Gene Simmons of KISS is Konfused.

I supported John McCain for the presidency two years ago. I supported him strongly and I supported him in the summer of 2007, when nobody else would. And I was wrong.

The appeal of McCain was that for years he stood up for what he believed was right, regardless of the cost to his standing in his own party. I can't think of too many politicians who would run a primary the way McCain did in 2000. As most of you know, the way to win a primary is to convince everyone that you're even crazier than your opponent. The Senator didn't do that. He ran on a set of principles (the shameful and stupid South Carolina Confederate flag sideshow aside). It doesn't really matter if you like those principles, but you have to admire that he stood up for them.

But John McCain sold his soul in 2008. He became just another Republican, who I still supported on the premise that he was just mistakenly doing what he thought he had to to win. In the aftermath of Election Day, McCain didn't stop cowering before the idiot fringe of the GOP.

Indeed, he went even further than he did during the campaign. McCain completely abandoned any pretense of principle because he was afraid of a jabbering huckster like J.D Hayworth - long thought by his colleagues to be among the very worst congressmen in a century - and that made me wonder what Vladimir Putin would have done to McCain had he become president. Anyone willing to so thoroughly sell himself out because of someone like Hayworth lacks the fundamental character to live in the White House. That's a sad thing to say about someone I admired, but that doesn't make it untrue.

That brings me to Barack Obama and Gene Simmons. Any number of people supported Obama simply because he's black. Don't get me wrong, I was as moved as anyone else when the black cat won. There are few other countries that would do that, mine included. But few people are as willing to admit that they voted solely on the basis of Obama's race as Gene Simmons is.



Here's the thing, if your vote is freely given on the basis of something as meaningless as skin color, you pretty much deserve what you get. Obama certainly didn't go out of his way to hide the fact that he's a liberal Democrat, and it wasn't a secret that he had the thinnest resume of a major party nominee since Lincoln.

There's one reason that I haven't wasted a lot of bandwidth going crazy about the Obama administration: he's doing pretty much what I would expect a very liberal Democrat to do, and I can't hold that against him anymore than I can hold my girlfriend's dog's insistence on humping my foot against it. If you know anything about anything, you know that ObamaCare is essentially a Republican plan. It's well to the right of what Richard Nixon proposed in 1971 and '74, and it mirrors the GOP plan of '94, which no fewer 23 Republican senators sponsored. The left is right to be pissed at him, but the right isn't.

If you're Gene Simmons - a self-declared business conservative - and voted for an unqualified statist liberal simply because you liked the optics of his skin tone, you have no right to bitch now. If you thought that Obama was going to govern like Reagan, you're either stupid or kidding yourself. Barack Obama wasn't lying during the campaign and if you thought he was, that's more your problem than his. And no, you don't get your fucking vote back.

Of course, I love the current GOP meme that because an unqualified liberal like Barack Obama was elected, they can freely nominate an equally unqualified Sarah Palin without criticism. He was a community organizer (who happened to kick the ass of the GOP across the country), but she ran the People's Republic of Alaska. And she quit halfway through the gig.

Gene Simmons is an almost legendary blowhard. That's why people like me love him so much. But there's something extra-special about his saying that musicians should shut up about politics after he spent nearly five minutes talking about Obama on TV. Seriously, he should have just broken out in a musical ode to fucking inappropriately young girls.

Mostly, I'm just sad that CNN cut away before Eliot Spitzer could ask for Gene to autograph his black socks.






Lovingly stolen from Five Feet of Fury