I'm Waiting for the Expiration Sampler

Is it just me, or have the ads alongside Yahoo Mail got more and more provocative of late? Here's one that popped up (no pun intended) this morning. And while it might be a lovely idea that undie-clad Russian hotties were staring at their cellphones waiting for my ring (if I were a single man, of course), I know better. Plus it's hard to trust anyone who offers me a "free trial dream marriage." They might not get what's supposed to be the point of marriage. And anyone says marriage is a trial, just go read Sandra Tsing Loh's new Atlantic articles and be happy, I guess.

Wanna Bet We'll Long for this Level of Dirty Ad in October?

McCain's ads are so ripe it's as if they were not meant to push a candidate but instead were designed to be texts for a Stanley Fish class. Take a gander at this:



OK, done retching? Here are some of the possible messages:

1) Don't trust a politician who can draw a crowd.
2) Politicians shouldn't be celebrities (unless they have starred in movies with chimps or Brigitte Nielsen).
3) Three syllable names can be chanted. Politicians shouldn't have three syllable names.
4) Lots of Germans bad; Germans at the Fudge Haus good, especially with Lindsey Graham at your side (insert your own fudge in the closet joke here).

5) Only blond ditsy young women are celebrities.
6) Correction: and there's a youngish black guy who is one too!
7) There's a youngish black guy after our young blond women.
8) Hey, lookie here! A big black column! (Paging Mr. Freud.)
9) Now that column is rising into the frame! Is this a McCain ad 2008 or a Dole ad 2008?
10) Gas prices are soaring because we aren't drilling offshore.
11) Perhaps Obama is so popular with foreigners as they're offshore too.
12) Aw, that Obama probably won't drill for oil offshore because we won't get any of it in the 8 years he could be president. How selfish is that?
13) The only way to reduce our foreign oil dependency is to drill offshore. (We couldn't, after all, suggest there's alternative energy.)
14) Here's pre-9/11 thinking for you: New Taxes is pronounced Osama Bin Laden in Republican.
15) You know how to avoid raising taxes no matter the deficit? Fund the war that never should have happened completely off-budget. That's financial genius.
16) I'm John McCain and I'll approve of anything.
17) Or, perhaps John McCain is really Noah Cross: "See, Mr. Gitts, most people never have to face the fact that, at the right time and the right place, they're capable of... anything! "
18) No matter, for as the old-timers would say, "That's mighty white of you, John McCain."