Religious fundamentalists will be the end of this country.

“I can’t imagine having a president of the United States named president OBAMA. I really have a problem with that, and I am not the only one”

“Because…that means what to you…”

“(pauses and stares into the distance, thinking. Nigger raghead-cameljockey) His background…”

Colin Powell, you are the voice of reason.

In the video in my last post, “Mr. McCain, your ass has been served to you on a platter”, Keith Olbermann accuses McCain of “tacitly inciting lunatics to violence”, because they have been calling for Obama to be killed.

McCain, all the while, has been playing the victim: “Boo hoo, congressman John Lewis compared me to George Wallace and Obama hasn’t condemned him for it.”

“He was linking you, aptly, to Gov. George Wallace’s lynch-mob mentality,” Olbermann says. He then calls on McCain to suspend his campaign if he values the security of the nation.

Now, in light of McCain’s comments in Wednesday’s debate, saying that ACORN is a threat to the “fabric of democracy,” McCain supporters are breaking into ACORN offices, stealing computers, and threatening the lives of its members.

http://www.miamiherald.com/news/politics/AP/story/730636.html

Congratulations McCain, you asshole! You have proven Olbermann right! Your supporters are dangerous, and until you get them under control, or at least get them to stop making threats on people’s lives, you should suspend your campaign.

I really hope McCain saw this.

William F. Buckley’s son announced he is voting Obama:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2008-10-10/the-conservative-case-for-obama/

and then had to leave the National Review:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2008-10-14/sorry-dad-i-was-fired

Liberals kept their shit together when Lieberman switched sides, why can’t Repubs respect a little difference of opinion?

I know only a minority of them believe the left is evil (literally), and I am all for bipartisanship, but there is usually a kernel of truth in stereotypes, and I think far more conservatives hate liberals than vice versa. Can’t we all just get along?

But then again, I guess the moment you start being tolerant, listening to your enemies, and respecting their right to believe what they do, you are giving way to liberalism

Not to say that Barack Obama’s life is anything like mine, or that leading the life of an ascetic should be required of presidential candidates, but can we at least stop pretending that the republican ticket is anything but elitist this time around?

Last night I watched Jon Stewart mock Bush’s position on the bailout. It went something like this:

(Clip of Bush at a press conference)

“I’m normally against big government, but after consulting with my advisors, I think this is the best thing to do.”

(Back to Jon Stewart)

[imitating Bush's accent] “It’s like, normally I love Jesus, but after consulting my advisors, ‘Hail Satan!’”

——

In the last couple weeks, we have witnessed republican leaders having a huge change of heart. Historically the party of small government, republicans have suddenly changed their tune, and are now singing the virtues of this bailout.

But wait just a minute! This is exactly the kind of government meddling they have been fighting all along. They have always been the party of capitalism-is-so-great-it-will-resolve-everything-if-we-just-keep-our-hands-off.

So why the apparent change in ideology? Is this just an epic flip-flop?

I don’t think so. I think that it is totally in line with what their policy has tacitly been all along: ‘fuck the poor’.

It just so happens that the market forces tend to favor the rich, and deregulation allows them to drift further in that direction. So deregulation and small government usually align perfectly with conservative ideology of coddling the rich. However, as soon as it’s in the interest of corporations/the business class/plutocrats to have BIG government (i.e. the bailout), conservatives show their true colors, and default back to ‘fuck the poor’, suspending their supposedly unswerving devotion to small government.

So what they are doing is, in fact, entirely in character.

If the economy is in the shitter and people’s houses are being foreclosed on, and nobody can afford an education or a car, the natural thing to do is to give $700,000,000,000 to a bunch of gluttonous companies right?

What if we cut out the middle man? That is to say, just abandoned the idea that by pulling economic strings, bailing out this company here, lowering that rate there, we would eventually put more money in the pockets of American citizens, and instead, we just put the money right into the pocket of the American citizens?

Nah, you can’t do that, the people didn’t earn it

Response:

1. Wouldn’t that be good; if people just had money to blow, isn’t that the kind of injection into the economy that we would want? (à la stimulus package)
2. Since when do we value companies lives over people’s lives? Why are these companies, who obviously made grievous mistakes, more worthy of a handout than a citizen? Conservatives are perfectly happy to use that “you’re on your own, if you fuck up, it’s your own fault, and the government shouldn’t help” line against citizens who are down and out, why not give the same tough love to these companies?

What if we just gave all of that $700,000,000,000 to the work force. Let’s say, people between the ages of 20-64. They make up 60% of the population (according to Wikipedia), so that is 180,000,000 people.

$700,000,000,000 ÷ 180,000,000 people = $3,889 dollars/person

That would pay off a lot of people’s credit card debt.

Or how about this, pay that money to everyone making less than $25K a year (42% of the poplulation [sad isn't it?])

