As I listen to conservative commentators, it sounds like they would actually prefer to take the country back into a gigantic depression rather than admit that the Obama plans have pulled the country and the world out of a tailspin. They would rather pay down the new debt and create a world-wide financial disaster in order to show the world that they won’t tolerate “too big to fail”. They really appear not to understand macro-economics, and appeal to the least informed members of society by using horrid slogans that inflame the masses rather than using sound thoughtful reasoning to make sense of things. It’s patently clear that they hate the president, all liberals in general, and above all, they hate the fact that they can’t get their way all the time.

But when it comes to war funding, they are the first to say, yes, let’s spend more money in Afghanistan and Iraq. Why is that? To me, it exemplifies the conservative mindset: they scare easily! It’s a thoughtless instinct rather than a clearly stated plan. And of course, since conservatives are mainly business people, they also see fat personal financial windfalls out there in the middle east. As we all have come to learn, most of the war funding has ended up in the hands of the enemy and the private contractors. This stupid war has gone on way too long with dismal results and we have wasted precious money on greed, corruption and private enterprise. Why are they supporting that?

Just last night I heard a senator say that we should change the constitution regarding our immigration policy. He wants us to change our citizenship rights. The founding fathers decreed that anyone born in the US is a legal citizen. This senator argues that the founding fathers didn’t recognize what is happening today: illegal immigrants are having babies, who are entitled to citizenship under the constitution. Does he have a point?

Here’s the rub: when it comes to gun laws, conservatives say we simply cannot change the constitution, because it is a sacred document. We cannot argue that the founding fathers didn’t recognize what could happen 200-some years later: guns in the hands of gang members, thousands of American deaths each year due to some form of domestic violence or accident, hot heads shooting up the workplace, and children bringing guns to school. The founding fathers couldn’t fathom such things happening. I think they might want to clarify what they meant by a “well armed militia”. Long before now, there should have been an amendment to the constitution clarifying that the founding fathers meant citizen-soldiers who are defending the USA should be well armed, NOT that ordinary citizens have the right to walk into a school building and kill off the teacher and their class-mates because they were angry at them.

When you look at the constituent base of the conservatives compared to the constituents of the liberals, the game is over. It’s the uneducated, the religious zealots, the racists and the unhinged, plus the big business fat cats just wanting to make a buck at any cost versus the educated thoughtful rational people.  And what an interesting game it has become.

As far as I’m concerned, the best man won the contest, and the runner-up in my opinion was Hillary. She might have been nearly as good a president as Obama has turned out to be. The Republicans really didn’t have a strong candidate in McCain. That’s really evident in this book, but I think we all knew it beforehand. His time to run had come and gone. He probably would have made a better president than Bush, but of course, that’s not saying much. My cat could have done a better job as president with a one of those “yes-no eight balls” then Bush did.

Then came Palin, and about a week after bringing her into the mix, the Republican handliers knew they had made a really big mistake there too. The most remarkable thing in the book is the retelling of the part that Palin played in the game. She was unteachable as far as policy was concerned, she knew nothing about American history, geography, or economics. But she was really good at being the nastiest, most vitriolic  candidate in the field, and probably the dirtiest political player I can remember. She was asked to do what she did and she did it with relish, even embellishing her role at times by adding nasty stuff and big lies that made McCain angry at her. He even tried to do damage control at times, sticking up for Obama when the rhetoric got out of hand. But she will be remembered as McCain’s running mate, and if he loses this next senate election, it has to be due in part to some of the disasters in his campaign.

But we can point fingers and pin most of the anger, hatred, and anti-government nonsense that’s going on today directly on Palin. She is definitely a “know nothing” about politics, but she really knows how to toss out lies and incite the unhinged. She believes that god is telling her to do these things, which puts her in the same category as the radical terrorist groups who profess to be doing god’s will too. This will also be one of the legacy’s of the McCain campaign. He found this monster and set her loose among us.

Pretty scary stuff, if you ask me.

