Political Humor | McCain Obama Town Hall Presidential Debate Highlights

Last night, at the University of Kentucky in Belmont, TN, Barack Obama and John McCain faced off in a town hall style Presidential debate. What you might not know is that as a Presidential candidate myself. I was there as well. Despite what Tom Brokaw said, these things are not spontaneous. They are scripted, rehearsed, and prerecorded.

The two other windbags wasted taxpayer time like they waste taxpayer money, and like in the real world, the regular guy got the shaft and ended up on the cutting room floor. Much like what happened in the Rick Warren Saddleback debacle.

Here are a few highlights from the debate.

McCain: I would order the secretary of the treasury to immediately buy up the bad home loan mortgages in America and renegotiate at the new value of those homes — at the diminished value of those homes and let people be able to make those — be able to make those payments and stay in their homes.

Fiar: Yay! Free houses for everyone! Isn’t Socialism great?

Obama: No, I am confident about the American economy. But we are going to have to have some leadership from Washington that not only sets out much better regulations for the financial system.

The problem is we still have a archaic, 20th-century regulatory system for 21st-century financial markets. We’re going to have to coordinate with other countries to make sure that whatever actions we take work.

But most importantly, we’re going to have to help ordinary families be able to stay in their homes, make sure that they can pay their bills,

Fiar: Make sure they can tie their shoes, get to bed on time. Where does personal responsibility come into the picture?

McCain: The point is — the point is that we can fix our economy. Americans’ workers are the best in the world. They’re the fundamental aspect of America’s economy.

They’re the most innovative. They’re the best — they’re most — have best — we’re the best exporters. We’re the best importers. They’re most effective. They are the best workers in the world.

Fiar: Did you switch bodies with Obama, Stuttering John?

Obama: Well, look, I understand your frustration and your cynicism, because while you’ve been carrying out your responsibilities — most of the people here, you’ve got a family budget. If less money is coming in, you end up making cuts. Maybe you don’t go out to dinner as much. Maybe you put off buying a new car.

That’s not what happens in Washington. And you’re right. There is a lot of blame to go around.

McCain: I have been a consistent reformer.

I have advocated and taken on the special interests, whether they be the big money people by reaching across the aisle and working with Sen. [Russ] Feingold [D-Wisconsin] on campaign finance reform, whether it being a variety of other issues, working with Sen. Lieberman on trying to address climate change.

I have a clear record of bipartisanship. The situation today cries out for bipartisanship. Sen. Obama has never taken on his leaders of his party on a single issue. And we need to reform.

Fiar: Yes, Senator McCain. We are all aware of your consistent record of voting in lockstep with the Democrat Party line, including your McCain-Feingold free speech infringement bill.

Brokaw: The three — health care, energy, and entitlement reform: Social Security and Medicare. In what order would you put them in terms of priorities?

McCain: I think you can work on all three at once, Tom. I think it’s very important that reform our entitlement programs.

My friends, we are not going to be able to provide the same benefit for present-day workers that we are going — that present-day retirees have today. We’re going to have to sit down across the table, Republican and Democrat, as we did in 1983 between Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill.

I know how to do that. I have a clear record of reaching across the aisle, whether it be Joe Lieberman or Russ Feingold or Ted Kennedy or others. That’s my clear record.

Fiar: Yes. You have already made it clear that you are zealously in line with the Democrats.

Obama: Sen. McCain likes to talk about earmarks a lot. And that’s important. I want to go line by line through every item in the federal budget and eliminate programs that don’t work and make sure that those that do work, work better and cheaper.

Fiar: Wait. Which one of you guys is the Democrat? Don’t tell me you’re both Democrats. Oh, and Obama. You might want to use the word “earmarks” little less often. It’s making the constituency giggle.

Brokaw: All right, gentlemen, I want to just remind you one more time about time. We’re going to have a larger deficit than the federal government does if we don’t get this under control here before too long.

Fiar: Don’t blame me Tom. My answers are short and to the point. I realize that just because I have two minutes, doesn’t mean that I have to use them. I don’t feel the need to run a deficit like my opponents.