They would all get $5,555. That would mean that for 2009-2010, 42% of the popluation’s yearly income would increase by 22% or more. That is a hell of a raise!

But no, people don’t deserve money for nothing. Organizations that make a handful of people obscenely rich deserve free money. But people don’t.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/25/AR2008092502171.html?hpid=topnews

From the interview with Katie Couric:

Katie: Explain to me why [being near Russia] enhances your foreign policy credentials.

Palin: Well, it certainly does. Because our…ooh…our next door neighbors are foreign countries…they’re in the state that I am the executive of. And they’re…

Katie: Have you ever been involved with any negotiations, for example, with the Russians?

Palin: We have trade missions back and forth. We, we do…It’s very important when when you consider even national security issues with Russia as Putin rears his head and …ah… comes into …ah… the airspace of the United States of America. Where, where do they go? It’s Alaska. It’s just right over the border. It is from Alaska that we send those out to make sure that an eye is being kept on, this very powerful nation: Russia, because they are right there, they are right next to, um, to our state…

—

This woman is seriously living on another planet. Did anyone ever say that Bush had foreign policy experience for governing a state next to Mexico? No, because that would have been absurd.

If Palin had any relations at all with the leaders of a nation bordering the state she governed, it was done so illegally. The constitution specifically assigns foreign relations responsiblity to the federal government.

I know I will catch a lot of hell for this, from people who like to maintain the optimism that this election will put a non-Neo-con in office, but I have to get it off my chest.

It is about time we face up to the fact that this country will never again be run by progressives. Everyone, regardless of party, is fed up with the past 8 years; the economy, the housing market, the war, and the list goes on. Yet they refuse to admit that this is directly correlated to who has been in power.

The fact that there is even a question of electing another neo-con, let alone that he is leading in the polls, just goes to show you how pointless the American political system has become.

Truthfully, I don’t think most conservatives even want this man in power: they’ve been duped. They have a legitimate right to worry about terrorism, abortion, and gay marriage, but these viewpoints have been co-opted by a party who could give a shit about them. What the Republicans’ real platform is is ‘fuck the poor’. Plain and simple.

The genius of their strategy is to do lip service to the issues people care passionately about, like family values, and protecting us from terror, so the very people who the Republicans’ policies are designed to exploit are their biggest voters.

The saddest thing is that they have somehow even managed to convince us that they are the party of patriotism. I don’t know how they pulled it off, but they did. Maybe it was by repeating the lie that progressives are unpatriotic loud enough and often enough that it became truth. I don’t know. But as long as they have a trademark on Patriotism™, there is no way you can resist them without allying yourself with Terrorists™, Muslim Fundamentalists™, the Axis of Evil™, Freedom Haters™, Mahmud Ahmedinejad™, and all of the other threats to the very existence of America™.

To quote Jack White, who was undoubtedly singing to Republicans on the topic of America:

“You’ve got her in your pocket
And there’s no way out now
Put it in the safe and lock it
’cause it’s at home sweet home”

-e

As sad as it is, Palin is a pawn. Everyone in power (the neo-cons) knows that this election is too important to leave to the candidates to debate about the issues, so they found this conveniently outrageous caricature of a person to distract us from what matters in this election: the economy and the war.

The status quo of both of these things plays to the advantage of the rich, and as they do in all elections, they make anything that might jeopardize their status a non-issue by flooding the media with other garbage.

GE for example, which owns a huge part of the American media, also furnishes our troops with supplies. It is therefore very profitable for them for us to stay fighting. Thus, they use the influence they have, namely the media, to make the war a marginal issue in this election. Just do a quick survey of the top headlines on google. Two thirds of them are about Palin’s eccentricities.

Far more interesting than issues to the American public (and these corporations know it) is the juicy gossip about nepotism, teen pregnancy, hypocrisy, book banning, inexperience, and moose meat that follows Palin.

We will be distracted by this, while McCain plots how to convince us, as Bush and Rove did, that if his party is not in power, some outside force will conquer us and drive us into a new dark age.

Don’t be fooled: Palin was not a bad choice at all. She will serve the end she was selected to further, and that is to make this election an issue of personality. Hence the renewed focus on ‘maverickness’. In the end, we will be forced to elect McCain, so he can protect us from the impending barbarian invasions.

The xenophobic fear that Republicans have instilled in us throughout the last twenty years will most certainly reincarnate itself in the last hours of this election, and will effectively nullify any lead Obama may have had based on his stand on the issues. As we can see from recent polls, Obama was far ahead in the ‘would do better with the economy’ venue, but now is trailing in that and other polls. Focus has shifted elsewhere.

This is the game they play. Obama knows it, and in the last few days has made it a policy not to mention Palin’s name at all.

We will see if his strategy pans out.