As the nation's attention keeps skipping from the financial meltdown to the presidential election and back again, nothing serves as a more apt metaphor for John McCain's campaign right now than the state of the markets and the popular response to it.
It is no longer
our economy but our democracy that is in peril. It was the economic
meltdown of Yugoslavia that gave us Slobodan Milosevic. It was the
collapse of the Weimar Republic that vomited up Adolf Hitler. And it
was the breakdown in czarist Russia that opened the door for Vladimir
Lenin and the Bolsheviks. Financial collapses lead to political
extremism. The rage bubbling up from our impoverished and
disenfranchised working class, glimpsed at John McCain rallies,
presages a looming and dangerous right-wing backlash.
Senator John McCain has become notorious for playing the POW card in his campaign for the presidency, as if that somehow qualifies him for the job. But, in McCain's case, I think his status as a former POW would actually detract from his ability to lead this nation effectively.
You see, he doesn't seem to have recovered from his POW experience, or the Vietnam war in general. He seems to be lacking closure. And this appears to be affecting his foreign policy.
Call it, what, our crapshoot democracy?
The looming election - the process itself, not merely the feints and jabs of the candidates - is actually getting some mainstream media attention, as in, ahem, voting public, excuse me, but maybe you should be aware that irresponsible self-interest has been detected in the vicinity of our polling places and some bad choices have been made lately (electronic voting is unreliable) and, well, how badly did you want your vote counted?
For weeks now the liberal media has been waxing incredulous at John McCain's stunt of a running mate. Righteously they decry her unpreparedness for potentially holding the most powerful office on earth; aghast, they witness the irony that such a specter should act as a tonic on the Republican ticket.
More astonishing, though, is this incredulity itself.
The reviews are in, and the latest U.S. presidential debate, the "town hall" from Nashville, Tenn., was a snore. One problem is that in a debate it is important for the debaters to actually disagree. Yet Sens. Barack Obama and John McCain substantively agree on many issues. That is one major reason that the debates should be open, and that major third-party or independent candidates should be included.
The entire world is, apparently, full of whiny no-good commie liberals.
It's true. This is the only logical conclusion, the only way you
can possibly parse the piles of (largely unscientific, but still pretty
damn convincing) numbers and data and full-blown emotional
consciousness now pouring in from all over the world, pumping our
little presidential election full of all sorts of cosmic meaning and
profundity and oh-my-God-can-it-be-true.
Ever since Andrew Johnson welcomed the New York Mutuals to the
White House in 1867, presidential politics has exploited professional
sports. It's a foolproof way for politicians to show voters they enjoy
competition, fair play and are salt-of-the-turf Americans.
I am not a conventionally religious man, or even a very superstitious one, but I do wish George Bush would stop asking God to bless America. Every time he does, we seem to be visited with another plague, suggesting divine wrath over our president's evil ways. How else to explain the persistent calamity that has marked this administration: a pointless but very costly war over nonexistent Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, the devastating New Orleans flood, the betrayal of the nation by the money-changers-from Enron to Goldman Sachs-that Bush welcomed into the temple of the White House?
If you have decided to vote for a third party candidate for president, or not to vote at all, because you can't stand voting for the "lesser of two evils," this message is for you. Though I'm supporting Obama and the Democrats, I understand and respect your choice.
