October 23, 2008, 11:21 A.M.

John,

That list of celebrities who “lean right” is hilarious in its pointlessness. The premise, of course, is that Hollywood is notoriously liberal and so any actor who would buck the trend as a vocal conservative must be a maverick of some sort. So why is it loaded with country singers and NASCAR drivers? If we threw a party and invited all the NASCAR drivers and country singers who voted Democrat, I wouldn’t even have to get the folding chairs out of the garage. It would be me, you, Steve Earle, and the Dixie Chicks.

It goes without saying that would be a better party than Dr. Phil, Kelsey Grammar, Shannen Doherty, and Rick Schroder.

The list is also loaded with athletes, which shouldn’t be a surprise either. As you know, I spent parts of three seasons working for major league baseball clubs, and baseball players spend as much time obsessing about taxes as they do about women. They could have easily made a version of Bull Durham in which the Susan Sarandon character was a supply-side-worshipping tax attorney instead of a sex-starved groupie. No matter where you live, pull up the roster for the local pro baseball franchise and count how many of the American players make their permanent residence in Texas or Florida, where residents do not pay state income tax. It’s not just because of the winter golf.

This morning’s news cycle is obsessed with the wardrobe of Sarah Palin, who talks like Joe Six Pack but shops like Jackie Collins. Almost buried by that news is word that taxpayers are shelling out almost $50,000 for a portrait of Donald Rumsfeld. I fully understand why we pay for traditional portraits of US presidents, but $50,000 for a Defense Secretary? And not even a good Defense Secretary. I mean for $50,000, we could get Damien Hirst to saw Don Rumsfeld in half, lengthwise.

I’m sure it showed up on a Halliburton invoice under “oil.”

Also in the bad timing department: Just as McCain/Palin switch their campaign strategy to one that paints Obama’s mainstream Keynesian economic theories as socialist, Alan Greenspan, not just a follower but a personal friend of Ayn Rand and America’s greatest champion of the free market, admitted to Congress today that his radical laissez faire ideology might have been just a teensy bit “flawed.”

So when McCain tries to mock Obama for wanting to withdraw troops from Iraq, George Bush announces he wants to withdraw troops from Iraq. Then when McCain tries to paint Obama as an elitist, McCain’s own running mate goes on a six-figure Fifth-Avenue shopping spree for her whole family on the dime of a campaign that’s already bleeding money. And now, just as he has Obama cornered as an anti-capitalist, government interventionist, Alan Greenspan himself says he wishes he had called for regulating derivatives, and former Bush Treasury Secretary John Snow is recommending “one strong national regulator” to oversee firms and fix “a fragmented approach” to regulation.

You almost feel sorry for McCain at this point. I mean if Republicans hate him this much, he can’t be all that bad.

—Kevin

SHARE THIS • EMAIL THIS