Obama Missed Chances to Degas McCain

Barack Obama missed two great opportunities last night to pitchfork John McCain:

When McCain gimped around the debate stage warning “My Friends” that because of Wall Street’s financial constipation and panic “we’re gonna hafta cut back on entitlements,” Obama failed to point out that McCain means cutbacks in Social Security and Medicare–the two biggest entitlement programs after those dosing bankers and generals with hundreds of billions of borrowed bucks.

McCain certainly does not mean putting the rich and military on dollar diets. He is rich and he has been military. He would not spit in the fountains from which both classes suck their elixirs of life.

No, he means putting fogies like me on food stamps by cutting back Social Security and into pine boxes early by cutting back on our medical care.

Obama let these pass. Too bad. Many of McCain’s supporter are geezers living at or near poverty (one of the great American towns) and depending on government-paid docs to keep them walking and talking.

(McCain is still talking but his shuffling and the growing hump on his back makes one wonder about his arthritis.)

Obama missed another chance to pish McCain’s balloon when in the heat of Wall Street's self-immolations McCain avoided intoning what has been Republican mantra until just the past couple of weeks: Change Social Security to cause each sweating for wages to plop her payments for Social Security into the dry palms of Wall Street stock jockeys. These would have, for a fee, invested her financial future in such sure things as Lehman Brothers, Washington Mutual, AIG and other outfits that since Labor Day have gone bellybutton up.

Had McCain and Bush had their way on Social Security last year or the year before, most working Americans would have thrilled in the past week to see their Social Security deposits evaporate.

Obama missed these opportunities. Like McCain he instead dropped worm-size tidbits from stump speeches into the maws of onlookers. Neither candidate had anything new to say.

Fortunately for Obama, McCain shambled around the stage, looking the old man he is, while Obama, still lithe and fit, appeared upright, calm and assured.

Presidential elections to date (all between white men) have shown that the candidate who appears taller will win. If the candidates appear the same height, then the candidate who seems to have the most hair will win.

(A smart candidate, from the start of campaigning, will stand upright, wear elevator shoes, be trim and hide his pate under an excellent toupee.)

Obama seems taller, trimmer and more hirsute and upright than McCain. But in this election there enters Obama’s skin. In America, black trumps white. If like Obama you’re half white and half black, you’re black--and subject to the white citizenry’s prejudices.

Prejudice against black as opposed to prejudice for height and hair may put McCain and his intellectual mentor, Sarah Palin–one in dotage and the other a dolt-- in charge of the nation and the health of the world. We would have the depressing in charge of the depression. That truly would be the holistic pits.

Palin Polishes Her Skills as a Liar

Sarah Palin may be as ignorant of foreign policy as a malamute pissing on a Wasilla telephone pole, but she knows how to snarl and snap and lie–for which in Alaska she has earned a reputation as a first-class practitioner of prevarications and back stabbings.

Along with other Republican pit bulls with and without lipstick Palin Saturday accused Barack Obama of “palling around with terrorists who would target their own country.”

She said it twice about Obama’s knowing a founder of the Weather Underground who led that organization when Obama was eight years old in Hawaii. Obama, it seems, lives in the same Chicago neighborhood, served on a charity board with the alleged terrorist, now a professor at the University of Illinois in Chicago who long before Obama was old enough to vote became an ordinary liberal.

So far Palin has lied to Americans with a wink-wink and leer about the Bridge to Nowhere, which she hustled for but now says she stopped. She never mentions that as Alaska’s governor she has the state now building the Road to Nowhere, which will stop where the Bridge to Nowhere would start. It’s an old political ploy in Alaska, my home state, to build a road to where a bridge must be built and then say, see, we need a bridge or otherwise the road is a waste. She implied she sold a governmental jet on E-Bay; she didn’t, she gave it away to a campaign supporter. She said she welcomed a legislative investigation into whether she canned the head of Alaska’s State Troopers for not firing her hated ex-brother-in-law; she refuses to testify in that investigation and has ordered her staff and her husband, a yokel known in Alaska as “First Dude,” not to testify. The list goes on.

