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Last week, on the sec­ond or third night of the Demo­c­ra­tic Con­ven­tion, I wrote a lit­tle bit about my skep­ti­cism about Barack Obama. I for­get exactly what my point though because now it absolutely doesn’t mat­ter. Essen­tially, my thoughts on Barack were basi­cally that he a.) he kind of seemed to be drink­ing his own bath water b.) did not have the for­ti­tude or polit­i­cal exper­tise to win the elec­tion. In light of the speech he gave on Thurs­day night, I’m no longer wor­ried. The guy’s bril­liant. I can’t say any­thing that hasn’t already been said on this, except that no one has ever used an accep­tance speech to so thor­oughly and effec­tively take the fight to the oppo­si­tion like Barack did. It did every­thing it needed to do. It was heroic.

So, as if he wasn’t going to spend the remain­der of the cam­paign respond­ing to what Barack said on Thurs­day, things have got­ten even worse for John McCain. No doubt he hoped his unveil­ing of run­ning­mate Sarah Palin would usurp news cov­er­age from Barack lead­ing into the Repub­li­can con­ven­tion. Palin is, after all, only the sec­ond woman to ever be on the bot­tom half of the top of a major party ticket in Amer­i­can his­tory. But instead, atten­tion was imme­di­ately diverted by the fact that she is com­pletely inex­pe­ri­enced and unpre­pared to vice pres­i­dent (and there­fore pres­i­dent if the 72-​​year-​​old McCain [happy birth­day, by the way] croaks in office), is under inves­ti­ga­tion for cor­rup­tion and has a preg­nant 17-​​year-​​old daugh­ter. Oh, and they had to rework the entire con­ven­tion sched­ule when a mas­sive hur­ri­cane just barely missed New Orleans. I’m sure I don’t have to explain why severe weather in or around the Big Easy doesn’t make for win­ning pol­i­tics for the Repub­li­can Party. It’s like Fri­day rolled around and McCain was like, “Fuck it. I’ve had enough of being a viable con­tender for this thing.”

So what goes around comes around, as the say­ing goes. The polit­i­cal pen­du­lum seems to have swung, the con­ser­v­a­tive moment passed. I’ll check back in on this when the GOP con­ven­tion over and the week of non­stop footage of young prison-​​camp McCain has run its course, but I’m pretty sure the train has left the sta­tion on this one. If only we could fast-​​forward to Novem­ber 4^th. We would have to endure a lot less bullshit.