuquerque that Obama would raise taxes on any one earning $42,000 or more. McCain has been called to task on this before,last time by Obama in the last debate,yet he keeps repeating it for lack of something else to say. MCain doesn’t care if it’s true or not,but maybe there will be someone out there who hasn’t heard it who will be influenced. McCain is like the dried-up comedian with no new material who’s hoping someone in the last row will laugh at his tired joke..
That was a great commentary above by Patton Oswalt,and puts into focus McCain’s fall into banality.McCain has no message and no focus, except ‘Obama is bad’.
So John McCain is Dane Cook?