McCain: I’m going to ask the American people to understand that there are some programs that we may have to eliminate.

I first proposed a long time ago that we would have to examine every agency and every bureaucracy of government. And we’re going to have to eliminate those that aren’t working.

Fiar: I agree. Let’s start by eliminating Congress.

Obama: I believe in the need for increased oil production. We’re going to have to explore new ways to get more oil, and that includes offshore drilling. It includes telling the oil companies, that currently have 68 million acres that they’re not using, that either you use them or you lose them.

We’re going to have to develop clean coal technology and safe ways to store nuclear energy.

Fiar: Okay. So you’re the Republican candidate, right?

McCain: And some of those programs may not grow as much as we would like for them to, but we can establish priorities with full transparency, with full knowledge of the American people, and full consultation, not done behind closed doors and shoving earmarks in the middle of the night into programs that we don’t even — sometimes we don’t even know about until months later.

Fiar: Don’t be stupid. Not a single one of you weasels works in the middle of the night.

Obama: Well, Tom, we’re going to have to take on entitlements and I think we’ve got to do it quickly. We’re going to have a lot of work to do, so I can’t guarantee that we’re going to do it in the next two years, but I’d like to do in the my first term as president.

McCain: Sure. Hey, I’ll answer the question. Look — look, it’s not that hard to fix Social Security, Tom. It’s just…

Obama: Well, I think it starts with Washington. We’ve got to show that we’ve got good habits, because if we’re running up trillion dollar debts that we’re passing on to the next generation, then a lot of people are going to think, “Well, you know what? There’s easy money out there.”

Fiar: Wait. You mean if we remove the ability to fail, then people might not have any consequences to their actions, and every time something goes wrong, they will look to Nanny Government for a handout? Interesting theory. It’s almost like I’ve said that before. How surreal.

McCain: Well, you know, nailing down Sen. Obama’s various tax proposals is like nailing Jell-O to the wall. There has been five or six of them and if you wait long enough, there will probably be another one.

But he wants to raise taxes. My friends, the last president to raise taxes during tough economic times was Herbert Hoover, and he practiced protectionism as well, which I’m sure we’ll get to at some point.

Fiar: Better watch it McCain. That sounded almost Conservative-y.

McCain: Sen. Obama has never taken on his party leaders on a single major issue. I’ve taken them on.

Fiar: You’ve never taken on his party leaders either.

McCain: I’m not too popular sometimes with my own party.

Fiar: Could that be because you always vote in lockstep with the Democrats? And what do you mean “sometimes?”

McCain: But when we can — when we have an issue that we may hand our children and our grandchildren a damaged planet, I have disagreed strongly with the Bush administration on this issue. I traveled all over the world looking at the effects of greenhouse gas emissions, Joe Lieberman and I.

Fiar: I agree. You are full of toxic gases. Stop damaging the planet!

Obama: But this is another example where I think it is important to look at the record. Sen. McCain and I actually agree on something. He said a while back that the big problem with energy is that for 30 years, politicians in Washington haven’t done anything.

Fiar: Which is why you make it a point to vote “present.”

Obama: What Sen. McCain doesn’t mention is he’s been there 26 of them. And during that time, he voted 23 times against alternative fuels, 23 times.

Fiar: And hardly a “present” vote amongst them.

Obama: I don’t understand how we ended up invading a country that had nothing to do with 9/11, while Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda are setting up base camps and safe havens to train terrorists to attack us.

… We’re spending $10 billion a month in Iraq at a time when the Iraqis have a $79 billion surplus, $79 billion.

Fiar: I agree. It’s time for the Iraqis to pay their way.

Obama: Well, we may not always have national security issues at stake, but we have moral issues at stake. If we could have intervened effectively in the Holocaust, who among us would say that we had a moral obligation not to go in?

If we could’ve stopped Rwanda, surely, if we had the ability, that would be something that we would have to strongly consider and act. So when genocide is happening, when ethnic cleansing is happening somewhere around the world and we stand idly by, that diminishes us.

