So crowds are cheering madly as McCain and Pailin promise to shake things up by rescuing Washington from the Republicans. Hello - is anyone home?
I feel like we are living in that scene in Blazing Saddles when the Sheriff (Cleavon Little), about to be attacked by a threatening mob, takes himself hostage and threatens to shoot himself if they come any closer. The idiot towns folk are frozen in their tracks - someone says "I think he means it" - and they all start slowly backing away".
A friend e-mailed with this observation -
this is really the most amazing political phenomenon of our age: I can't quite get the right analogy for this successful leading of working people to believe that the GOP are on their side, while enacting policies which badly screw them: the distraction faked by the pickpocket just before they hit you; the magician's distraction of the eye before he pulls the card from his sleeve; people buying again and again from the same snake-oil salesman who came by last yr even though they got sick from the stuff. Lincoln never addressed this formulation directly, but maybe you can fool most of the people most of the time
