The President

Posted 10:15 AM by sean
Don't tell me that we can take back the White House. In fact, here's something specific; don't say "Together, we can take back the white house."

Dean is done. I love him, he'd be a good president, but he's done. Because we let everyone vote, and everyone is convinced he is unelectable, so they won't vote for him. They believe that other people won't vote for him, they don't know why, and so they know they shouldn't bother. What are his views on Nafta? Abortion? Tax subsidies for first time home buyers? They don't know, but they know, in their high school, most of the other kids wouldn't want to have the party at his house, so they're going along with it.

Don't argue the point. I've heard people say "I'm pro-life, but I respect the fact that pro-choice people might not agree with that and they have the right to do what they want." If I have to explain to you that this person is actually pro-choice, and that they can't see it for themselves, then you're one of those people. You're too dumb to read this. And I'm no genius, so you're pretty stupid.

Are there disenfranchised people? Sure. But most of these people are gonna hate Bush no matter what he does. He's on the other team. He's a Dookie. He could triple the funding for the NEA and these people would hang on the fact that he lied about WMD.

He didn't lie. He was lied to, and he's dumb. He was searching for the information he wanted in order to justify doing what he thought was best. That makes him a bad president, especially since he won't admit that he made decisions based on bad intel, but it doesn't exactly make him Hitler. If he was in a company and he misused a massive amount of that company's funds producing a product that his R&D people told him would work, but then it turns out to be a giant waste of money, he would get fired from that company, and rightly so.

So, tell me that. Talk to me about the deficit. Talk to me about mortgaging my children's futures and that Bush is the most fiscally liberal president since Johnson. Sure, you can remind me how out of touch he is with my problems, how he's basically a boob. You can remind me that he grew up as a child of infinite priviledge. You can remind me that he, personally, doesn't care at all about my life.

But the Presidency has been ours this entire time, as much as it ever is. We are not taking back the White House, like some kind of South American coup d'etat. We are firing the general manager and coach and we are bringing in a new guy that can inspire our team. Bush has done the best he can, he has not soiled the presidency, and we need to bring in someone who can lead us in a direction that will make us safer and stronger. It's that simple.

M to tha J

Posted 3:10 PM by sean
Here's the thing about Michael Jackson that you might not remember. He was really cool.

I know that goes without saying, but I mean that he was cool in the way that the things we like now are cool. He wasn't cool like Justin Timberlake or that hellspawn Ashton Kutcher. He was the youngest brother of the Jackson 5, clearly the most talented and also clearly blown away by the attention. He was just this dork, this kid, like us, like everyone.

You gotta put yourself back in 1983, back before John Hughes stole our childhoods, back when dorks were still totally dorks. You can tell me all you want that punk rock hate entered America, but I can tell you that all I knew back then was that The Right Stuff was the movie, Ronald Reagan was the man, and goofiness was, to use the right phrase, *hurtin'*.

Off The Wall had come out and some of my black friends had it, but MJ was flying way under the radar. He was a flat out dork who seemed to spend all his time practicing how to walk backwards in his room. Man, when Thriller came out, frickin' Billie Jean... are you kidding me? Suddenly this dork is talking about how girls are trying to claim he's their baby daddy? And it was like everywhere he walked the ground would glow.

I remember dancing with Nicole Black and whispering the lyrics to Human Nature in her ear and feeling her body shudder under my hands. She made out with me for an hour, and I was 26% zit cream at that point. I remember everyone trying to do the choreography from "Thriller" and I was the only one who could pop and lock. But I also remember the video for "Beat It" and thinking, "uh, he's wearing a tee shirt with a cartoon on it, right?"

He was cool like a shy Jack Black. He was wearing these retarded clothes and everyone stole the look and made it awesome. He was singing the songs he liked, just doing his thing, but he was also spending hundreds of hours perfecting the sound and making the videos. He hired real directors to direct his shorts, he gave them plots and made them, if you'll excuse me, thrilling.

You remember if you were a kid then. People don't understand why there are thousands of normal fans yelling his innocence, but it's because at one time we thought of him as one of us. I honestly feel that the reason he clutches children when he sleeps, the reason he has demolished his face, the reason he lies and lies and lies about the stuff he does, is because he couldn't take what happened to him in the exact same way that none of the rest of us could.

Ashton Kutcher is gonna be fine, he's gonna grow old gracefully, he's gonna keep making movies that everyone hates and he'll marry four times. But Michael can't pretend that the whole world staring at him doesn't scare him. I couldn't have handled it, you couldn't have either.

Just remember, the fact that he has trashed his life and his face beyond recognition doesn't mean he is guilty of abusing a child. If he has lost his moral center, if he no longer understands that being strange and freakish is wrong, you can't blame him. Every other fucked up (and every other normal) thing he did from 81 to about 93 was embraced, by all of us.

They had better *prove* he did something wrong, because with all he's given us, and all he has done for children's charities around the world, this is one guy that definitely gets the benefit of the doubt from me.