Fiar: Didn’t you just say you didn’t understand why we stopped a genocide in Iraq? Or des it only count when France and Russia agree with us?

McCain: The United States of America, Tom, is the greatest force for good, as I said. And we must do whatever we can to prevent genocide, whatever we can to prevent these terrible calamities that we have said never again.

Fiar: So you are the Republican?

Obama: And if we have Osama bin Laden in our sights and the Pakistani government is unable or unwilling to take them out, then I think that we have to act and we will take them out. We will kill bin Laden; we will crush Al Qaeda. That has to be our biggest national security priority.

Fiar: I agree with your policy of invading Pakistan to kill terrorists. Do they have oil too?

McCain: When you announce that you’re going to launch an attack into another country, it’s pretty obvious that you have the effect that it had in Pakistan: It turns public opinion against us.

Fiar: Public opinion? So you’re the Democrat candidate then?

Obama: Look, I — I want to be very clear about what I said. Nobody called for the invasion of Pakistan. Sen. McCain continues to repeat this.

Fiar: I liked you better when you wanted to invade Pakistan.

Obama: Now, Sen. McCain suggests that somehow, you know, I’m green behind the ears and, you know, I’m just spouting off, and he’s somber and responsible.

Fiar: You really need to stop with the ears. I’m laughing so hard I can’t breathe.

Obama: Sen. McCain, this is the guy who sang, “Bomb, bomb, bomb Iran,” who called for the annihilation of North Korea. That I don’t think is an example of “speaking softly.”

Fiar: I believe that we can do two things at once. We can invade Pakistan, and bomb Iran.

McCain: Not true. Not true. I have, obviously, supported those efforts that the United States had to go in militarily and I have opposed that I didn’t think so. I understand what it’s like to send young American’s in harm’s way. I say — I was joking with a veteran — I hate to even go into this. I was joking with an old veteran friend, who joked with me, about Iran.

Fiar: I liked you better when you wanted to bomb Iran.

McCain: We’ve got to show moral support for Georgia. We’ve got to show moral support for Ukraine. We’ve got to advocate for their membership in NATO.

Obama: But we can’t just provide moral support. We’ve got to provide moral support to the Poles and Estonia and Latvia and all of the nations that were former Soviet satellites. But we’ve also got to provide them with financial and concrete assistance to help rebuild their economies. Georgia in particular is now on the brink of enormous economic challenges.

Fiar: Tom, can you give me a hand here? Which one of these guys is the Republican? Obama, right?

Brokaw: This requires only a yes or a no. Ronald Reagan famously said that the Soviet Union was the evil empire. Do you think that Russia under Vladimir Putin is an evil empire?

Obama: I think they’ve engaged in an evil behavior and I think that it is important that we understand they’re not the old Soviet Union but they still have nationalist impulses that I think are very dangerous.

McCain: Maybe.

Fiar: What the F… Maybe? Maybe? To quote Red Foreman, You dumbass! Of course they are evil. It might not be the Soviet Union of old… Yet. But that is a big “yet.” If we don’t stop them, they will relive their glory days and more.

McCain: Depends on how we respond to Russia and it depends on a lot of things.

Fiar: Heh. You said “depends.” It’s funny because you’re old. And apparently either senile or stupid.

McCain: And our challenge right now is the Iranians continue on the path to acquiring nuclear weapons, and it’s a great threat. It’s not just a threat — threat to the state of Israel. It’s a threat to the stability of the entire Middle East.

Obama: We cannot allow Iran to get a nuclear weapon. It would be a game-changer in the region.

Fiar: So we can all agree to bomb Iran then?

Brokaw: What don’t you know and how will you learn it?

Obama: My wife, Michelle, is there and she could give you a much longer list than I do. And most of the time, I learn it by asking her.

McCain: I think what I don’t know is what all of us don’t know, and that’s what’s going to happen both here at home and abroad.

Fiar: I don’t know the difference between which one of these guys is the Republican and which is the Democrat.

Thank you, Sen. McCain. Thank you, Sen. Obama. Thank you Fiar. Good night, everyone, from Nashville.

I’m Fiar and I approve this political satire.