Palin’s Republican handlers, headed by one of Carl Rove’s chief henchmen, know that a giant smear campaign has started against Obama, thanks to the rich reactionaries who fuel the Republican Party’s private efforts to win and stay in office and damn the truth or anything like the truth. Palin is their resident Barbie Doll to wrap around the big lie. Soon she’ll be yowling that Obama is Beelzebub and Satan’s Mother.

Well, her handlers have finally found one thing she’s good at: Slander.

And what about that guy she’s allowing to run with her, John McBush, the self-anointed hero and self-baptized truth teller? Will he snap her garters and tell her to stop fibbing about Obama?

Damned unlikely. It’s plain he will do anything–anything at all–to be president of the United States and finally outrank his daddy, the admiral, including choosing a nincompoop like Palin to run for vice president on the Know Nothing ticket.

That choice alone and her obvious incompetence at anything except ruining reputations speaks to how we must overhaul the way we elect presidents and vice presidents. McBush and Palin are beginning to make Caligula look like a statesman.

Obama-McCain Do the Gonna, Gotta, Hafta Cha-Cha-Cha

When last night the debate between Barack Obama and John McCain piddled to its soporific end, I shuddered with dread–dread for pronunciation of English among the ruling classes in the United States.

“Gonna.” “Gotta.” “Hafta.” “Tuh.”

Two U.S. senators, one with a law degree from Harvard and the other with a degree from Annapolis, speaking with the commonplace accents of high-school sophomores after a few drags on a joint.

“Tuh” for “to” of course now slogs the tongues of those who don’t wish their speech to stand out from those changing tires or tossing hotdogs at stock-car races. “Tuh” hallmarks the speech of the present grease monkey in the White House, who despite his East Coast private-school and Yale educations now drools a quaky hick-Texas accent for the rest of us to try to translate.

“Tuh” also flops from the lips on TV of the richly suited former sports jocks gabbling forth endless details on the differences between crotch pieces for hockey and for volleyball and professional badminton.

How long will it take before American dictionaries offer “tuh” as an alternative for “to?” Just as long as it takes for lexicographers to recognize that most of the population cannot look up that preposition without first hunting for “tuh,” the only pronunciation they know.

“Gonna” for “going to” has even passed into newspaper writing and headlines. It won’t be long before “going” in the conjugation charts and dictionaries simply will show as “gon’.”

“Gotta” for “got to” (whatever happened to “must” and “should?”) peppered last night’s first head-to-head between Obama and McCain.

So did, lord help us, “hafta” for “have to.” None of these pronunciations will show spelled out in the transcripts, of course. Transcribers have a way of cleaning up sloppiness.

Is that all horrified ears could mark in what was supposed to a universe-shaking event, the clash of two political gladiators in the great arena of the American mind as conveyed by TV?

No, one could also hear no original ideas, no witty utterances, no humor, no epigrams, no semblances to oratory or formal rhetoric. The two senators to me sounded like two TV sports jocks hustling each other over luge statistics without the benefit of beers.

Yes, I know supporters on both sides swooned as one or the other senators dribbled forth bits cut, steamed and canned for and from former speeches.

I didn’t. I found both boring, commonplace and neither showing the slightest signs of rising out of the treacly trench of presidential campaigning.

Did last night show me one is more equipped than the other to preside over the government of the U.S.? No. Alas. I will vote for Obama because I cannot abide McCain and other Republicans, but I will vote without much hope for inspired leadership or good pronunciation.

Witches Banned When Palin's Around

This morning, after watching Sarah Palin being protected against witchcraft as she stood before a Wasilla preacher from Kenya, her back turned, holy texts in her hands, with two adept gents laying their hands upon her gently, I felt mightily relieved:

One more problem of American government solved, this time two years ago before she ran for the governorship of Alaska and won--not just because the witches bounced off her but because the incumbent governor then, Frank Murkowski, a fellow Republican and supremely stupid and arrogant, was despised most Alaskans, including those still wanting to secede from the Union.

