You kids, get off my lawn!

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

When I was a kid growing up we had a guy who lived at the end of our street we all called "old man Wilson" (the names have been changed to protect the innocent, namely me).  You know this guy. We all knew a version of old man Wilson growing up.

Old man Wilson was this cantankerous old coot who always seemed to be angry.  He never had a kind word to say to his neighbors, not even a friendly "hello."

The kids in my neighborhood had the advantage of a spacious cul-de-sac at the end of the street that we used as a ball field for baseball or football.  Every once in awhile a ball would get away from us, and it would roll or bounce up into old man Wilson’s manicured lawn.

That’s when the hostage negotiations began.  No one wanted to go get the ball from old man Wilson’s yard.  "You go get, you threw it." "Nah-ah, you didn’t catch it, you go get it!" This give and take would go on for a few minutes until we all decided to settle it by a democratic election of rock-paper-scissors.  This would take several more minutes until we had elected our representative. 

By now we were all convinced that old man Wilson was spying on us, peering through the slightly-open blinds in his window.  Our elected representative would stealthily walk onto old man Wilson’s manicured lawn like he was Kwai Chang Kaine from Kung Fu to retrieve the ball, believing that he also was somehow invisible.  But without fail, as soon as our elected representative picked up the ball, old man Wilson would throw open his door and come out yelling at the top of his lungs: "you kids, get off my lawn!"

This was when our elected representative, ball in hand, would turn and run by the rest of us like he was the roadrunner in one of those Looney Tunes cartoons.  The rest of us, temporarily frozen by fear for the life of our elected representative, looked at each other and collectively yelled "run!" as we closely followed behind the heels of our elected representative.

I tell this story only because I was reminded of old man Wilson on Tuesday night.  John McCain, appearing as "the creature from the lime jello salad," delivered a speech which has been universally criticized by political pundits on both the right and left alike.  Watching McCain speak, there was something uncomfortably familiar about him that I just couldn’t quite put my finger on, and then it suddenly came to me – old man Wilson!

John McCain has managed to define himself as that cantankerous old coot who always seems to be angry.  John McCain has defined himself as old man Wilson who was always yelling at us kids to "get off my lawn!"

And nobody likes that guy.