How To Get The Barney Gumble Vote

The terms nuance, satire, racist, subtlety and flip-flopping are taking a pretty good beating this political season with the feckless news media outdoing itself in the further dumbing down of what passes for political discourse.

Barack Obama's position on Iraq is fundamentally unchanged, but every nuance of that position is attacked by supporters of John McCain as flip-flopping if it doesn't conform verbatim to what he said earlier.

The New Yorker magazine cover showing Obama as a Muslim president and knocking knuckles in the Oval Office with his AK-47-toting, Afro-coiffed wife is unadulterated satire, but is being attacked for being racist.

McCain's digs at Obama are sometimes subtlety in the finest tradition of that art form, but he is attacked by supporters of Obama, who is pretty good at subtlety as well as satire himself, as being racist.

McCain also is being unfairly criticized for flip-flopping, although he certainly is not a racist. This stems from the fact that McCain doesn't necessarily change positions on some issues, he just has multiple positions.

And so a modest suggestion for Messrs Obama and McCain from here on out: If Barney Gumble down at Moe's Bar doesn't get it, then fuggedaboutit.

Belch!!!