Okay, not really. But I do have that song totally stuck in my head since it's on some commercial that's been on ten times in the last half hour. So I thought I'd exorcise it here. What I'm really walkin' on is one weary body.
How will I ever stay up for the debate tonight, especially when I know it will only make me angry and upset? Yet I must watch. I can't help but feel that I'll miss something if I don't. Okay, here's my best presidential debate memory. No, it's not Nixon v. Kennedy, although I was probably in the room when it was on, I just don't remember it. No, I was probably already in bed, since I was seven years old. The one I remember is Ford/Carter.
I was in graduate school at Rutgers, and I lived in the graduate students' dorm on campus. I won't go into that much, except to say that the folk who lived there did not exactly mingle all that much, and the Hubs' (then the Boyfriend) former girlfriend lived one floor below me. So that wasn't too awkward in the elevator. But I digress.
I had a very nice roommate that semester, but she must have been at class that night, or else it was after she had already decided to drop out of her doctoral program and give her marriage another shot. (Don't ask.) I was alone in my room watching the debate on TV. At which point, President Ford said something about the people of Poland and Eastern Europe being free, and not under Soviet domination.
Uh ... what? Poland? A Communist country behind the Iron Curtain with a heavy concentration of Russian troops and tanks? That Poland?
Jimmy Carter just looked ... astonished. He said something that was meant to give Ford the opportunity to clarify what was clearly a slip of the tongue, but he said it again, with confidence. The moderators of the debate looked astonished.
At which point 30 graduate students who had never even spoken to each other before, including me, raced into the corrider, doors banging open, yelling "Did you see that? Did you see that? Did you see that?"
So I can't help but wonder about tonight. At that moment, Ford lost the presidency, because he looked like an idiot. To me, Bush looks like an idiot all the time, and yet I'm certain that if he said something similar in a debate, his advisors would convince everyone the next day that he was actually correct, and that Kerry was the moron for believing that, for example, the sun really did come up in the morning and go down at night, and not the other way, if that's what Bush said. I doubt that Bush can "lose" the debate, whatever that is, because his spin doctors are so skilled that they will make it turn out that way, regardless of what really happens.
Get this. Colleague tells me today that her husband likes Bush because "he is strong." (She thinks her husband is nucking futs here, btw. She's more anti-Bush than I am.) Anyway, her husband was in the army during the early Vietnam years, although not sent over there, and he likes Bush because anyone who's been in service knows you need a strong leader. What's wrong with that piece of shit logic? The fact that Kerry was, in fact, a strong military leader and that Bush was not? Okay. I swear, the only thing "strong" about Bush is that he says all the time that he's strong. He's a schoolyard bully, not a leader. Jeez.
Okay, I'm going. I should have taken a nap, but I had to go buy rainbow balloons for the GSA display at Club Fair tomorrow, because we're not giving into that cliche, are we?
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I'm watching The Daily Show
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Sweet Sorrow - 06.12.2007
So ... - 12.19.2006
Christmastime Is Near - 12.18.2006
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