Because OT Posts are SO MUCH More Interesting than MM These Days

Two things:

First, I was thinking this morning in the shower about how Obama and Bush pare kind of similar in a way.

(ducks)

No no no, NOT LIKE THAT. What I mean is, in 2000 Bush played himself as a "compassionate conservative," essentially trying to say "yeah, I'm conservative but not too far out there" all the while sending signals to his base that he was, in fact, way way out there.

Obama has also presented himself as a left-leaning centrist, but, me, I'm pretty optimistic that he's a lot more liberal than he's been campaigning on and that upon entering the Oval Office Obama will rip the mask off and show the world just how liberal he really is, just like Bush did in 2001. I'm guessing a lot of other people further to the left feel somewhat similarly.

The fact that I hated Bush for pulling that shit but am almost banking on Obama to do the exact same thing is one of the biggest bits of hypocrisy I've ever noticed in myself, and I'm going to spend most of today thinking about it, I guess. (Update: I wrote the draft for this post this morning and then spent the rest of the day preparing my cryostat for a bake-out and pump down, completely forgetting to my early morning revelation. Damn you, grad school!)

Second, in a bid to become the next big "political analyst" I'm going to make this prediction about the election. I STAKE MY REPUTATION ON on the declaration that almost all of the polls will be wildly wrong. It's hard to say in which direction, but I'm guessing that Obama wins by an even larger margin than anticipated. Note my reputation is staked on the first claim. I'm not so sure about the latter claim.

If I'm right, I expect to be hired by the New York Times by the end of the week.