Veep Pick Proves McCain Puts Country Second
And Politics First

Republicans: "Sarah Palin is so Pro-Life that she keeps the duds!"

What if Geraldine Ferarro and Dan Quayle had a child? The answer is Sarah Palin, John McCain's newly minted runningmate. Palin already has a unique place in history as being the first candidate to be both woefully unqualified and selected chiefly because of her gender.

McCain's choice for Vice President matters more in this election than in those previous because he would be the oldest first-term President ever at the age of 72. Aside from his numerous bouts with cancer, men his age are known to drop dead spontaneously. Because of this, John McCain might not be able serve throughout all of George Bush’s third term. People who vote for the self-proclaimed “Original Maverick” should know that they are voting for a Sarah Palin administration every bit as much as they are voting for a McCain administration.

Palin’s light resume, her extremist views, and her history of corruption and lies are enough to make a lot of voters wonder if John McCain was in possession of all his cognitive faculty when he chose Palin to be his running mate. After all, he had met her only once and officials from his Vice Presidential search committee had arrived in Alaska to do a background check on Palin just one day before the announcement was made and the McCain/Palin yard signs printed.

McCain and Palin are now calling themselves the “The Original Mavericks” in an effort to make people forget that McCain-Bush policies have been driving the country for the past eight years. Sarah Palin is already famous for saying that she opposed building the ‘bridge to nowhere”, which is a half-billion dollar Alaskan bridge project that connected to an island with a population of less than 50 people, which has become emblematic of wasteful pork-barrel spending. By comparison, the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco was built for 400 million in today’s dollars.
But, in fact during her gubernatorial election, Palin supported the project whole-heartedly. She only rejected it after it began to provoke outrage and mockery across the nation. Worse? She kept the quarter-billion dollars of congressional pork-barrel earmarks for the bridge and spent it on other projects.

Even though there is now a broad consensus that her remarks fall far short of the truth, she hasn’t corrected herself on the campaign trail. In fact, Palin keeps repeating the same line verbatim from town to town, without any reluctance or evidence of shame. She is either oblivious to the facts or she is an outright liar.

Either way, we have had enough ignorance and dishonesty throughout the past eight years under the Bush Administration; and if you want a change in the direction of the country, John McCain and Sarah Palin are the wrong choice.

Palin, is currently under investigation for misusing her role as governor to have her sister’s ex-husband fired from the Alaska State Police, which is an amazing feat given that she has only been Governor for about a year and a half.

During her 19 months in office, Palin spent 312 days in her own home and charged the tax payers for meals and apparent business expenses, just like any other “Hockey Mom”. If you want a departure from the culture of corruption that has been emboldened by the Bush Administration, John McCain and Sarah Palin are the wrong choice.

Sarah Palin’s radical right-wing worldview is unlikely to jive with Hillary Clinton voters or anyone who might have considered voting for Barack Obama.

Palin is a global warming skeptic, which means that she does not believe that global warming exists or is man-made, despite an overwhelming evidence-based consensus to the contrary. This is a view so extreme that she is out of the touch with the top of the ticket. John McCain has in the past admitted that global warming is real phenomenon. There is no word on McCain’s position since receiving millions of campaign contributions from oil company lobbyists.

Palin is also against abortion rights in all instances, even if a woman is a victim of incest or rape. This is a view way outside the political and practical mainstream. What is even more repulsive is that Palin has allowed the McCain campaign to make a political prop out of her infant son who was born with downs syndrome. There wasn’t a single night during the Republican Convention where someone didn’t mention little Trig Palin. It’s almost as though the Republicans are saying:

“Hey America! Look! Sarah Palin keeps having children, and she is so Pro-Life that she keeps the duds!”

Because she refuses to participate in news interviews, we don’t know if Palin agrees with the assertion of the Bush administration that all contraception can be considered legally the same as an abortion. For that matter, we don’t know if she has any thoughts on anything other than moose burgers and protecting the right to hunt wolves with a helicopter.

Sarah Palin also breaks with John McCain, conventional wisdom, as well as science and reason in her opposition to life-saving medical research on stem cells. If you feel like the clash of ideologies is stymieing progress in Washington D.C. and you want more pragmatic decision makers in the White House, John McCain and Sarah Palin are the wrong choice.

The Palin pick exposes a lot about John McCain’s leadership style and decision-making process. You have to wonder if John McCain would be as equally hasty when choosing an Attorney General or a Secretary of State. The Bush years are a barely-living testament to how putting ideological purity before operational competence can sink a Presidential administration. These are the people who after all gave us Donald Rumsfeld, Harriet Meyers, and Michael “Brownie, you’re doin’ a heck of a job” Brown. And now they have given us Sarah Palin.

As Sarah Palin claims to have told Washington when it came to the “Bridge To No-Where”, tell them “thanks, but no thanks”.

The 45th President Of The United States?

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The Infidelities Of Johns Edwards & McCain
Why The Edwards Story Is Worse For John McCain

When something bad happens to a well-known leader in the Democratic Party, you might expect that the Democratic Party might suffer.

Those of us that have been paying close attention to this election have noticed that Republicans have been quick to exploit any news story that can be distorted to discredit Barack Obama. But with the Edwards story, John McCain and the Republicans are treading lightly this time.

Why? Because John McCain's vapid, shallow and crotchety campaign has been based on two things:

First, the McCain campaign is out to assassinate the character, policies and campaign narrative of Barack Obama with an alarmingly vitriolic and immature tone that more and more voters are finding repulsive.