As I savored feeling narcotized by this Pentecostal Church spectacle of getting anti-witch insurance in advance, imagine my delight when I chanced on an Associated Press piece--http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/politics/2008201741_apabsentpalin.html-- detailing how the governorship of Alaska is now being run by John McCain campaign staffers.

Even Alaska’s lieutenant-governor, in theory in charge of the state while Palin gallivants about the U.N. inhaling foreign policy, has to vet with McCain staffers whether he can turn off the office lights at 5 p.m. and trot down the street in Juneau for a quick shot with other politicos in the Baranof Hotel’s saloon.

Only in America can one gaze on such a spectacle of what a free people can do when they undergo cultural lobotomies.

Palin, in case you missed her latest, opines that the nation will dive into Depression if Congress does not give George Bush his way in wanting to rescue his Republican owners by handing them $700 billion that our descendants yet unborn have still to earn.

Imagine a Depression, during which all those Wall Street high rollers would have to stand on street corners peddling Red Delicious apples at five bucks each while on the radio rappers yapped “Brother, Can You Spare A Ten Spot?”

Palin, of course, knows as much about economics as a poodle peeing on a fire plug. Even so that over qualifies her to serve in Congress and makes her more than equal to that guy running with her, McCain, who admits he knows nothing at all about economics and that’s why he should be president.

McCain hastens with his ignorance back to the Senate to solve the upcoming Depression problem, and Barack Obama plans to join him there for the same thing, the usual American political solution: If you don’t know what you’re doing, smother it in money–other people’s money, your money and mine.

The best investment one can make right now is in green ink, the green ink the government printing presses will be sucking as they run day and night rolling out more and more $1,000 bills worth less and less for the Wall Street bravos to pocket.

Maybe a decent contribution will bring that godly Pentecostal chap back from Kenya to preach by the presses, to beg God to save them from breakdown while outside in the newspapers and on TV witches gibber and in Iceland Palin compares snow machines and bones up on energy policy.

Republican Vandals Invited to Loot the Treasury

For the 50 years of my adult life I have heard, jaws agape, that Capitalism creates democracy, girds personal freedoms, demonstrates the unwavering effects of something called The Market, which corrects itself and solves all human problems except, well, maybe, poverty. (After all, doesn’t God ordain who shall surfeit and who starve for their sins?)

I kenned that like Religion, Capitalism is an excuse peddled by ruling classes to justify what they must do to remain in power. Put another way, Capitalism and the Market are abstractions to cloak greed. They are not the only such–Communism is another, Socialism is still another. In human hands, as opposed to the hands of the angels, all such systems grind away, under a cloud of lies, to distribute wealth in such a way that it ends up mainly in the pokes of a small number who use it to control the rest of us.

Yes, to keep the peasants from sharpening their sickles before they take to the streets, some shekels must trickle down to keep us underlings in bread and amusements, nowhere more so now than the United States where, until lately, Mammon provided his skilled devotees with wealth never before dreamt of.

But, alas, the golf-club regulars who run Wall Street and related gambling dens have so lied and cheated not only the lower orders but, inevitably, each other that now, thanks to a Republican regime representing the rich, they howl that to avoid disaster they must loot the Treasury to pay for their mistakes.

The President and his Secretary of the Treasury, himself until recently one of Wall Street’s most successful three-card monte dealers, have jettisoned all the conservative crap about the Market Correcting Itself and have sashayed forward in panic, crying the world will end unless the taxpayers give to Wall Street the biggest hunk of boodle ever grabbed in history with permission.

If the nation survives this monetary blooding, we and our offspring unto untold generations enjoy the pleasure of paying off this “legal” debt.

In an world where now and then justice occurs, such rapine of the public’s future might stir a decent public uprising, to decorate light poles with tarred and feathered bankers.

But no, the mainstream press and the Congress have prostrated themselves to the untested notion that if we let Wall Street banks fail the world will end. Neither reporters and editors nor members of Congress truly understand what’s going on and think we all must bow to the cries of anguish emanating from a White House that has showed unerring talent for lying, ignorance and error.

Republicans in Congress of course feed off the rich and support anything that resuscitates their patrons. Democrats, alas, know that if they do not go along with the Republican skin game and the economy coughs and wheezes, Republicans will blame them in these final days of endless presidential and congressional politics. So Democrats drop their pants to pleasure their conservative colleagues.

Our two presidential candidates have lashed themselves to the panic rocket. Obama agrees to the bailout, even though, if he becomes president, he won’t find a pfennig to spend for the social and economic reforms the country cries for.

As for McCain, my God, when he is not sounding like a high-school sophomore babbling about Americanism to the American Legion, he mutters like the village idiot. Yep, bail out the banks will all the money we can beg, borrow, steal or, worse, print; cut taxes on the rich and expand our wars against the infidels.

(War, finally, is cheaper than something else in American government. The bank bailout will cost more in a few seconds than wars have cost since the dunderhead now in the White House ordered our troops to attack Iraq five years ago. Of course, like the ancient Romans, we may find that we’re broke and we can’t afford to lift a sword anywhere against anybody.)

Yes, the politician mutter: Don’t let the bank boys pay themselves big salaries while they haul all those sacks of bucks out of the Treasury. Don’t pay any more to each than to support four or five families while in return they hand us all the failed mortgages they dreamed up or bought in hopes they could peddle them off to greater fools.

Well, the Greater Fools now are us, powerless citizens, who can only watch and groan while the mighty plunder our country.

Lay That Pistol Down, Babe, Lay That Pistol Down

John McCain’s choosing Sarah Palin as his vice-presidential running mate proves that the American way to choose a backup president is broken.

Palin, as anyone with brain cells understands, would amount to a disaster were the actuary tables to kick in once McCain is elected president and suddenly he becomes a stiff eligible for a dandy funeral parade along Pennsylvania Avenue.

Ms. Palin has shown herself to be an unaccomplished liar (she had the hots for the Bridge to Nowhere until Congress severed the funding from it), vindictive (watch out former brother-in-law) and as ignorant about national affairs, international affairs and science as one can be and still admit to being an adult.

McCain and she claim that knowledge of Russian affairs steeps her since on a very rare clear day one can see Russia from the northwest tip of Alaska about 500 miles from where Palin lives and over 1,000 miles from where Palin is supposed to work as governor of Alaska. (Juneau is a place she avoids since she can’t draw state per diem for living in the governor’s mansion whereas she gets paid extra by the state for every night she snoozes at home in Wasilla, one of the suburban wonders of the Western World.)

Neither McCain nor Palin mention whether it takes only one glance across the Bering Strait at a distant form on the horizon to become expert on what’s happening in the Kremlin or whether constant exposure to the view increases one’s knowledge. In fact, Palin hasn’t yet admitted that she has ever seen the Russian mainland, apparently because no reporters have had the wit to ask. I lean to the constant-experience view, and believe that Native men, women and children living at Pt. Hope AK and looking across the strait toward Kamchatka are probably America’s leading experts on Russian affairs.

Palin has had a college education but as anyone knows who has endured the U.S. educational system, having a college education doesn’t mean you know anything about much, and probably means you know little at all about science.

Until the press spotlight hit her the other night, Palin pablumed to whoever would listen that humans have nothing to do with global warming, if global warming exists, and if it does exist and drowns all the polar bears, that’s OK with her because trying to save polar bears (or any other arctic creature dependent on ice) would irritate the Oil Boys, on whom her state depends for its socialistic economy of running on oil revenues (no state property, sales or income taxes anymore and most towns also have gotten rid of taxes, to depend on handouts from the state treasury).

She also touts creationism as something to be taught in schools, but has reserved saying a word yet in praise of astrology, palmistry or reading skull bumps for glimpses of the future.

She and McCain caterwaul about her using her persuasive skills as governor to get a pipeline underway to carry natural gas from the oil field at Prudhoe Bay down through Canada’s Yukon Territory, British Columbia and Alberta to markets in the U.S. Midwest.

The problem? Well, the Prudhoe Oil companies want a different pipeline and haven’t said whether they’ll peddle gas to such a competing pipeline that certainly will never be built without contracts in hand from the oil companies.

And again because no one seems to have brains enough to ask, the Canadian territorial, provincial and national governments so far haven’t even been invited to Palin’s pipeline party. Since her pipeline won’t travel one inch over Canadian territory without their permissions, the plain fact remains that Palin’s pipeline right now is a pipe dream.

By picking Palin, McCain got what he wanted: A public-relations coup and a small rocket up his political codpiece that he prays will boost him to the presidency.

By so choosing, McCain hollers that he doesn’t give a damn, he’ll do what it takes to get in the White House. And he shows that he doesn’t give a bucket of owl spit for whether, if he kicks off in the office he covets, his successor will have any talents at all for running not just this nation but for preserving the western democracies.

Ms. Palin, after all, says we’ll have to kick the Russian bear in the crotch if it gets uppity again about countries on its borders, like Georgia, run by a guy who has just found out the hard way what Palin, as an Alaskan, should know: Let sleeping bears lie if they have a den full of nuclear bombs.

Thanks to McCain’s cynical choice of Alaska's Pistol Packin’ Mama for his #2, it’s obvious the Constitution needs to be amended again on how to choose a vice president, so that another impetuous fool doesn't foist yet a worse fool on us and the world.

The New Yorker Finally Delights the Republican Hate Machine

The New Yorker prides itself on being the journalistic voice of the most literate and liberal population in the United States. Long time readers and admirers appreciate that “New Yorker” in the title does not refer to the state, not even to the entirety of New York City for that matter, but to Manhattan and particularly the Upper West Side thereof, where any pigeon poop dropped from on high is likely to hit the tonsure of a self-certified super sophisticate lately arrived from Pocatello with manuscripts of childhood novels clutched under each armpit.

So it surprises when The New Yorker’s editors join hands to take simultaneous pratfalls in public, as they do with the cover of their most recent issue–the cover notoriously showing Barrack Obama in the White House dressed in an Al Queda outfit, his wife lugging an assault gun and dressed as a terrorist, all while Bin Laden gazes down from a picture near a fireplace where the American flag burns.

Satire, says David Remnick, the eminent editor of The New Yorker, satire of commonplace beliefs about the Obamas. Strange all you pressies working for The New York Times and other crudities misunderstand it and think it’s a caricature instead of the Obamas.

But of course Remnick, who gave final approval of the cover and made the decision to run it, is one of the few who see the drawing as satire on the mistaken beliefs of the Great American Unwashed (i.e., those who don’t live in Manhattan).

The mob, alas, sees the cover as, for The New Yorker, a surprising attack on the new liberal savior and his beloved. The Republican Hate Machine is grinding out copies on the net and elsewhere as fast as it can, figuring journalism from the left can’t get any better than this. National Review and Wall Street Journal boys and girls are snorting with joy: Obama and Missus pegged, and by the haughtiest of the haught!

As for the rest of us disheveled in the hinterlands, we can laugh too, but with tears in our eyes, at a joke, a satire that doesn’t work. It was flat in the first place and only worked in The New Yorker’s digs where fresh air is in short supply. What was supposed to be a piece of savage wit, turned out to only half that: Savage. No wit.

At least Remnick should say: Shot the poor booger by mistake. Sorry. Deep regrets, and all that.