Griper Blade: The Sour Grapes Ticket

Over the weekend, I was screwing around and wrote a piece of satire I called "John McCain Explains the Economy." Basically, it's the confused ramblings of a doddering old fool who tries to tell a story, but can't remember which parts he'd already told. It was an exercise in pure absurdism. In it, McCain insists that movie moguls the Warner Brothers were "the world's richest siamese twins at the time," that Hawaiians used to be communist, and that publisher William Randolph Hearst used to sell soap at movie theaters.

In retrospect, I could've swapped the title "John McCain Explains the Economy" with a real headline from McClatchy Newspapers and it would've worked out just great. That headline is "McCain picks failing Ohio factory to laud free trade." Seriously.

Standing before a nearly shuttered factory pocked with broken windows in a city devastated by the erosion of its industrial base, John McCain on Tuesday urged Americans to reject the "siren song of protectionism" and embrace free trade.

He used his own recent political fortunes -- a dramatic fade followed by an unexpected comeback to secure the Republican presidential nomination -- to illustrate that depressed Rust Belt cities such as Youngstown can rebound.

"A person learns along the way that if you hold on -- if you don't quit no matter what the odds -- sometimes life will surprise you," McCain said in a speech at Youngstown State University after meeting the five remaining workers at Fabart, a steel-fabricating factory that had more than 100 employees a few years ago.

I feel I have to point out that this isn't satire, this is the news. When you're talking about Baghdad John, sometimes it's hard to tell. In a speech lauding free trade policies that have sent American jobs overseas, McCain chose a nearly abandoned factory for his backdrop. I wrote a satire of McCain as a ridiculous boob and then McCain himself outdid me...

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