Jon22: The Website of Jonathan Dobres

I’m sure by now you’ve seen John McCain’s “Celeb” attack ad, in which Barack Obama is compared with vapid “celebrities” like Paris Hilton and Britney Spears. McCain’s attack implies that popularity and substance are mutually exclusive traits. The logic is asinine. To make matters worse, the ad implies that Obama’s many supporters are a gaggle of deluded, starry-eyed idiots. It’s not often that a presidential hopeful disseminates a really bad attack ad; the kind that both alienates potential swing voters and offends the base. Smooth. I haven’t seen such an ill-conceived attempt to reverse someone else’s popularity since Saved by the Bell. If this is the best the GOP can do, I’m pretty optimistic about November.

But wait, there’s more. Reality got an order of magnitude stranger yesterday when Paris Hilton released a video response to McCain’s ad. The video has blown my mind, pure and simple. Watch and follow along with me:

1. Legitimately humorous parody intro. Cue footage of the Crypt Keeper and the Golden Girls, along with a narrator saying that John McCain is “old enough to remember when dancing was a sin.”
2. Behold Paris herself: horriffic leopard-print bikini, gold heels, full wonk-eye.
3. And yet, “Then that wrinkly, white-haired guy used me in his campaign ad, which I guess means I’m running for President,” is actually pretty funny.
4. Then comes the mind-blowing part, where Paris offers up her solution to the energy crisis. It’s untenable, of course, but the fact that she could even string these words together and sound intelligent is kind of remarkable.
5. “I’ll see you at the debates, bitches.”

So, I think you can see why my mind is blown. Self-parody requires self-awareness, and I assumed that Paris Hilton had none. Now it’s that much harder to think of her as a one-dimensional trust fund brat with too much spray-tan and not enough food intake. By portraying herself at maximum superficiality, she deftly satirizes the childishness of McCain’s original ad. I approve of her message, which means I now have something in common with Paris Hilton. My mind, it is blown.