The second part of the McCain campaign strategy is to continue his hyperbolic glamorization about his service and character. John McCain wants you to believe that getting shot down and beaten up is a qualification to lead, and that taking on populist policy positions as part of an image-making strategy after the Keating Five scandal somehow validates the assertion that he is an independent minded maverick.

There is a growing consensus throughout the voting community that John McCain’s self-manufactured image as maverick-foreign affairs guru-former fly-boy is little more than a thin marketing strategy that worked better eight years ago.

So, of course John McCain doesn’t want the public to be reminded of his character flaws, which includes his violent and vulgar temperament as well as propensity toward skank-pronging.

John McCain’s first wife, Carol waited years for her husband while he was in a P.O.W. camp. When he came home to find that the former model was severely injured in a car accident.

Despite his apparently catastrophic war injuries on the behalf of the Viet Cong, he was able to muster the strength and virility to commit hundreds of infidelities with dozens of women.

When he finally found an FWB who had extensive connections in Republican politics and who was a millionaire heiress to the Anheuser-Busch fortune, he left Carol outright.

McCain even had the audacity to get a marriage license to wed Cindy McCain, (the infamous pill-popping Stepford Wife) before his divorce with Carol was final.

So, while John Edwards was egregiously unfaithful, I’m sure McCain would like it better if the public wasn’t talking about the marital infidelities of politicians.

Especially when his character-myth is the lynchpin of his campaign narrative.

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You Get What You Deserve

Hillary Clinton, the former first lady will most likely win the Pennsylvania Primary on Tuesday, but probably not by the crushing margin she had thought six-weeks previous.

Barack Obama the Senator from Illinois is poised to win Guam, Indiana, North Carolina, Oregon, Montana and South Dakota in the weeks ahead, and by June 3 all the contests will be over. At the end of all the nominating contest he will be ahead in overall delegates, pledged delegates, the popular vote, states won, and he will still be polling better against John McCain than Hillary Clinton.

History will judge Hillary’s campaign for the White House as a failed experiment in girl-power. Looking back on the past twenty years it will be clear that the Spice Girls did more to promote a positive view of feminism and woman-empowerment than Mrs. Rodham-Clinton.

It's better for womankind though that the first female nominee for President from a major party not be the spouse of a former President. It's not just because it is a formula for defeat but because it would be regarded by the masses that the first woman to have a serious shot at the White House would only have had made things happen by virtue of nepotism and a certain sentiment of socially engineering affirmative action enabled by a certain core constituencies of the Democratic Party.

To be fair though, Hillary Clinton is in many ways a better candidate than most of the choices that were available in 2004. But in this most recent contest the fiery populist John Edwards 2008 (2.0) was a far superior product to not only the establishment hack Hillary Clinton, but also to the establishment lightweight John Edwards of 2004 (BETA). But what is most important is that Senator Barack Obama is better than them all.

It's no wonder Hillary is out for blood. She knew that in 2004 a White House run would have started in haste and ended in disaster. She would have lost as badly or worse than John Kerry. She had all along been counting on a John Kerry defeat so that she could have her time in the sun four years later. Even given the tragedy and disgrace that has ensued since November 2004, she would probably have still been crossing her fingers that John Kerry would sink his prospects of winning by eating escargot and almond-crusted brie at a Red Wings game if it could mean she had a shot at George Bush's job in 2008.

However, she didn't count on the fact that the Bush Administration would implode the way it did. Even those of us who saw it coming didn't have a clear idea about the complete clusterfuck of an economy he would leave us with and how our energy crisis would have persisted completely unabated. Nor would we have ever predicted that Hurricane Katrina would have exposed such disgraceful poverty and governmental incompetence. We didn't know that the Jihad For Jesus would have made a giant stink about Terri Schiavo leading to a repugnant and repulsive government overreach that came to be known as "Schiavo's Law". In looks as though like Iraq, which is the greatest foreign policy disaster in U.S. History, is only one part of the dystopian story that has unfolded over the past 7 1/2 years.

Because Hillary Clinton didn't count on these things, she didn't anticipate that the 2008 electorate would shift in such a way that provoked people to do more than demand a replacement for George W. Bush. Rather, they have been inspired to demand a candidate who as President could deconstruct the institutions and thwart the culture of Government that have made the failures, corruption, and malice of the Bush Administration possible. Voters at the moment seem generally wise to the fact that you can't fix the problems of establishment hackery with another brand of establishment hackery. Indeed, they finally appear wise to the fact that you can't fix your cavities by switching from Pepsi to Coke.

It is this change in sentiment that inspires Hillary to so viciously assault Barack Obama. Her blood-lust isn't inspired by an aversion to the defeat of higher ideas, but rather her own personal defeat. She probably has a good idea that she isn't going to win the nomination in 2008 and she also knows that if Barack Obama wins in November that she wont be able to run in 2012 when she will be 65 years old. And thus she understands that such a victory of her opponent would be a nail in her political coffin, as she is unlikely to pursue the White House in 2016 when she will be 69 years old. She is biting, clawing, and throwing sand in Obama's eyes every chance she can get in an effort to soften him up for John McCain in an effort to preserve the faint possibility that she might be the party's nominee in 2012.

In 1958 former candidate for President Adlai Stevenson (perhaps the Al Gore of his time) said, "people get the kind of government that they deserve". The retrospective context in the time since Stevenson made those remarks reveals them as a cruel, damning, and perhaps completely valid assessment of American Democracy and the American electorate itself.

But maybe, just maybe this time the people will get both what they deserve as well as something good. Just Maybe.

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