You Have GOT To Be Kidding

Maybe this is kinda insider baseball stuff, but it turns out that if you look closely at the Rick Davis axis of campaign managering, the McCain campaign, chronically short of cash, has been cheating itself. Kind of like a kleptomaniac walking through his own house and pocketing stuff.

And how did that work out?

"One senior McCain adviser said the entire flap could have been avoided if the campaign had resisted attacking Barack Obama for his ties to two former Fannie Mae executives, which prompted the media to take a second look at Davis. 'It was stupid,' the adviser said. 'A serious miscalculation and an amateurish move.'"

That Didn't Take Long

The Republican argument now is that, no matter how much experience Obama gets, or what he accomplishes, or how much he knows, there's something about him that means he will never be as qualified as Sarah Palin to be President.

Gee, I wonder what that "something" could be?

Well, I've heard a duck fart underwater before. That "something" is the fact that he's black. They're racists, and deserve to be called racists. Don't try that argument on me, Mr. Republican, or I'll give you a mouthful.

Out Here in the Third World...

Yes, Sarah Palin is ignorant and quite possibly aphasic. But remember, she's a cultural fit for a third-world country like the US, where people believe in witches, take orders from their church, and think Eva Peron still lives.

Over the past eight years especially, we've become third-world. We export commodities. Half of our land is owned by 1% of the people. There's always twenty countries better than us on healthcare, nutrition, housing, or education, and usually more like 40 countries if you measure that many.

In spite of living in urbanized areas, we're not an industrialized democracy anymore. McCain is a clumsy emulation of the military dictator who seizes power and Palin is his wacky Peron sidekick, the American version of the Catholic church in South America that supports the oligarchy. And we're well on the road to being as poor as Brazil and Argentina have been for two centuries. It may seem funny to watch, but it's also a very serious business.

The Palin Plan For Prosperity

The Plan: Take $26 million of somebody else's money and build a road to a spot, far from the bright lights, where teenagers can park. Provide teens with cars but no contraception. Hilarity ensues, along with drinking, drugs, sex, babies, slasher movies, or perhaps- all of the above.

Doin' The Short Form

It's becoming obvious that the Bush gang, far from trying to "shore up the markets", was trying to pull off the biggest bear move in history- to scare the markets into total failure by saying that unless $700 billion was provided immediately our financial system would crash. With a neat little provision enclosed giving Paulson absolute power and immunity from the law, they were trying to spook the herd.

Kevin Drum found the neat chart about bailouts, and links to details at the original source.

You will note that John McCain was involved in the S&L swindle as a co-conspirator, that his campaign manager collected over $2 million from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for his work defeating regulation and oversight, and as Chairman of the Commerce Committee McCain was directly involved in the wrong legislation and oversight that resulted in the other financial failures. Probably nobody else in the US can claim to have been so directly involved in every major financial disaster of the past twenty years. You're doing a heckuva job, Johnnie.

It's Not A 'Tragic Mistake'

At the end of the Vietnam War Americans began referring to it as a 'tragic mistake'. It was not a 'mistake', it was an unprovoked attack on democratic government that degenerated into a pogrom with the intent of murdering Vietnamese society by bombing.

And the current debacle is not a 'crisis', it is a robbery in progress. A hundred years ago every major railroad in the country was pulling the same scam; the victims then were the small shareholders. Since then, the taxpayers have become the small shareholders, now expected to gratefully cough up a trillion dollars so the upper classes can rest assured that things will continue unchanged. It's disaster capitalism come home to roost, and we're about to take another big slide down to third world status. To us, it's a crisis, to them, it's Christmas.

Lord of the Pants

We're So Over That

The Vietnam War was a chance to burn off the WW II surplus ordnance and keep the Baby Boomers off the labor market. When those goals were accomplished and the war looked like a mid-term political disaster for Nixon's second term, it was over, or rather, reduced to a political vendetta called the Drug War.

The war in Iraq was about contracts, munitions sales, and making George Bush a war hero and dictator. Mission accomplished, except for that "hero" part. The war that our war economy and the Republicans need doesn't need to be in any specific place. Time to 'move on'.

When asked how he felt about leaving Iraq, a British trooper said "What's the fucking difference? They'll just send us off to fight some other bloody war."

And that's the bottom line.

What Are They Taking?

Apparently the Republicans have been huffing until they're ready to sail off the edge of the world.

According to McCain, electing a black man President would be just more of the same, but electing an old white millionaire male President would be exciting change.

What kinds of drugs is he on, anyway?

And Sarah Palin thinks electing an experienced and capable Senator for VP would be just more of the same, but electing a lying small-town sack-of-shit "Christian" demagogue, the kind of person we moved to the city to escape from, would be exciting change.

At the bottom line, the Rs are hoping their racist war-mongering "Christianity" will carry them over the finish line one more time, and to hell with the good of the country. It's not a very inspiring message.

I was about to say that McCain now has a bunch of 'supporters' who are wishing for his speedy death (after he wins the election, natch), but, as immortalized in the Slog, one of McCain's 'Christian' supporters has already said it.

Here's mud in your eye, John!

A Bunch of Damn Lies

Republicans say that Sarah Palin working as Governor is just the same as Hillary Clinton. Except, of course, Clinton's daughter is in one of the best British colleges, and Palin's daughter, still in high school, is pregnant. There'll be a wedding soon, when they find the shotgun.

Common sense would declare "Game over" right here, but because we're being told not to discuss Palin's family life, I'm going to say we have a duty to discuss Palin's family life. She wants to make birth control illegal and "abstinence" the only sex ed taught in the schools. That is to say, she wants to spend public money paying religious groups to push their failed doctrines in the public schools. So much wrong here.

She ran for mayor on the platform that right-wing Christians should be able to deny everyone else in town their civil liberties. One of her first acts as Mayor was to demand the resignations of all city department heads, to prove their loyalty to her. She didn't understand that their loyalty, in fact, should be to the citizens, the town charter, and the U.S. Constitution, in whatever order, but not to the Mayor.

If I had been asked to name, say, 80 million people who could be the next Vice President of the US, Sarah Palin would not have been on that list.

And we have a right to ask- do you think high school girls should become pregnant? If not, why are you pushing a program that guarantees that result? If you do, why did you slash funding to a residential center for pregnant and new mom teens? Or are you just a bad parent, somebody who should be getting counseling from the social services of Alaska?

These are just a few of the questions we have a right, and a duty, to ask.