I've been working the night shift at a studio that converts 2d films to 3d. 4:30pm to 3:30am. What a grind! The resulting insomnia is hard to overcome. I thought I would bring a radio in and listen to last night's debate as I worked rotoscoping elements of stupid film clips into the wee hours. I'm glad I didn't. Those two buffoons are about as relevant and interesting as the contestants in a beauty contest when they answer the question, "What would you do to change the world?" I never would have been able to stay awake and so would have added to America's jobless statistics.

Now all the people that I know who are anti-Obama (I know few real McCain supporters) are really depressed because the polls are showing Obama slightly ahead. This is a case of the headline being different than the text of the story. If you just read the headline you miss the statement, "Leaners are included in the total of the candidate they are leaning towards." That means people who answer, "Well, I guess I might vote for Obama, maybe" are included in the final percentages. The 'internals' of the polls are skewed in favor of the Democrats, generally speaking. The media supports the Democrats so is it any surprise that the polls conducted by that same media are coming up with the desired result? Its like those phony polls that we get in fundraising letters ("Do you support Ted Kennedy's radical socialistic power-grab or would you rather the government not tax 90% of your income?). No group of any persuasion takes a poll and doesn't get the desired result. What's the persuasion of the media again? Unbiased. Scientific. Right.

Excuse me if I just don't see it the way that the pollsters do. I think back to Bill Clinton, a true political heavyweight, a guy who was never caught flat-footed ever by anybody. This great performer, this political star who had a gang of spinners and attackers who came across like in between TV guest shots on cable news shows they sat around in the back room snorting lines of chicken crank and taking the edge off the methedrine rush by passing around a bottle of Wild Turkey. Gremlins like Carville would pop up and filibuster, lie and insinuate at a mile a minute like some babbling speed-freak. The fax machines of the press were jammed by faxes from the Clinton Campaign. They attacked, attacked, attacked while their smarmy candidate felt our pain and our daughters with his great big long fingers. And what did the most politically talented Democrat to emerge since Harry Truman add up to? Numbers in the forty percent range.

Clinton 'debated' Dole in '96...that one I saw, and a truly pathetic spectacle it was! Does anyone look at Obama and say to themselves, "Wow! That dude is as good as Big Bill, our first black president!"? No they don't. Obama gave a good speech or two last February but he's definitely been off his feed since he got the nomination. He can't answer questions off the cuff at all. Every performance he gives shows what a lightweight he is. Obama doesn't know anything; or he realizes that what he does know is so unacceptable that he feigns ignorance. The whole 'Hope and Change' thing has dissolved in a cloud of ambiguity. Obama's only gambit now is to attack George W Bush. He has no agenda, no identifiable program, no philosophy, no direction new or old.

So what's my point? My point is that the "Well, I guess I might vote for Obama, maybe" people are not going to vote for Obama. They never were. These voters are upset with Bush after eight years of total media saturation and are freaked out by the financial crisis so when the phone call from Zogby comes they speculate on whether they might take a flyer and vote for the New Guy. When the day arrives these are 90% McCain voters. This is the Bradley Effect. Blue collar people need an affirmative reason to vote for someone as radical as Obama and his themeless mish-mash of ridiculous attacks against McCain are not a reason to vote for Obama. He's not even 'The New Guy' anymore, Palin is. She's drawing crowds of fifty or sixty thousand in the battleground states; more than Obama. She's the draw in NASCAR land, where the swing voters live.

So November 4th the "Well, I guess I might vote for Obama, maybe" folks are going to walk into the voting booth and actually be forced to make a decision. They won't have any reason to vote for an Al Sharpton-like ACORN 'community organizer'. The numbers that Hillary Clinton got against Obama towards the end of her run, when it was certain that Obama was going to be the nominee, are going to be replicated by McCain in some places that are going to surprise everyone. This is an opportunity for all of us. Because of these polls the Obamanoids are giving 2-1 odds. Time to start placing a few bets. But make sure that you get someone else to hold the money; you're dealing with Democrats here and history has few examples of a more sanctimoniously dishonorable group of people than modern liberals.

OK, I guess McCain won last night. How could he not against that facile empty fraud who was posing across the stage from him? But for me it was a very unsatisfying performance; one that reminded me of everything I disliked about McCain in the first place. Rush Limbaugh warned of this but in my eagerness to see a real scrap I allowed myself to get overly enthusiastic.

The debate reminded me of a salient fact; McCain is NOT a Conservative. Period. He still has a fond spot in his heart for Democrats and doesn't want all-out war. How else do you explain him not bringing up the Democratic Party's intimate involvement in the current mortgage crisis? While Obama was blaming this mess on Bush policies why didn't McCain mention that Obama was the second highest recipient of fan-Fred campaign contributions and that two crooks who stole $100 million dollars were Obama 'economic advisers'? Is he willing to take the blame while Chris Dodd and Barney Frank, the two most culpable players in this entire business, walk away scott-free? Apparently so.

