Banalities

"Trust me, the President has a big stick. Trust me." quoteth Vice President Joseph Biden (see National Journal Clip)

Such base utterings coming from the Vice President of our once great nation seem almost unimaginable ... yet it has happened.  Has our country sunken so low that such snarky innuendos can be thought of as gaining any political foothold among voters?  Sadly, apparently so.  These things do not occur by accident.  They are not "slips of the tongue." Polling and focus groups have told Obama's green-eyeshade consultants that such phallic imagery will cause a certain defined segment of voters to feel a tingle go up their leg as they step into the voting booth this November.  And so, another decorum is abandoned.

We, as a people, have been so conditioned by a fire-hose media onslaught of sexual references and half-references to the point where a negative has become, for all too many, a positive.  Our popular culture is awash with such imagery:  "Desperate Housewives," Mr. Big in "Sex in the City," Abercrombie and Fitch's pornographic ads ... and on and on.  Even Al Gore's handlers, twelve years ago,  felt it appropriate to have his Rolling Stone magazine cover picture Photo-Shopped to augment his "package."  How low we have sunken ...

For those of you who have studied what happened to the Roman culture in its waning days, does this all seem so familiar?  Try imagining Caligula's visage superimposed into the National Journal clip referenced above.