I think Barack Obama is a shitty candidate for president. He has shown nothing to win my vote (as though my vote matters). He has grand plans for the country with either no way or ridiculous ways to pay for them, and his history as both a person and as a politician does not impress me.

I think John McCain is a shitty candidate for president. He has shown nothing to win my vote (as though my vote matters). He is so unimpressive that I haven’t even bothered to delve that deeply into the proposals he wishes to enact as president. As a politician, his McCain-Feingold Act, AKA the Incumbent Protection Act, says more than enough.

Obama’s choice for VP, Joe Biden, contradicts everything he’s said about being the candidate of hope and change for the last year and a half or whatever. When I think hope and/or change, I do not see a vision of 30+ year Senator Biden, and being what he is — a partisan hack, which is what anyone who’s been in congress for decades HAS to become in order to maintain his tenure and position — he is not someone I want “one heartbeat away” from the presidency. Based upon his own horribly failed campaigns for president his own party doesn’t want him there either.

McCain’s choice for VP, Sarah Palin, is an unknown. Completely. All I know is that she’s been dragged through the mud since her selection and that it’s not going to end for her any time soon.

So thank Athena we have Camille Paglia to put Palin in perspective for us. Because I’m a dumbass I only understand about half of what Paglia says, and I couldn’t get through the one book of hers I tried to read, but as a self-described lesbian atheist feminist who is supporting Barack Obama with both her vote and her money, she has a terrific perspective from which to view Sarah Palin and the treatment she’s received. Here’s a taste:

But what of Palin’s pro-life stand? Creationism taught in schools? Book banning? Gay conversions? The Iraq war as God’s plan? Zionism as a prelude to the apocalypse? We’ll see how these big issues shake out. Right now, I don’t believe much of what I read or hear about Palin in the media. To automatically assume that she is a religious fanatic who has embraced the most extreme ideas of her local church is exactly the kind of careless reasoning that has been unjustly applied to Barack Obama, whom the right wing is still trying to tar with the fulminating anti-American sermons of his longtime preacher, Jeremiah Wright.

I strongly recommend anyone of any political persuasion to read her entire column. Paglia is reasoned and reasonable and makes total sense. Most importantly, her article makes you think. And if you think you can veil her words behind partisanship you’re an idiot.

For me, it doesn’t change the fact that Obama and McCain are both terrible candidates for president, neither of whom I will vote for, but it helps to read the opinion of someone who can see shit for what it is.

So I guess what I’m trying to say is too bad Camille Paglia isn’t running for anything because she’d have my vote.