VPILF

John McCain has successfully (at least for the moment) stolen Barack Obama's post-convention thunder by naming Alaska governor Sarah Palin as his running mate. But seeing as how she's held elective office for less than two years, has zero foreign-policy experience and is even under investigation in her home state for firing the head of the state police when he wouldn't fire her ex-brother-in-law, she may be more trouble to the McCain campaign than she's worth.

But someone didn't wait for the announcement to start sounding off on her. On August 4, someone registered a website domain at http://www.vpilf.com touting Palin for the VP job. Now it just so happens that Palin is a former beauty-pageant contestant, and "VPILF" stands for "Vice President I'd Like to F***."

Really.

Now I started wondering who was behind the website, so I did a little digging. It seems that according to the registration info, it was set up through a masking company in Arizona:

Registrant:
Domains by Proxy, Inc.

DomainsByProxy.com
15111 N. Hayden Rd., Ste 160, PMB 353
Scottsdale, Arizona 85260
United States

Registered through: GoDaddy.com, Inc. (http://www.godaddy.com)
Domain Name: VPILF.COM
Created on: 04-Aug-08
Expires on: 04-Aug-09
Last Updated on: 04-Aug-08

Administrative Contact:
Private, Registration VPILF.COM@domainsbyproxy.com
Domains by Proxy, Inc.
DomainsByProxy.com
15111 N. Hayden Rd., Ste 160, PMB 353
Scottsdale, Arizona 85260
United States
(480) 624-2599 Fax -- (480) 624-2598

Technical Contact:
Private, Registration VPILF.COM@domainsbyproxy.com
Domains by Proxy, Inc.
DomainsByProxy.com
15111 N. Hayden Rd., Ste 160, PMB 353
Scottsdale, Arizona 85260
United States
(480) 624-2599 Fax -- (480) 624-2598

Domain servers in listed order:
NS47.DOMAINCONTROL.COM
NS48.DOMAINCONTROL.COM

Domains by Proxy is a company whereupon anyone can register a website and keep their personal details private. So with the domain registered in Arizona, and the GOP nominee being from Arizona, is it too outrageous to wonder whether this is an arms-length ploy by the McCain campaign to "sex up" their VP candidate?

Considering that Karl Rove's winged monkeys are running the McCain campaign, that certainly doesn't seem out of the question. On the other hand, it seems remarkably shabby for even McCain's own handlers to treat Palin as just another pretty face.

On the other other hand, they've pulled stuff like this before. Is there more to this story?

Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don't

For what it's worth, I never thought Barack Obama would pick Hillary Clinton as his running mate in the fall election, not after all the bad blood during the primary season. But now that Obama has tapped Joe Biden, John McCain has jumped in with both feet. Yes, he quickly unveiled a campaign ad accusing Obama of telling Hillary's supporters to go jump in the lake.

"She won millions of votes but isn't on his ticket," the ad's voiceover says. "Why? For speaking the truth." The way McCain makes it sound, Obama is a thin-skinned elitist who couldn't handle her criticism of him. And he probably hates women to boot.

This is, of course, a crock. If Obama had picked Hillary as his VP, McCain would doubtless have run a different ad reminding voters of all the supposed "Clinton scandals" back in the 1990s, questioning Obama's judgment at selecting such a person to be his running mate.

This is not the first time the McCain campaign has played this game. Back when Obama made his tour of the Middle East and Europe, McCain ran an ad accusing Obama of dissing wounded soldiers in a military hospital in Germany because he didn't meet with them. Only after the ad ran - and it was shown that the Pentagon had advised Obama not to visit the soldiers - was it revealed that the GOP had prepared another ad just in case.

You see, if Obama had visited the troops, McCain would have run an ad accusing Obama of doing so purely for political purposes.

Visit the troops: get accused of using them as props.

Don't visit the troops: get accused of dissing them.

You're damned if you do and damned if you don't.

And Everybody Hates the Jews

Rep. Steve Cohen is a Democrat who represents Memphis, Tennessee in Congress, and is doing a pretty good job of it. He is so popular that the GOP isn't bothering to run a candidate this year, not even a sacrificial one. But he does have a primary election today, and one of his opponents has run what just may be the nastiest ad of the year:



"Our churches?" "Our churches?" Nikki Tinker is saying in code what is impolite to say openly: "That Jewish guy doesn't represent us. Vote for an honest Christian instead."

And this is a Democrat speaking. Imagine what a Republican would say.

Take My Wife - Please!

