Lipstick on Which Pig?

DUMMERSTON, Vt. - This is for all of you who
are truly frightened by Alaskan Governor Sarah Palin: give it a
rest.

The corruption scandals,
Troopergate, her musings on how to ban library books, the moose
slaughter, the drill-baby-drill, the creationist stupidity, the
pregnant underage daughter and the acceptance of statutory rape as a
marriage-brokering tool, the bridge to nowhere and all the rest of it
- including the story on the front page of The New York Times on
Sunday about how she hired most of her junior high school yearbook to
run her government - well, yes, Sarah Palin reeks.

Meanwhile, the real danger of her
candidacy has been ignored. It took Frank Rich, on the Times' op-ed
page on Sunday, to point out that McCain, in his desperation to be
president, has so compromised himself that he allowed the party to
pick a running mate who is younger, stronger, more vital and more
forceful. With McCain so weak, Palin and the men who pull her strings
will take over the office of the Imperial Vice-Presidency, Dick
Cheney's operation, which is already up and running the country. The
Republicans are proposing another weak, lame presidential figurehead,
with the real power concentrated behind closed doors.

I'm not arguing that Palin wouldn't
be a real danger to what's left of our democracy, but the reality of
the 24-hour news cycle is that for every lash, there's an immediate
and equal backlash. The Palin bounce? It lasted exactly two weeks. The
news media, like so many young children stricken with an advanced case
of attention deficit disorder, is easily attracted by bright and shiny
objects.

This week it moved to
another narrative: is the second great depression coming? And if so,
when?

Every time a
large financial institution founders, the press is on it like a pack
of wolves. But they move on once they've stripped the story to the
bone. Our crumbling financial infrastructure has been crumbling for
quite some time, yet after Bear Stearns fell and Countrywide was
bought out, all we heard about was Palin, pigs and lipstick. Now these
names have returned to the news, and the names of Fannie Mae, Freddie
Mac, AIG, Merrill Lynch, Washington Mutual and Lehman Brothers are
being added to the Wall of Shame.

The crumbling of the American
economy raises many critical questions. The first, of course, is
whether our banks - and our savings - are safe. Eleven federally
insured banks and thrifts have failed this year. The Federal Deposit
Insurance Corp., which insures bank accounts and CDs up to $100,000,
is reporting that its funds have dropped below the minimum target
level set by Congress. A Treasury Dept. loan might be needed to shore
the fund up if Washington Mutual or another struggling financial
institution fails.

The Feds - using taxpayer dollars -
helped Bear Stearns in its sale to J.P, Morgan Chase & Co. They
just bailed out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Now they're shoring up
AIG. America's capital market is going up in smoke. We're still
fighting two foreign wars. Where will the money come from to bail out
the FDIC, or will the government even care? Is anyone asking these
questions?

Still, FDIC officials
have said that 98 percent of U.S. banks are still sound and well
funded. So don't panic. For now.
Given the financial turmoil, we return once again to
the political reality that it's the economy, stupid.

So how fit is
McCain to be president? This is a man who has admitted that he doesn't
know much about economics. A man whose chief economic advisor (until
he was forced to fire him) was former Senator Phil Gramm, Mr.
Enron-Loophole, Mr. "Nation of Whiners," Mr.
Reduce-Government-Oversight-on-Banking-Insurance-and-Brokerage-Activities or, in other words, the architect of what's happening
right now.

On Monday,
McCain said, "The fundamentals of the American economy are
strong." On Tuesday, forced to backtrack, he said he meant that
"American workers, the backbone of the economy, were productive
and resilient." Still backtracking, he then called the economic
situation "a total crisis" and decried the "greed"
in Wall Street and Washington. He sounded like a babbling
fool.

McCain's solution? A commission to study what went wrong.

This isn't 9/11.
We know what went wrong. The moneychangers wrecked the temple. We
don't need a commission. We need a new government.

According to James Kunstler, who writes a
well-respected if slightly profane financial blog whose title I cannot
repeat here, "The Republicans must be clearly identified as
the party that wrecked America... it's hard to imagine the
American people giving the clean-up task to the very group that
created the mess -- no matter how many cute little faces Sarah Palin
can make on TV."

Obama's strength in this campaign has always
been issues, particularly economic ones. Right now he's vague about
solutions, but he's a bright man who listens to bright advisors.

The country is
looking ito the abyss. Suddenly the bleats about lipstick on pigs,
sexism, elitism and all the other Republican tricks don't seem to mean
a thing. The campaign is back on Obama's ground - are you really
better off than you are eight years ago? And if not, who do you
blame? "The party that wrecked America," that's who.
Do you really want four more years?

Economically, legally,
morally, politically, scientifically - wherever you look, the
Republicans have failed. They've even failed with FEMA again.
Supposedly, the damage from Hurricane Ike in Texas is as bad as it was
in New Orleans, so FEMA has instituted a 2,000-foot no-fly zone to
prohibit the press from taking pictures. Brownie's successors aren't
doing a heck of a job, either.

Sarah who?