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.