1. Dismantle those dreadful health-care programs that Obama is so proud of.
2. Take the Tarp money away from all the banks and let them fail. Dog-gone it, there is no such thing as “too big to fail”. Just let them fail, who cares! Conveniently forget that it was the banks that failed in the Great Depression and in the four years of the Hoover administration, nothing occurred to help the US economy. It was only when FDR arrived on the scene that things started to get better.
3. Same for car companies, take that Tarp money away from them too. Who needs car companies if they can’t make it.
4. Use that Tarp money to pay down the national debt, or least the debt that Obama created. The 7 Trillion that Bush spent is sacred and doesn’t need to be repaid.
5. Dismantle the Green Revolution. Don’t do anything to curb global warming because as we all know, it’s just a hoax concocted by liberal eggheads who really have no clue about what’s actually going on.
6. Also conveniently forget that it was Bush who got us into the mess in Iraq and Afghanistan in the first place and left a monumental fuck up for Obama to fix. Complain loudly about the cost of the war.
7. Declare torture as legal as long as you call it something else.
8. Once and for all, take away the right of women to have abortions, even though it is in fact a constitutional right. At the same time, keep misinterpreting the constitution with regard to guns, claiming that individuals, including gangs and gun nuts, are in fact well armed militiamen, which is what the constitution calls for: a well armed militia. To Republicans, gangs are well-armed militias. However, don’t ask who they might be protecting.
9. Give big tax breaks to big businesses who have managed to overcome all odds and are now back in business making huge profits without the need to rehire old employees. They deserve to keep everything they make.
10. The model city for this administration will be: Detroit. Housing prices are extremely low and there are plenty of jobs in Detroit for private security firms to protect well-to-do neighborhoods. Also on the horizon more work is planned — digging moats and fences to protect those neighborhoods. As soon as the fence building is complete along the Texas border with Mexico they will start on the Detroit fences and moats, alligators will be optional.

There’s more:
11. Combine church with state. Down with democracy, up with theocracy. Oh, and dash of hypocrisy too. Put God in charge but don’t forget who pays the bills for the GOP to stay in power: big business, big oil, big pharma, and of course, the ever-lovin’ NRA.
12. There doesn’t seem to be any plan for the future, there are no ideas about how to solve the depression (the new one just created when the banks fail), or unemployment, or the state of the rest of the world, but nobody expects us to. After all, we’re the Party of No. We don’t think ahead, and we don’t care about “others”, only stupid liberals do that.

And finally, thinking about the next presidential election, recreate the glory of the Bush years by running Sarah Palin for president, Rush Limbaugh for VP and Glen Beck for Secretary of State or Defense or maybe both.

So, if all of this really resonates with you, hurry up and join the nearest Tea Party. You are a tried and true Republican. If, however, it makes you sick at heart, you are probably a liberal.

I can’t wait for the day that the internet finally becomes a little more civilized. But you know what that means — more rules, more enforcement of rules, forces in control making people behave themselves like good citizens. Maybe then, I won’t have to spend time deleting all these foul messages.

The Phantom

And then, of course, there’s Sarah’s personal stuff. In an interview today on NPR a gushing Alaskan delegate to the Rep convention said: well, she has raised five children. RAISED FIVE CHILDREN? What? One of them is only four months old, and a special needs child. I hardly call a four month old special needs child to be already raised. Won’t that little boy need to see his mom once in a while? And of course the other problem is Sarah’s pregnant seventeen year old. Where was Sarah when she was about to be sexually active? Off doing politics somewhere. Nobody was around to tell her what’s what. Of course, Sarah is against sex ed, especially in schools. I guess she must be against sex ed at home too. (Hello, Sarah, it is possible to raise little girls to grow into mature women who don’t accidentally have a baby.) Who is going to help that child-woman through what will definitely be a difficult pregnancy? She will probably be delivering it in January, Sarah could possibly be at the swearing in ceremony, not in the nursery helping her daughter and first grandchild (to say nothing of her own baby). Who will teach her how to be a mom? Sarah? I doubt it. Sarah wasn’t there for her daughter and she won’t be there for the rest of the family. As far as Sarah is concerned, her family is already raised. She has moved on to bigger things.

