Rejoice ...and be glad!!!

"If you are tired, keep going; if you are scared, keep going; if you are hungry; keep going; if you want to taste freedom, keep going."


Harriet Tubman

Invasion of the Body Snatchers or Cher che la Femme

As we approach the final days of this endless campaign season, a new, but predictable narrative is emerging: Why John McCain is losing. It offers a meagre multiple choice. In the weeks following the Republican Convention in Minnesota, the McCain campaign ramped up its attacks on Barack Obama in ugly, unseemly ways, sneering at his educational achievements, distorting his public record, linking him with domestic terrorism, and questioning his patriotism. McCain's campaign operatives announced that this was not going to be about policy, but about personality. A deliberate, strategic decision was taken, to attack everything and propose nothing. While this is hardly surprising to many of us, it seems to have done permanent injury to the fragile egos of America's pundit class and, remarkably, to the professional politicians who regularly clutter the national stage.

"This is not John McCain," laments one talking head. "This is not the man I've known and worked with in the Senate," mourns a Democratic colleague. What's remarkable about these comments is their frequency. It's as if John McCain has been taken over by some virus. Matt Taibbi, of Rolling Stone writes an excellent and scathing piece about Karl Rove's takeover of McCain's campaign. Chris Matthews looks both wistful and demoralized even as he surrenders to the rapture and the romance of an Obama victory, and William Kristol of the NYT urges McCain to "fire his whole campaign."

But unfortunately, this IS John McCain. He hasn't changed. He's just "come out." John McCain chose the people who run his campaign. John McCain picked the advisers who develop and direct his policy positions, so he alone, is responsible. The chief of his transition team was a lobbyist whose client list included Saddam Hussein. His chief campaign operatives were instrumental in lobbying for the deregulation that directly resulted in the Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac unraveling, Phil Gramm wrote the legislation that resulted in the sub prime credit default swaps that collapsed our financial house of cards, and Charles Black, his campaign Chair, has been a lobbyist for years for big oil and the banking industry. John McCain chose these people because he wanted them. He's comfortable with them. They are his friends. He shares their views.

The vicious attacks on Obama are John McCain's. He owns them. He does very little to distance himself from them. He chastises a supporter at a rally for calling Barack Obama "an Arab" as he betrays his own prejudices, by saying he is not an Arab but, "a good, decent man." His own campaign operatives are using mass e-mails to McCain supporters linking Obama to domestic terrorists, yet he expresses outrage at Congressman John Lewis for comparing him and his campaign to the bad old days of George Wallace and some real domestic terrorists. McCain goes with what is expedient. This is the real John McCain. This is the man who makes fringe people feel so comfortable at his campaign events, that the calls to "kill him!" directed at Barack Obama, are becoming a regular feature at McCain rallies.

Interesting isn't it. As our country teeters on the verge of financial bankruptcy, in some grand, Shakespearean way, it's a metaphor for the bankruptcy of the Republican Party, especially as it is articulated by the conduct of the McCain campaign. Total moral bankruptcy is the only explanation for McCain's behavior and his choices.

Part II: Cher Che La Femme

It's always hard for politicians and pundits to say, "I was wrong." They rarely ever do. Especially the media's talking heads. So if they're forced to blame John McCain for the conduct of his own presidential campaign, they have to do it in a way that exonerates him. They accomplish this by blaming everyone around him. Which brings me to their second choice for why McCain is losing. Sarah Palin.

Credible conservative columnists are frothing at the mouth about Palin, especially as her favorable poll numbers drop. She's no longer a "breath of fresh air." She no longer "energizes the base." She is a disaster. She is, in the words of Conservative columnist David Brooks, "a fatal cancer on the Republican Party." "What was McCain thinking?" they ask. Well, he picked her. This was his decision, so he has to own it. John McCain deliberately chose Sarah Palin.

It was no accident. It wasn't that she didn't get "vetted properly." It wasn't the result of a compromise between Rove and McCain because of Leiberman, the guy John "really" wanted. Many are now saying that it was McCain's reckless and irresponsible decision to go with someone like Palin that will cost him the election. Losing, in effect, becomes Palin's fault. But it's not nearly that simple. Not even when coupled with the current unpopularity of the Republican Party and George Bush.

When the pundits point to the fact Palin's not qualified, and McCain has put the country at risk, they are only talking about the Vice Presidency. They haven't bothered to consider the broader implications of the toxic breeding ground for hate and vitriol that she and John McCain both foster and encourage on the campaign trail. While these tactics are often described as "Rovian," Karl Rove didn't invent them, and they only work because we let them. Rove may be evil, but it is John McCain's embrace of this evil that is defining him. There are consequences for these campaign excesses, too, even as we are now facing the consequences of the excesses on Wall Street. The McCain/Palin campaign has sown seeds of fear and division, of intolerance and hatred, like time bombs. If it is their intention to scare people, they've succeeded. But not in the way they intended. As McCain's poll numbers continue to plummet, it's pretty clear that a lot of average Joe's out here are terrified of the possibility of a McCain victory. Vote.

