Gag me with a spoon, as Valley girls used to say. Did you see that McCain-Palin ad promising “tougher rules on Wall Street to protect your life savings, no special interest giveaways”? Just how dumb do they think we are?
Seriously, 20 minutes of Google searches should be sufficient to convince all but the dimwits among us that John McCain has been a master of the special-interest giveaways to Wall Street that enabled this meltdown. He voted for abolishing all of the significant rules put in place at the time of the Great Depression designed to prevent a repeat. The two main bills accomplishing that, bills which McCain enthusiastically supported, were the Commodity Futures Modernization Act and the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. The Gramm is former Sen. Phil Gramm, who was chair of the Senate Banking Committee when he acted as chief sponsor of both pieces of legislation. The same Gramm that McCain picked to co-chair his presidential campaign.
The Republicans have already turned to sick sexual innuendo and nonsense about their vice-presidential candidate, pigs and lipstick in order to distract the public from the real issues in this campaign. One of the items that should be on top of the list of real issues is Senator McCain's plans to privatize and cut Social Security.
It’s looking a lot like 1929, or as Yogi Berra, that pithy philosopher would say, “Looks like déjà vu, all over again.” Republican businessmen abhor regulations that get in the way of quick profits. They hate the government interceding in their business unless it’s to bail them out of trouble. And do they ever have a knack for getting into trouble. Driven by that base emotion greed, the corporate, left to its own devices and freed from government regulations, will screw up every time. FDR, after he began cleaning up the economic mess he inherited, got Congress to pass the Glass-Steagall Act. Republicans hate him to this day, and dream of turning the clock back before FDR’s presidency. Republicans can’t rest until FDR’s “New Deal” has been torn from its roots, and thrown on the compost pile of history. Meanwhile, the taxpayer endlessly plods along, paying for the mistakes that Wall Street and its environs so predictably make.
Sarah Palin is not qualified for high office, and she has proved it in two interviews, if you were listening, but it was equally clear eight years ago that George Bush was not qualified for high office, and many Americans were not listening.
The excitement generated around Palin is just as though America were again embracing George Bush – a younger, prettier version of the most incompetent person ever to hold the office of president, a judgment based on his actual achievement and not just my exceedingly low opinion of him.
Laura Chase, her first campaign manager, summed up: "I'm still proud of Sarah. But she scares the bejeebers out of me," said the woman who was present at her political creation.
She should scare the living shit out of the rest of us.
The more you know about her, the more it is clear that Palin resembles nothing so much as a more poorly educated, less intelligent and even more reckless version of George W. Bush.
"I could not help but notice the editorial cartoon," complains a Canadian newspaper reader, "which in my opinion was not funny or satirical at all--in the past, the purpose of an editorial cartoon." An editor at the Houston Chronicle disagrees. "The point of satire is not to be funny," he argues. "The point is to be critical."
Today's Quote:
"The zeal which begins with hypocrisy must conclude in treachery; at first it deceives, at last it betrays."
America is no longer the home of the free and the brave. It's now the home of cowards who have surrendered their freedom to fascists offering vague promises of "homeland security."
by Robert Scheer
