We know that various lipstick metaphors are the most important issues in the 2008 presidential election following eight years of George W. Bush, but we feel we should mention something about this new HIT PIECE from the liberal Nation magazine. In the above picture, John McCain and his campaign manager Rick Davis are boarding a fancy boat to celebrate McCain’s 70th birthday, 423 years ago. Ha ha, look at freakin’ Walnuts trying to shimmy up that ramp. Anyway, who is that greasy Montenegrin convicted con artist playboy, the one who owned the boat? MORE »

Working for the Republican National Committee would be so freaking fun. When your electorate consists of the dumbest shits in the country, even the simplest, most transparent appeals to nativism, homophobia, or provincialism will preserve your monolithic base’s loyalty for decades. And so here’s the latest creative output from the RNC — which, along with BarackBook.com, constitutes the “July 29 RNC Twofer.” It is a comical video about what an Obama commercial in Germany would look like. Deep techno beats, robots, gay flashing colors, David Hasselhoff, anti-American German interviews, various other Eurotrash tropes. And you must watch the very end. Oh, it’s really not an option. [YouTube]

Last week all the Obamatards hated Andrea Mitchell for complaining about how Barack Obama didn’t invite the press to his basketball games in Iraq. This week they will love Andrea Mitchell for saying this McCain attack ad is “literally not true.” You know, the one about how Showboat Barry wouldn’t visit the troops in Germany because he couldn’t bring along cameras. (The truth is that he gave the troops the brushoff because he was busy inventing man-made AIDS.) [YouTube via Huffington Post]

Barack Obama and French President Nicolas Sarkozy had been engaging in some “heavy petting” during this Congressional Trip, until this moment. During their joint press conference, CNN’s Christiane Amanpour asks Sarkozy if he feels awkward praising black Obama when, only a few years ago, he was calling black French rioters “scum,” the worst word in the world. MORE »

Like so many McCain campaign disasters — choosing Phil “Poor People Suck” Gramm as financial adviser or announcing a press conference on an oil rig during a hurricane — it probably seemed like a terrific idea at the time: Harass Barack Obama into embarking on an international fact-finding mission thing, which would obviously provide so many embarrassing gaffes and make Americans scared to death of the Boy Muslim President. MORE »

Yesterday, John McCain made a gaffe that no one cared about: he referred to the Czech Republic as “Czechoslovakia,” which is actually correct, but only if you think time froze in 1992. Does John McCain think this? Because today, for the second day in a row, he referred to that same country as “Czechoslovakia.” It turns out he has been making this same mistake regularly for most of his post-Cold War political career, but since he gives the Journalistic Reporters apple-flavored lollipops on his comfy bus every day, they choose not to write about it. The Main Stream Media’s inability to mention this exact gaffe, in fact, was something George Bush complained about during the 2000 primary season. And look how that turned out for him! MORE »

Dumb dumb dumb, dumb dumb dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb, dumb dumb dumb dumb. That is one “dumb” for each paragraph of Jonah Goldberg’s Los Angeles Times column today. For the record, we did not expect it to be “good,” in the traditional sense — we didn’t expect to read it at all! But 18 paragraphs of unmitigated “dumb” has a strangely magnetic appeal during this lazy news season. So let’s check out Jonah’s column, in which he argues that Obama’s plan to offer educational aid as a reward for national service is somehow both (a) welfare and (b) slavery. Europe, MTV, “the JFK cult,” and Rolling Stone magazine also play bit parts in Jonah’s remarkable paean to the God of Shit. MORE »

Everyone in Europe is a socialist Liberal arugula-swilling white wine-eating gay elite terrorist statist freedom-hating fairy, except for one man: Silvio Berlusconi, who said today that he favors John McCain, and did so by mocking him: “I suppose I could express my own personal preference for one of the candidates, the Republican candidate, and this is for a very selfish reason, and that is that I would no longer be the oldest person at the upcoming G8.” So far, this is the most reasonable explanation any individual has offered for supporting John McCain. [WSJ]

Ha ha, here is some great newspaper from Nazi Germany that comically names the White House “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” because a slave may soon call it home. This is very offensive, according to the Internet, and of course we all know why: what a nasty way to detract from Obama’s writing skill, by comparing it to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s! Have you actually *read* Uncle Tom’s Cabin? Yikes! [Spiegel]

Europeans’ favorite hobbies include drinking tea and “Fanta,” smoking *our* tobacco, sexing tight-jeaned hobbits, and being outrageously catty. Due to at least three of these factors, the outgoing Italian government — distraught over its failures — posted every Italian’s tax information online, with no warning, until the site crashed due to excessive voyeurism. MORE »

French president and ladies man Nicolas Sarkozy has bought a new toy, for killing Lobsterbacks. Today he inaugurated “Le Terrible”, which the AP caption describes as “a new generation nuclear-armed submarine.” Rowr! What a perfect complement to his “new generation” wife. [AP Photo]