Salon has a front page article today discusisng how McCain's juvenalia disguised as serious campaign advertising is being taken entirely seriously by the mainstream, er, right wing, er, wait, by Salon.

What else is new.

Satire and Salon are becoming less and less suited for each other, since what Tom Tomorrow skewers so brilliantly is often on display right in the same zine, in some of the worst ways.

in this same week's posting.

McCain makes juvenile frat boy jokes disguised as campaigning, disgusts most of even his fawning sycophants in the corporate media, who amazingly enough actually say so.

Meanwhile Salon presents a ponderous and serious analysis of how he's "leveraged current events better" or whatever it was.

Glenn Greenwald often writes scathing critiques of the kind of thing that Salon engages in, daily. Now it's Tom Tomorrow.

I don't know how to tell you this but your two best feature contributers are making fun of you.

Whether you, or even they, know it or not.

True, hopelessness and stagnation have been working so much better. We should have nominated someone closer to the status qou, you're right. That corporate beltway mainstream thing has been such a winner, why would anyone want to change it? War, corruption, why would anyone hope for an end to that?

Go read the candidate positions, then try again. Knowing what they are and then disagreeing is one thing, but this vapid "he has no positions, only hope! just embarasses you.

Bonnie Lee Fox you took the words from my keyboard, quite literally exactly what I was going to use as my subject line.

Camille Paglia is telling Barack Obama whether he should sound black? Or telling him not to? Or how to?

I think I really am going to scream now.

This woman has always been kind of loose-nut lightweight posturing as an intellectual. Now, she's throwing in a kind of concern-troll racism as one of her ploys for attention.

Some people were doing the same to Hillary Clinton, you may recall, showing clips of her speaking in the South and accusing her of becoming more folsky and Southern.

Here are two points about that: The ones who made these accusations were at places like Fox News, and Hillary is white. Not a black person being accused of sounding black.

Let me put it in another way, just to be sure this is clear:

A writer in Salon just wrote that an African American sounded black when he spoke, and that he'd be better off not doing that.

"Oh my god" is far too mild but I won't stoop to writing what this bilge deserves.

"And Obama's tire gauge mini-crusade was a mortifying misfire with those same voters -- a shiny little gadget specializing in the literally lightweight issue of air versus the greasy, brawny push for massive, phallic drilling into the seabed of mother earth. Symbols matter!"

That was McCain's camp, not Obama.

To recap: during a talk on overall energy strategy someone asked "Yes, but what can I as an individual do?" and Barack Obama replied "Well, I'll tell you one thing you can do, keep your tires inflated because that wastes a lot of gas..."

Which the McCain campaign lied into "Barack Obama said that this is his entire energy plan", and started handing out tire gauges, in a flourish of juvenilia.

Listen, I can understand wanting a diversity of opinion but someone who's not even paying attention, I mean surely we can do better than this. Buying the whole McCain smear premise is one thing, but imagining that it was Obama's himself is really a little too uninformed for this side of intelligent discourse.

It almost makes you wonder if Paglia really does get her talking points from Rush Limbuagh, as many have claimed here. Though she's not even getting them right, if so.

Brazilian standpoint

I´m staying off the argument about Obama´s accent because, frankly, I couldn´t care less.

Well, that makes a certain amount of sense since you're outside of the culture here. Since you're nice enough to illuminate the subject of Brazil a little (I'm serious, no snark, thanks) let me fill in the gaps regarding things on this side:

"Accent" is an interesting choice of words, it's not exactly what we'd use in this particular case but I can see why someone would. Basically, it's like this:

If one of our really extreme right-wing radio or TV personalities, Bill O'Reilly for example, said:

"And hey,what's up with that talking like a black person thing, Obama? I mean all that "You all" and lazy speech, actin like "you all cool" and all that, I mean come on!"

Then everyone here would be screaming about it.

When Camille Paglia writes roughly the equivilant however, in a supposedly moderate to progressive zine, there will actually be people writing letters to say "What a breath of fresh air! I love Camille!" and so on.

No, we can't understand it either.

Obama brought up tire gauges to make a comparative, contextual point about how little offshore oil drilling will do to solve or affect our large-scale, long-term energy problems.

Obama didn't bring up tire gauges. At all. Ever.

Obama was asked by a listener "What can I do, as an indvidual, about energy?" and he responded to the effect of well, one thing is to keep your tires fully inflated, that wastes more gas than people realize.

McCain and camp then simply lied that into "that's Obama's entire energy plan" and to milk that lie, they sent out cute little tire gauges. Obama then responded that inflating tires would actually save more than McCain's sneering plan for drilling.

I mean my god, these things take on a life of their own, even the people trying to get it right get it wrong.