McCain Is Frivolous For Calling Obama Frivolous

How dumb can it get?

John McCain is the fading celebrity who turned his Vietnam imprisonment into a series of best-selling books, a second marriage to a pretty young beer heiress, a TV bio-pic and a lucrative three-decade career in Congress that led to his current starring role as the GOP nominee for president.

So what does his campaign choose as an issue? The popularity of his much younger, more talented political opponent, Barack Obama. The worst part is that Obama's campaign is paying attention to that angry old guy yelling "Get off my lawn!"

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It's a sad monument to American Dumbness when Paris Hilton's mom provides a better overview of McCain's campaign than any profressional political pundit.

But that's what happened Sunday, when Kathy Hilton posted her angry reaction to the McCain campaign's TV commercial comparing the vapid fame of Paris and Britney Spears to the appeal Barack Obama has for people tired of crooked old Reagan-era politicians.

"It is a complete waste of the money John McCain's contributors have donated to his campaign," Mrs. Hilton wrote at the Huffington Post. "It is a complete waste of the country's time and attention at the very moment when millions of people are losing their homes and their jobs. And it is a completely frivolous way to choose the next President of the United States."

Unmentioned in Kathy Hilton's tirade was that her own billionaire family had contributed heavily to McCain's presidential campaign -- patriarch William Barron Hilton has given more than $50,000 to McCain and the GOP this year, while Paris' dad (and Kathy's husband) Rick Hilton contributed nearly $7,000 to McCain's effort.

It would seem like just another stumble in John McCain's road to November 4, just another applesauce explosion or green-screen punchline, but lately the Obama campaign is reacting to this stuff, rather than setting the agenda. It's as if Kermit the Frog stopped the show and started responding to those cranky old fossils in the balcony seats.

Kathy Hilton, of all people, notes that millions of Americans are losing their homes and their jobs. Nearly 50 million people lack basic medical insurance. America is bogged down in a six-year war in Iraq that McCain would love to see go on for a century. Meanwhile, America is on the run in Afghanistan, where we supposedly landed seven years ago to prosecute an "easy war" against Al Qaeda.

Gas is $4 a gallon and heating oil is $5 a gallon -- lots of people in New England and the Great Lakes can't afford to buy their winter heating fuel. Our bridges are collapsing and our highways are pitted with potholes. American kids, if they manage to graduate high school at all, are graduating as semi-literate fat slobs with no prospects for anything beyond Type 2 diabetes and swollen legs covered in flame tattoos.

This nation is falling down. Barack Obama may or may not be able to do anything about that, but at least he has plans. John McCain's economic policy consists of repeating Ronald Reagan's dim promises of the early 1980s, when America suffered its worse economic collapse since the Great Depression.

When even the richest of the Republican Rich argue against John McCain's weird joke of a campaign, you can bet your nonexistent home equity that we're in trouble deep.

Ken Layne is the managing editor of Wonkette.


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