Idiot Savant?

Representative Dennis Kucinich, (D) Cleveland, Ohio on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives Sunday, September 28, 2008 as it appeared in The Nation online:

"The $700 billion bailout for Wall Street, is driven by fear not fact. This is too much money in too a short a time going to too few people while too many questions remain unanswered. Why aren't we having hearings on the plan we have just received? Why aren't we questioning the underlying premise of the need for a bailout with taxpayers' money? Why have we not considered any alternatives other than to give $700 billion to Wall Street? Why aren't we asking Wall Street to clean up its own mess? Why aren't we passing new laws to stop the speculation, which triggered this? Why aren't we putting up new regulatory structures to protect investors? How do we even value the $700 billion in toxic assets?

Why aren't we helping homeowners directly with their debt burden? Why aren't we helping American families faced with bankruptcy. Why aren't we reducing debt for Main Street instead of Wall Street? Isn't it time for fundamental change in our debt based monetary system, so we can free ourselves from the manipulation of the Federal Reserve and the banks? Is this the United States Congress or the board of directors of Goldman Sachs? Wall Street is a place of bears and bulls. It is not smart to force taxpayers to dance with bears or to follow closely behind the bulls..."

Theatre of the Absurd: A Big Campaign About Small Things

The choice of Sarah Palin as John McCain's vice presidential running mate tells us a lot about the Republican Party that we already know: They don't care about governing, they only care about winning. Secondly, John McCain and his "handlers" have their own notions about the "right kind" of woman to be our first female Vice President. Someone who will be colorful and entertaining and baldly appeal to the fundamentalists' base.

The "Feisty Reformer" is just as illusory as "Maverick." While the Republicans are busy packaging their figureheads with the goal of closing the sale, the Democrats are busy looking for people who "understand the issues," or who have the necessary "credentials." They cite the Harvard Law Review, while John McCain cites a Miss Alaska runner - up. The complicit media breathlessly describe McCain's choice as a "game-changer." They're right. But not in the way they mean it.

Too many people have serious, urgent concerns about the economy. Many of them are even Republicans. Some have expressed concern about McCain's penchant, in this campaign, to do nothing but attack his opponent, while proposing little in the way of relief, callously ignoring what the people in this country, including loyal Republicans, many of them small business owners, are facing. Some Republicans expressed hope that once McCain picked a running mate, and the convention began, things would change. We would hear some concrete proposals. McCain's pick demonstrates to them that things are trending in a different, albeit more familiar direction.

John McCain just threw a "Hail Mary " pass. The only function Sarah Palin has is to shore up the right wing, religious extremists' support for McCain. McCain's strategists also cling to the thin hope that she will attract disgruntled Hillary supporters. But to suggest such a thing is insulting. So her usefulness is limited. Secondly, there are undecided, economically distressed Republicans, and some Democrats, who have been sitting on the fence. Many of them just jumped off that fence and onto the Obama bandwagon. Finally, there were serious, moderate, practical people on the Republican side, who were hoping for Romney, Ridge, Pawlenty, or Leiberman. Their disappointment is palpable. What McCain is saying to them and to the American voters is that he will bluster his way thru the presidency, the way he's crashed thru every other important passage in his public life. There has never been a Vice Presidential nominee so singularly unqualified for this position since Dan Quayle.

Instead of demonstrating leadership and sound judgement, a steady hand in perilous times, McCain is playing to the cheap seats. He is less a maverick, then he is just an erratic, egotistical narcissist. Some people are suggesting the Democrats have to "be careful "not to attack Governor Palin. Hopefully those people won't regard a robust discussion of the issues as "attacks." This is a woman who's slender record and public pronouncements has shown that she promotes her religious beliefs as public policy. The question is whether the corporate shills in the mainstream media will do the vetting the American people need and that John McCain's campaign clearly has not done.

Sarah Palin has been governor for less then two years.This candidate who aspires to be "one heartbeat away from the presidency" of a 72 year old cancer survivor, admitted recently she didn't keep up with or know much about the war in Iraq. This woman is now the running mate of the man who admitted a few weeks ago, he didn't know much about the economy. At a time when most Americans are concerned about larger issues, I'm afraid all the Republicans are serving up is "...a big campaign about small things."

Media Darling

By Jim Rutenberg for the New York Times

WASHINGTON - The number of times Senator John McCain’s new advertisement attacking Senator Barack Obama for canceling a visit with wounded troops in Germany last week has been shown fully or partly on local, national and cable newscasts: well into the hundreds.

The number of times that spot actually, truly ran as a paid commercial: roughly a dozen.
Result for Mr. McCain: a public relations coup that allowed him to show his toughest campaign advertisement of the year — one widely panned as misleading — to millions of people, largely free, through television news media hungry for political news with arresting visual imagery.

Definitions

Arrogance - an attitude of superiority manifested in an overbearing manner or in presumptuous claims or assumptions ;

Arrogant - 1. making claims or pretensions to superior importance or rights; overbearingly assuming; insolently proud; 2. characterized by, or proceeding from arrogance: arrogant claims.