Apathy Sketchpad

Quite by accident over the last week or two, a load of different things have drifted into my Google Reader inbox that make me dislike John McCain (more so than I already did simply for being a Republican). Three of them were in a single post on Things Younger Than McCain. Two of them will be covered later so I shall just mention the one. But first, in case you haven’t figured it out, Things Younger Than McCain is a blog devoted to listing things that you think have been around for ever but in fact have been around less time than John McCain. The aim isn’t to say McCain would be a bad president because he’s old, but to say that his age should be considered when choosing a president. I think we all know someone who was great at their job when they were 45 but would be awful at it now. And we’ve all seen the comparisons showing how much Tony Blair aged in office — if McCain serves two terms he’s going to end up looking like this.

McCain might be one of the lucky ones who can hit 80 and still be spry, smart, and in touch. Or he might be one of the others, who by 70 is feeble, losing it, and/or clinging to an out-of-date worldview. Or, and this is a slightly scary thought, he might be one of the first group now and become one of the second while in office. Okay, so we have the 25th Amendment to protect the world from the actions of a president with dementia, but that rather relies on having a vice-president who is better at running a country than a demented old man, and I’ve seen the list of likely candidates for McCain’s running mate. It includes Charlie Crist, who opposes gay rights despite (reportedly) being gay, Mitt Romney, who thinks that “freedom requires religion”, Mike Huckabee, who wants to amend the constitution to ban gay marriage, Sam Brownback, who is a creationist, and Bobby Jindal, who thinks he has met a demon (and cured cancer to boot).

So the big question is, is McCain the kind of old person who is still in touch with the modern world, or will he sit on a rocking chair on the White House steps shouting “get off my lawn”? I don’t know. But I know he can’t work a computer at all. That could be a clue, there.

I also found out, via Wired, that his campaign involves what is essentially a spamming campaign. And I saw a video of McCain explaining that the constitution “established the US as a Christian nation” (compare and contrast to Obama’s speech on secularism), so we can safely say that either McCain has not read the Constitution (in which case he’s a dick), or he has read it but did not understand it (which would seem to suggest that he’s the kind of old person who is a moron and probably still was when they were young).

Or, he’s a liar.

It’s certainly possible that he’s a liar. These videos would seem to suggest that that is a possibility. (The second one’s better, mostly because of the dubious gay marriage bit in the first.)

(He must have the Animation Shop 2 text effects turned right up, there.)

I appreciate that a lot of this is probably posturing to big voting blocks, but I must confess it baffles me that people use that as a defence: that’s not an extenuating circumstance — that’s electoral fraud!

Come on. This is getting silly now. If Obama doesn’t win the election by some kind of unprecedented landslide then I think the most humane option would be to release some kind of virus and wipe out the whole stupid population.