McCain's Just Desserts

Today is Sunday, 19 October 2008.

“Senator Obama is more interested in controlling who gets your piece of the pie than he is [in] growing the pie." (John McCain)

John, pies don’t grow on trees.

"John McCain thinks that giving these Americans [“the waitresses who work double shifts, the cashiers at Wal-Mart, the plumbers fighting for the American Dream”] a break is socialism. Well, I call it opportunity, and there is nothing more American than that." (Barack Obama)

On this day in 1950, died the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay (born 1892). Her poem (1931):

The Conscientious Objector

I shall die, but
that is all that I shall do for Death.
I hear him leading his horse out of the stall;
I hear the clatter on the barn-floor.
He is in haste; he has business in Cuba,
business in the Balkans, many calls to make this morning.
But I will not hold the bridle
while he clinches the girth.
And he may mount by himself:
I will not give him a leg up.

Though he flick my shoulders with his whip,
I will not tell him which way the fox ran.
With his hoof on my breast, I will not tell him where
the black boy hides in the swamp.
I shall die, but that is all that I shall do for Death;
I am not on his pay-roll.

I will not tell him the whereabouts of my friends
nor of my enemies either.
Though he promise me much,
I will not map him the route to any man's door.
Am I a spy in the land of the living,
that I should deliver men to Death?
Brother, the password and the plans of our city
are safe with me; never through me
Shall you be overcome.