That was a tiring “debate” to watch, the one between Biden and Palin. Whenever she spoke I felt like I was being beat over the head with a cornpone stupid stick. She babbled incoherently, lied, contradicted herself many times per minute, and tried to gussy it all up in some kind of small town act trying to appeal to rednecks, but I’m pretty sure most rednecks are smart enough to see through all that.

There was one moment though, near the end, that none of the pundits seem to have noticed in the post debate banter. It was when she said

I know education you are passionate about with your wife being a teacher for 30 years, and god bless her. Her reward is in heaven, right?

Biden’s face kind of fell on that remark, because of course, his first wife Nelia and daughter Naomi were killed in a car crash just before Christmas in 1972. [edit: A clarification on a point brought up by a reader. Senator Biden's second and current wife, Jill, is a professor, and that is who Governor Palin was talking about. Biden knew Palin wasn't talking about Nelia, but the wording of the comment still brought up the pain of remembrance.] Senator Biden became more combative after that, and brought it home near the end with remarks about his understanding of parenthood.

Look, I understand what it’s like to be a single parent. When my wife and daughter died and my two sons were gravely injured, I understand what it’s like as a parent to wonder what it’s like if your kid’s going to make it.

Palin didn’t know how to respond to this heartfelt passion, so she followed with more incoherent babbling until she regained her composure somewhat, and went on a campaign rant about John McCain being a maverick. And that’s when Biden really hit back with a heated rebuttal with regard to McCain’s maverickness.

The pundits all thought she did well, but surely it’s only because the bar of expectations was so incredibly low for her. Look at some of these sentences!

In fact, 96 percent of his votes have been solely along party line, not having that proof for the American people to know that his commitment, too, is, you know, put the partisanship, put the special interests aside, and get down to getting business done for the people of America.

I do take issue with some of the principle there with that redistribution of wealth principle that seems to be espoused by you.

I had to take on those oil companies and tell them, “No,” you know, any of the greed there that has been kind of instrumental, I guess, in their mode of operation, that wasn’t going to happen in my state.

What I want to argue about is, how are we going to get there to positively affect the impacts?

Education credit in American has been in some sense in some of our states just accepted to be a little bit lax and we have got to increase the standards.

Also, John McCain’s maverick position that he’s in, that’s really prompt up to and indicated by the supporters that he has.

Okay, but that’s more about style than substance, you say. Maybe, or maybe it’s an indication of her scramble-headedness, that there are times, a lot of times per minute when she just doesn’t think straight. You sure you want to have her being Commander in Chief? McCain looks like he’s been having some microstrokes lately. He doesn’t have to die for her to be president, he just has to be mentally incapacitated.

But there’s a lot of substance in her babbling that’s just plain wrong, and still more of it that’s self-contradictory. I don’t have time to go into a lot of it right now, but just look at her statement about the “white flag of surrender.” That is a complete misunderstanding of a timetable for withdrawal. The timetable is for the Iraqi troops, not for Al Qaeda! If we stay there forever, they’ll never have a reason to man up and take charge, unless it’s to go against us. But if we give them a timetable for when we’re going to leave, they’ll have an idea of how long they have to get prepared.

And then there’s all that malarkey about Wall Street being greedy and corrupt. Come on, lady! You just said you wanted to give rich people some big tax breaks so maybe they’ll give middle class folks some jobs. And what is it with these “hungry markets” that are “hungry” for oil? What’s their problem, are there places in the US where you can’t buy oil with money?

To me it just seems like she’s pandering to rednecks as if they’re stupid and provincial. But I’ll tell you what, a country boy can survive, and bein’ a naïve dumbass ain’t a part of his survival skills. I got yer cornpone right here, lady!

I put some Adsense ads up, and most of them are anti-Obama. I’ll leave them there anyway. Remember, the people who bought them only have to pay if you click on them.

Why should the term “redneck for Obama” be surprising? It seems like an oxymoron, the way the media and the Republicans have hyped it up, only urban Democrats who consider themselves the intellectual elites should be for Obama, along with most Black Americans and some other minorities.

Rednecks are supposed to be for Republicans because Republicans don’t whine for the government to give them money, they don’t try to teach Ebonics as a second lanuage, they aren’t jealous of rich people, they don’t let criminals go unpunished, they aren’t always spending money they don’t have, they don’t expect the government to bail them out when they make a mistake…

Oh, wait.

In the past, rural folks were Democrats because Republicans were for the wealthy, and the wealthy were considered robber barons without family values, people who spoiled their children and were bent on forcing people to work for low wages, on manipulating markets to their advantage, always to screw the little man.

Then of course in the South, rednecks were Democrats because the Republicans belonged to the party of Lincoln. Republicans were carpetbaggers, and scalawags who came to the South to take advantage of the post-war conditions, to buy up land cheap, and rob people of their life savings.

But with the huge numbers of newly college educated young folks coming into adulthood in the ’60s, the Democratic Party changed course and went too far afield of values of its rural roots. It became the party of city folk, which you can see clearly in the Purple Maps which became popular after the 2004 election. These maps show clearly that even in largely rural states like Texas, which people think of as a “red” state, there are still concentrations of “blue” voters in the cities. So that’s why it’s surprising that there should be such a thing as rednecks for Obama - because the red-state/blue-state thing is really more of an suburban-rural/urban thing.

Now, I mentioned the whininess of Democrats, and their tendency to call for nanny state government as reasons why rednecks, who value self-reliance, wouldn’t want to associate themselves with that Party. I’ll have to address that in my next post.

Hell yes! Well, in fact I’m not exactly a full-blood redneck, having grown up and lived in the big city all my life. But I have tons of relatives out in west Texas around Coleman and San Angelo, and my family owns some farmland near Kaufman, and… I have an Uncle Bubb! You can’t hardly get more redneck than that.

Anyway, I saw something in reddit about Rednecks for Obama and thought I’d join the bandwagon, and maybe help build the wagon to some extent. To that end, I have put up some artwork at Zazzle and CafePress.

On Zazzle, I have a Rednecks for Obama store at http://zazzle.com/obamaredneck, and on CafePress my store is called LoonyBuns, after a funny Youtube video, at http://cafepress.com/loonybuns.

I have four basic designs, but they took down one of them on Zazzle because they thought my replica of the Obama “O” infringed on the copyright. CafePress doesn’t seem to care about that. CafePress makes it easier to create a whole slew of products from one design and its variants, so for example, the header design for this site needs to be wide for a bumper sticker but fat for a t-shirt.

Zazzle makes you create entire separate products for each such design, but they let you choose if customers should be able to customize, so you can go in with some art and put it on anything you like.

Later I’ll have more about politics and less about my side business.