And then the other idea that the Reps are trying desperately to float is how much they embrace pregnant teenagers. Another one said today, again on NPR, that all families have the pregnancy problem. What? I had no idea that all the Reps families are so prolific. We all know they are anti-abortion, and against sex ed in school, but I thought they were pro-marriage, especially between a man and a woman. That means, obviously, between seventeen year olds too. Sarah is quick to point out that the seventeen year olds will be getting married soon. As if that will solve all their problems.

Of course, the reps tradationally ignore those unwed moms’ babies after they get out of the womb. They want to deny them access to day care, to health insurance, they would even deny school lunches if possible. The poorest people in the USA today are children, especially those of single moms. And poor families have a hard time making a living on the minimum wage, even though the dems wrung some money out of them after years and years of stone walling that responsibility. But according to Sarah, they will be married. But what do they know about being parents? What did Sarah teach them? Will either of them work? Will they be independent or will they be living in Washington, where the “help” will help raise these children?

And then there’s McCain. What was he thinking? Even though the reps are denying it, I don’t think they looked past Sarah’s winning smile when they decided to choose her. There are plenty of qualified reps that are willing and able to take on the job of VP. Isn’t it sort of a slap in the face to them to choose somebody like Sarah Palin? It seems pretty scary to me to think that McCain could make such an unwise choice for a running mate. He wanted to be daring, he wanted to do something that would take our minds off of the dems. (Of course, there is presidence for goofs in choosing VPs: remember little Danny Quail?)  I give you that Sarah is a smart and successful woman, but what about the price she is paying? I’m sure her family is very proud of her, but it really doesn’t look good for her family or for our country to have a person like her so close to the White House. She, like McCain, suffers from a serious lack of good judgment. And worse, McCain obviously thinks that VP is a job that really doesn’t matter in the long run.

Lots of people watch the races AT THE TRACK. Maybe 100,000 folks on a good day attend these spectacles of boredom, watching cars running in circles trying to go nowhere faster than the car behind them, while they breathe polluted air and grow deaf as the speedsters roar by. Say there are 30,000 spectator cars and trucks at the track, and they drive an average of 25 miles to get to the track - some drive lots more, some less of course but for the sake of argument: that would be about 750,000 miles driven by the spectators. Say they average 15 miles per gallon. That gives us another 50,000 gallons of gas burned up in one day on this one race track. Isn’t that rather appalling!

And we could probably add another 50,000 gallons of gas when we consider all those trucks, trailers and RVs littering the center of the oval, all those camp followers drive thousands of miles every week, burning up the roads between tracks all over the country.
I’d love to be able to factor in the amount of pollution rising into the sky from the exhaust pipes, from the burned up tires and brake pads. I wish I could factor in the amount of sewage generated in one spot by all those people, the time wasted getting there, sitting there and then getting back home, the amount of junk food that’s eaten and the pile of garbage that is generated by those 100,000 people. It boggles my mind.

While this is horrendous waste of our country’s valuable and scarce resources are being burned up this afternoon, thoughtful and worried people around our country are trying to figure out how to save a mile or two while driving to run errands, are car pooling to work, spending lots of extra time using public transportation, doing whatever they can not to use an extra drop of gas. People are switching to more fuel efficient cars, are taking their lives in their hands bicycling and riding scooters to work, while wringing their hands at the rising cost of fuel. People are asking questions like: should I turn off my car’s engine while waiting at the red light? Should I drive more slowly? Should I, gulp, buy a hybrid?

And have you noticed that the news commentators are still talking about four dollar gas, as if that’s something awful. In California it has reached five dollars in many places.

Meanwhile at the track, the tracksters and speedsters simply raise the ticket prices to pay for the added expense and give no thought at all to what this sport is doing to our country.

Speaking of statistics, we have to recognize that some countries do not keep track of their murders: countries in Africa principally. Among the places in the world that do keep track of murders is Puerto Rico. That’s the only place with a higher murder rate than the US, but we own them! So they are really us.

Guns are the big culprit. Nations without guns have fewer deaths. If we eliminated the guns, murderers would have a harder time killing their victims. Yet we are too afraid to even try to get some of the guns off the streets. Unfortunately, our new hero, Obama, said the other day that he would do nothing about the gun problem.

It’s depressing, isn’t it?