The debate was hosted by long-in-the-tooth Jim Lehrer, who brought all the magic and charisma that makes his nightly news show so phenomenally boring. I guess that was a plus for McCain because in comparison to Lehrer's stringy neck wattles, buggy eyes and palsied tremors Mccain looked hale and healthy. Maybe, in one of these 'debates', they could actually have a conservative host for once, instead of these dessicated, predictable mainstream media liberals.

The format was better than most because it allowed them to really respond to each other; an opportunity that they failed to avail themselves of very often. There were no spirited clashes or witty repartee. They hardly talked to each other directly at all. This was the clash of the briefing books. A bloodless round of recitals of what their advisers figured people wanted to hear. But they were both wrong. People wanted to hear a song about how everything was going to be all right in these increasingly frightening times and they never got to that tune at all.

But McCain won anyway, in spite of all this. Obama CANT say what he actually stands for; dismantling the military, raising taxes and cutting loose huge chunks of government cash to his crooked cronies and fellow 'community organizers'. It doesn't matter, we all know that's what he'll do. His slimy evasions and twists of the truth about his advocacy of defeat in Iraq fooled no one. His complete lack of any ideas about how to deal with Iran or Russia was obvious.

Where McCain DID score big was on energy and its relationship to our national strength in the world. Drill for oil, build nuke power plants; a simple idea that everyone can understand. And guess who it turns out was for these things all along, Barry and the Democrats! If you believe that you should have your driver's license taken away because you're too mentally incompetent to be trusted behind the wheel. That flagrant lie will not hold water. Neither will Obama's promise to not raise taxes. At one point he exclaimed that McCain's proposed tax cuts left out 100 million people. When Democrats talk about a tax cut for the poor, who pay no income taxes under the present system, they mean an increase in the payout from the Earned Income Tax Credit. To them a tax cut is giving a large refund check to people who don't pay taxes. To them an 'investment' is wasteful government spending. After all, the money that they throw in the trash can goes back into the economy when the recipients spend it. They don't have a clue as to how wealth is created and the destructive effect that giving away money has on everyone who gets it.

So McCain won on points. He didn't land any telling blows but if we wanted that we would have nominated Mark Levin instead of this lukewarm centrist. However, winning on points is still a win and all McCain needs to win the election this is to convince the voters that he's not too old to be president. He outdid Obama enough times to show that his age wasn't a factor. He kept Obama constantly off balance and forced him to agree that McCain was right several times. Obama has a tougher task. He has to give people a convincing reason to overlook the ugly associations in his still-vague past and put forward a credible plan of action. He never does. He criticizes Bush and McCain and says how bad things are but he never says anything specific about what he intends to do. He just stood there bobbing and weaving like the slimy left-wing con-artist that he is spouting the usual guff that anyone who has followed this business has become more than accustomed to. It adds up to a great big NOTHING! He is a pathetically inadequate candidate.

Those looking for a knockout blow, or even a good punch-up came away disappointed but I'm of good cheer. The Dems are not having a good time this election cycle. The romp that they expected to vast majorities in both houses and an ineffectual dope of their own party sitting in the Oval Office ready to rubber-stamp whatever congress decides to flop onto his desk is coming unglued. All their compassion twaddle appears to be backfiring as people look at the monstrous government screw-up of the mortgage industry and start having second thoughts about making the same people who caused it more powerful.

It was 1929. The market had crashed. But then, like a miracle, hope was rekindled in the hearts of a terrified nation when President Franklin Roosevelt went on TV and...er, wait a minute! Is this History or just the latest Biden gaffe? He seems to make at least one a day. One of my favorites, and one which ensures that I will always have a warm spot in my heart for Joe, was his statement that the Obama ad that mocked McCain for being unable to use a computer with the hands that were broken and smashed while he was being tortured by the North Vietnamese friends of Bill Ayres and Bernadine Dohrn was 'horrible'. The usual backing and filling occurred to try to redefine the remark as Biden being upset at McCain's vicious attacks.

And the attacks have been extraordinarily vicious. McCain has gone so far that he is actually bringing up votes from Obama's incredibly thin record! During the entire campaign against Kerry the hapless W never stooped low enough to bring up Kerry's record in the Senate but now McCain has gone completely insane and has sunk to the depths where he is harping on things that Obama has actually done! What kind of crazed, unethical Kamikaze behavior is this? Does he think Obama was the Governor Of Alaska or something which requires a higher level of scrutiny?

Now there has been a dramatic shift in the polls. You see, Obama's record is not relevant but POLLS, now thats the hard-hitting factual basis on which we can base our choice. And the polls have shifted in response to the McCain-Palin surge. The pollsters reweighted their sampling demographics and have produced a much tighter race. They've also produced a totally non-scientific poll where they have determined that most Americans are racists. What makes you a racist? Answering 'Yes' to a question asking whether you associate blacks with violence. Maybe the people who answered 'yes' to this question had just listened to some of the speculation that is common amongst the Rev Wright types in the Black Community who are predicting bloody riots if Obama doesn't win.

