All I can say is, praise the Lord I was in a Boulder Bar when it happened. I don't usually like crowds of any kind, ever, because basically I can't stand being around people. But watching the debate alone in my living room would have been like turning off all of the lights in my house and watching The Ring over a bowl of animal crackers. Sinking your nails into someone's skin is what gets you through these sorts of things.
I barely got back to Boulder at all because apparently McCain had some sort of shtick going on across from my office and the overzealous secret service were making getting out of my parking garage hellish.
By the way, the candidates won't leave us alone. This is why it sucks to live in a swing state. Then again, I lived in Palin's home state for most of my life (Idaho! hurray!) and Texas (George W! Hurray!), so I'll take swinging over being an accomplice to putting another Republican in
office, which i can only say is the moral equivalent to taking a ripe dump on our constitution.
My friends and i met at the Redfish bar in Boulder, at an event sponsored by Women against Palin, or something like that. i thought it would be the LPGA crowd, only with pink hair and patchouli oil. To my great amazement (and slight excitement), it was filled like a pickle jar
with men in tight t-shirts and horned rim glasses, (which have only just made it here from San Francisco.) I had thought to bring my Macbook (there are no PCs in Boulder) to the
restaurant/bar so I could blog, as I had promised, but typing while standing is impossible, so I just stood there like a boob and made my friend hold onto a closed computer the whole time. I contented myself to hang out next to Jared Polis, a gay Jewish guy who I pretty much like
and who's on the Colorado ticket for congress. Mostly I gripped the bicep of my friend Joel, also Jewish, and the back flesh of my friend Dan, also Jewish but one that wears Sarah Palin glasses. i only mention the Jew-pod because I want to apologize to all non-Jews who had to
listen to palin grovel pathetically over Israel. I'm a huge Israel supporter and it didn't work. in fact, i'd give her a free makeup-application lesson if she could find Israel on a map. I still
wouldn't vote for McCain though, as I'd be shocked if he made it 4 years.
the reaction at the Redfish wasn't what I had expected. we all quickly got sick of listening to memorized and canned answers, maverick, wink, darn, Alaska. barf, barf, barf, taxes this and that, and started watching the heart monitor apparatus at the bottom of the screen. I mean
we - several hundred of us - stopped reacting to the candidates and started reacting to whomever it was that CNN was polling, the "undecided Ohio" men and women. We groaned with disapproval that these invisible voters, armed with clickers, got giddy every time Palin winked or said some inane something about "Up in Alaska." We were disgusted that people
bought into her blather about raising taxes or respecting same sex-couples. We wanted to shake them when they seemed to go totally ballistic when she talked about defeating al Quaeda in Iraq or solving our terrorism woes by drilling in ANWR.
Soon, it was clear that this event wasn't about Women against Palin. Sarah could wear her trannie makeup and believe that dinosaurs and humans coexisted, and ban library books in Wasilla, and hire high school buddies to run Alaska. She could crap on the environment and go outside with her gun and shoot down all of those Russian spyships circling
Juneau. Fine. (As i supposes I can attest to), this country has no shortage of bitchy women.
This debate wasIt was about a room full of people, like rooms full of people all over this country, being palpably ashamed and angry that the people with the clickers in Ohio - who presumably reacted the same way that people without clickers all over this country reacted - were going to let this pit bull with lipstick have our country. Yet again. How could they?