River-in-Egypt Alert

I just spent 5 excrutiating hours watching speeches by Romney (yawn), Huckabee (nice guy, needs a speechwriter), Rudy (you must forgive Homer....), and finally Sarah Palin (nasty good with the zingers).

And now I can't sleep. Shoulda known.

It was almost nostalgic to see them ranting on and on (and in Rudy's case at least, on and on and on...holy cow) about elite media, Hollywood celebrities, and left wing intellectuals (or as Dubya prefers , angry liberals). Nixon and Reagan would have been proud, George 41 probably felt right at home. And I'm sure it played very well in some quarters, and the narrative meshes nicely with the ringer that Palin and her family have been put through over the past week.

But it just seemed a little strange, I thought as I gave up with the tossing in bed, got up, grabbed a drink and booted up the computer, that these guys really seem to sincerely believe they can win the election by pissing on George Clooney and Maureen Dowd.

So I ask.

• Who sent the US Army into Iraq on false pretenses - left wing intellectuals, or the Republican gang of George W. Bush and John McCain?
  
• Who botched federal oversight of emergency programming post-Katrina - elite media, or the Republican gang of George W. Bush and John McCain?
  
• Who sat idly by while banks and mortgage brokers and securities regulators converted American people's homes into Monopoly money and flushed down the toilet - Hollywood celebrities, or the Republican gang of George W. Bush and John McCain?
  
• Do they really think they can get away with passing off America's problems on everybody except the guys who've been running the place for the past eight years?

Call me an angry liberal if you want. Personally I prefer left wing intellectual. Whatever. I'm going back to bed.

2 Things I haven't blogged about yet and should

1) Macca in Quebec City. He had me at hello (or, if you prefer, at "bonsoir les québecois!"). He had me tearing up by the second verse of "Drive My Car." He had me bawling with the opening notes to "All My Loving." It is impossible for me to put into words how emotional it was to be there, standing among the 250,000+ fans on the Plains of Abraham, singing along with the crowd as he performed what is quite literally the soundtrack of my life. I saw him in 1989 at the Forum and in 1993 at the CNE in Toronto, and had a blast each time but back then I was too young to really appreciate what the music meant to me then. But I get it now, and I savoured every moment, every perfect note, every miscue (Paul giggling his way through the first verse of "Lady Madonna" after reinterpreting the opening piano riff, for example).

2) More on carbon taxes. Probably best that I hold my peace on this one, for the time being at least. I said in my last post (in June!!) that what I really care about is the quality, and the honesty, of the debate on this issue in the coming election. Let's see how it plays in the coming weeks.