John McCain has a sense of humor which can be charitably called odd. Whether it's singing a let's-bomb-Iran ditty to the tune of the Beach Boys' "Barbara Ann," joking about killing Iranians with American cigarette exports, or his jest about a woman being raped by a gorilla, his attempts at humor tend to backfire messily.

And now we have another example.

McCain was in Sturgis, South Dakota yesterday, campaigning at the annual Buffalo Chip biker rally. Now, it is admittedly odd for a 71-year-old man to proclaim kinship with a bunch of big Harley riders, but stranger things have happened. In the midst of the flesh-pressing and speech-making, he made a rather interesting comment about his wife Cindy, who was standing right next to him: "I encouraged Cindy to compete. I told her with a little luck she could be the only woman ever to serve as first lady and Miss Buffalo Chip."

A little explanation is needed here. Every year, one of the high (?) points at the Sturgis rally is an event which ESPN described far better than I can:

Buffalo Chip has a reputation for that sort of thing. It holds a Miss Buffalo Chip contest every night, which is essentially a topless beauty pageant. And occasionally bottomless, too. During a drenching rain Wednesday night, the contest broke up into smaller groups and one woman wound up dancing naked on a bar top. Her boyfriend/husband saw her and angrily dragged her away as she struggled to put her pants back on and muttered something about how, "It's only this one week a year."

So was McCain really volunteering to put his wife on display? I would call it just another of his off-the-cuff attempts at cracking a joke, except the video clearly shows him reading from a prepared text.

If Barack Obama had offered Michelle up like this, the media would roast him for weeks on end - assuming, that is, he survives whatever Michelle would put him through. She's no dummy, and she sure looks tough as nails.

So McCain may have won the biker vote by showing up at Buffalo Chip, but he might have lost the women's vote with his rather crass comment. And there are a lot more women than bikers.

Obama the Anti-Christ?

John McCain - or rather, his handlers - clearly realize that he has nothing going for him. He has no new ideas or new solutions. His entire campaign is based on continuing the very same policies that have dragged the current president down to historically low opinion ratings and the country into an abyss. He has surrounded himself with Karl Rove acolytes who believe that the only way to win an election is to turn your opponent into a baby-eating, grandparent-murdering monster. And if your opponent is intelligent and charismatic with a lot of good ideas, that makes it all the more challenging.

Hence McCain's latest crop of ads and talking points. His surrogates' claims of "presumptuousness" on Barack Obama's part is really just a thinly-veiled way of calling him an uppity Negro who needs to be taught his place in the world. And his TV ad comparing Obama's "celebrity" status with that of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton, known nowadays primarily for boozily forgetting to put on underwear, has been widely derided as appealing to racist fears of black men hooking up with white women.

But his latest web ad goes even further.



Now, at first glance, McCain is satirizing Obama's Great White (as it were) Hope image and taking it to absurd extremes. No big deal, and the Ten Commandments clip is pretty funny in this context. But there is something deeper here.

McCain can't hope to win in November without the support of the Christian Right voters who put every one of Tim LaHaye's ultra-violent Left Behind books at the top of the best-seller list. Now it just so happens that the series' principal villain is a man who comes to power by proclaiming peace and international brotherhood but ends up doing the work of Satan.

In other words, the ad is sneakily calling Barack Obama the Anti-Christ.

Classy.

But maybe that's giving McCain's team too much credit. After all, they thought the "McCain Cribs" web video, which patronized and looked down on the young voters whose support they want, was a good idea. So they might not have actually meant to call Obama the epitome of evil.

Nah, who are we kidding? Of course they meant it. They're trying to reach the people who insist that Obama is some sort of black supremacist secret Muslim, hoping to scare them into voting for a nice white Christian man instead of some black guy with the middle name of "Hussein."

But will they get away with it?

Something Greater Than Ourselves

Once in a while, something happens that makes us pause and turn away from such purely Earth-based subjects as politics and elections to make us appreciate the majesty of the Universe.

This morning, my kids and I watched a live feed of a total solar eclipse from halfway around the world. Even on a computer screen, watching the Moon slowly cover the Sun and the solar corona shine out in the darkened sky is an awesome experience.

The astronomy behind an eclipse is easy enough to understand - from Earth, the Sun and the Moon appear to be the same size. Every few years, everything lines up so perfectly that the Moon's shadow falls along a narrow path across Earth's surface. Anyone in that path sees the Moon blot out the Sun for a few glorious minutes.

But knowing the science behind an eclipse and actually seeing one, even remotely, are two very different things. Seeing the effect when the sky darkens and the Sun's coronal halo becomes visible is to know that there are greater things in the Universe than our ephemeral squabbles here on Earth.