I’m not normally one to encourage John McCain to make a change that would help his campaign, as I’ve made it pretty clear to regular readers here that I lean left, but he desperately needs to stop using the phrase “my friends”. It comes out of his mouth in just about every other sentence during his stump speeches and, frankly, I shudder every time he says it. During last night’s debate, for example, McCain uttered the words “my friends” nineteen times. He said “my friends” more than he mentioned the middle class, health care, energy, deficit, debt, and change — combined. I know he isn’t going to read my humble and insignificant blog, but someone needs to get across to him, for the sake of his dwindling political career, that referring to his audience as “my friends” makes him come across as sleazy. It is the kind of phrase you expect to hear at a used car dealership, flea market, or pawn shop, where someone is trying to sell you something whose value is clearly less than the price they’re pushing. The argument can be made that what the presidential candidates are doing is selling themselves to the American people, but any good salesman knows that you don’t get happy repeat customers with sleazy tactics. That said, for the sake of his stump speech and so that I can stop cringing whenever I watch the news, someone close to him needs to tell John McCain to stop saying “my friends”. In fact, I have typed the words “my friends” fewer times in this post about John McCain excessively using the term “my friends” half as many times than he said “my friends” in last night’s debate.

He’s visibly full of shit when he refers to voters as his friends, so do you want to know who his friends really are? Here’s the answer: