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.