They are going to town on this.

grist.org

That is a good question, apropos of David's earlier question about why it is manly to like nuclear power but girly to like wind.  

CW says: Real Americans like nuclear power, budweiser and overcooked burgers.  Sissified elitists like efficiency, wine and a salad of summer greens lightly drizzled with balsamic vinagrette and a medium rare tenderloin with a port wine reduction sauce.

I get it... but I'm not sure why.  Food snobbery sounds French, after all.  But then again, so does nuclear power.  Thoughts?

Going back to the John Birch society playbook there?  And will Obama now finally stop saying what a great American John McCain is, blah blah blah?

McCain has been trying to paint Obama as an elitist but Obama is the one who is more like most Americans. He is middle-class and like an increasing number of Americans, he's mixed race. Unlike McCain he's still married to his first wife.

McCain is a millionaire who left his first wife for a millionaire heiress. He's so rich that he's forgotten how many homes he owns but somehow Obama's elitist because he is a lawyer who took his family on vacation to Hawaii. The last time I checked, Hawaii is an American state. I didn't know it was elitist to visit another state.

grist.org

This is sooooooooo depressing.

It is clear that the primary threat to the environment -- and a lot of other stuff I won't go into here -- is ant-intellectualism.

What can a person do about this?

Wait -- Obama is cursing McCain for owning housing?

Who is out of touch!   House prices have been sliding precipitously in case His Highness hasn't been reading the friggin' newspapers for the last 2 years!

McCain is taking a beating (yeah, he's used to it, thin skins) in the market -- what's more, since he held on to his property, he's actually propping up the market so others can sell.

Only Odumba would think that someone having multiple houses in 2008 is "raking it in"!?!

Republicans will spin this with their classic, trickle down justifications. Owning multiple homes provides construction jobs, service jobs for maintenance and cleanup staff, security jobs, pays local property taxes, grows the economy, etc. While many of us look at this from a vantage point of virtue, ethics, greed, excess, waste of resources and energy, etc. others view it as a badge of success and freedom to pursue the dream of good standing among the country club set.

McCain, the face of the ruling class, flashing the gold while trashing the "elites".  

The country is built on illusions and McCain is depending on it.  

If some hot-shot Navy pilot dropped napalm and bombs on my village and got shot down, I'd have done a lot worse to him than he got.  He's lucky that his father was an admiral in charge of the Pacific fleet.  I'm sure that didn't affect his treatment at all, though.  Why doesn't anybody ever ask Mr. POW why he was flying over another sovereign nation and dropping munitions on them just because they had a different ideology than he did?

He probably thinks owning 12 houses doesn't make him rich.  Of course, the definition of rich being "earning over $5 million a year."

Il faut cultiver notre jardin.