Meanwhile, back on the campaign trail Biden makes a stop at a coal-mining town and touts his love for the hard-laboring coal miners. Too bad that he was on tape from two days ago advocating 'no coal plants in America' but saying that we needed to introduce clean coal into China! So China gets electricity and we don't. When the lights start to go out, because the alternative energy the libs are so fond of is uber-expensive and basically unworkable, the government will declare a crisis, appropriate a trillion dollars as a 'bailout' and use that as a blind to seize the electricity industry and turn it over to the Federal Government. One by one the crisis are brought on by idiotic government policies and in the name of averting disaster the government steps in and effectively nationalizes another sector of the economy.

We have now reached the tipping point. The Dems demand that the Fannie-Freddie bailout include the effective nationalization of the financial sector or its no deal. The answer should be the President going on TV and in a national speech BLAME THE DEMOCRATS for the disaster and for the inability to pass a bailout bill. Of course, after eight years of ignoring Democrat lies and power-grabs the feeble Bushy is not capable of any such truth-telling. They say that Bush is preparing an address on the financial crisis but I doubt he's going to throw down the gauntlet. He certainly was completely silent when Pig-losi and Co. passed a drilling ban in congress. This was an issue that could have been loudly pushed to the detriment of the Dems' hopes of holding the house. But that would have been so ...partisan. We're not ...partisan.

Meanwhile back on the campaign trail Obama and Biden are stumbling along making gaffe after gaffe and losing steam. The demographics in the polls can only be tweaked so much and there is a debate coming up between the tongue-tied Obama and a mean old man who has sandbagged better men than Barry in a series of debates. Cast your mind back to the debates between the Republicans, which were pretty sharp and issue-driven and those of the Democrats which were only bidding matches about how much money they were going to hand to various interest groups. HRC was hardly likely to accuse Barry of being a corrupt leftist tied to wacko radicals, just as he was not going to bring up her Chinese contributors. I think we can count on that snarky ol' critter McCain to abandon the Marquis Of Queensbury rules and lure the lightweight amateur Obama onto the ropes.

I cant wait for Biden's post-debate commentary.

So Thrilly as Hilly returns to Philly! Yes, the City Of Brotherly Love, where Traitor Russert launched the illegal alien driver's license question that began Mizz Hilly's long slide towards irrelevance and unpopularity. Now she's back on stage in a debate that her wildest dreams of a year ago never envisioned; the nerds, the droolers and the chronic losers all sent home in disgrace, stripped down and fighting for her political life against the lean, up-and-coming New Kid. But even her desperate situation couldnt make Hilly adhere to the truth:
"Regardless of the differences there may be between us, and there are differences, they pale in comparison to the differences between us and Sen. [John] McCain,"
No they dont. You're all a pack of Big Government libs and you know it. Any minor differences these socialists might have with McLame would be overcome by his Dem Senate buddies twisting his arm after he's elected. Also, what differences are there between these two Stalinists; the only thing they're arguing about is which one of them institutes the Five Year Plan. Its like Stalin and Trotsky, not a dime's worth of difference between them.
And what fun George and Charlie were having! It was like the two guys at a cockfight that hold the roosters in their hands while they bump the bird's heads together to get them killing mad.
One of the most wonderful things about this endless primary is the media has lost all its inhibitions against going after liberals. After all, with all the candidates on the far left (except maybe McLame who might possibly be on the near left) they're going to have to get used to taking out their pissant bile on whoever's available. So far they've managed to strip the aura of wonderfulness from America's First Black President and stood back and let him be revealed as a petty, grudge-filled, greedy, lying, power-mad kook as he erupts into tirades at hapless college students and voters who ask him an unwelcome question. With his eyes bugging out of his red face framed by that weird stand-up white hair he looks like another Clinton, George Clinton, after his crack arrest. So much for Legacy Boy.
The best howler of the evening was when Gibson asked the debaters whether 'The Dream Ticket' , one of them as VP on the other one's ticket, was a possibility. Total Silence. I hoped that they had patted these two down for weapons before they let them on the stage. Its pretty clear that having the other one around for four years, competing with them for media face-time, is not what either of these two are dreaming of.
So, then the debate degenerated to a discussion of 'the issues'. Who cares. Nothing these dopes ever say during a campaign actually happens so why subject yourself to the insane boredom of listening to whatever permutation of Stalinist economics has focus-grouped the best this week.
They're going to dismantle our military, hand out cash to all and sundry and nationalize whatever industries they can get their grasping hands on. Remember, everything that the socialists have gotten their hands on for the last hundred years has turned into a total disaster. Now they want more input into energy, health care, pharmaceuticals and finance. If they get it we're in for some seriously hard times.
So who won the debate over which one gets to wreck the country? Its hard to tell. Hillary is hoping that the blue collar oafs who vote Democratic in Pennsylvania decade after decade as their jobs flee the anti-business, high-tax environment which results from that, will be racist enough to be scared by quotes from Obama's book and the Rev Wright into voting White. Obama is hoping that a solid black vote combined with enough glassy-eyed, granola-eating, left-wing, fanatical loonies and swooning college students can finally put a stake through the heart of the Undying Candidate. Only the polls will tell!