Re: OT: political humor (another Photoshop creation from me)

On Oct 19, 12:18 am, Jan <janmschroe...@xxxxxxx> wrote:

I've been kind of amazed at the lack of political posts this election
and while I kind of hate to admit it, I've missed that somewhat.

Here are some thoughts on politics, then. Please excuse the length of
this essay, but I wanted to say all this in one place. Anyone who
prefers not to read about politics in this newsgroup, or/and who's a
staunch Republican and finds themselves disagreeing with my views, is
free to choose at any time to discontinue reading this essay/post of
mine.

In order to answer the question of which candidate is best served to
lead the US at this time, one should at some point consider the
question: exactly what kind of change is it that the US needs right
now? Neither party has provided a full, complete and satisfactory
answer to this question. I hope to elucidate the reasons for this
during the course of this essay. The party which has come closest,
though, is this one:

http://www.barackobama.com/2008/05/20/remarks_of_senator_barack_obam_67.php

“We will face our share of difficult and uncertain days in the journey
ahead. The other side knows they have embraced yesterday's policies
and so they will also embrace yesterday's tactics to try and change
the subject. They will play on our fears and our doubts and our
divisions to distract us from what matters to you and your future.
Well they can take the low road if they want, but it will not lead
this country to a better place. And it will not work in this election.
It won't work because you won't let it. Not this time. Not this year.”
– Barack Obama

http://www.fightthesmears.com/

It has no doubt escaped the notice of many of the people taking that
low road that John McCain and Timothy McVeigh have surnames which
sound very similar. If it is patently clear that such a linguistic
similarly is meaningless for two *caucasian* sounding names like
McCain and McVeigh, then surely the same standard should be applied to
an African-American presidential candidate’s name, should it not? (As
for Palin’s claim that Obama should “rein in” ACORN, perhaps John
McCain should rein in his running mate, and take after President
Truman’s “The Buck Stops Here”.)

“What should we tell the children? Should we tell them that evil is a
foreign face? No, because it could look just like yours” – Spidey, in
ASM #36

In the Democratic primary, I supported Hillary Clinton, who I’ve
wanted to be president for many years. I implied as much in 2001-2
when I described Sen. Clinton as the best person to complain to about
human rights abuses against women by the Taliban, and the fact that
women weren’t being represented in the new government of Afghanistan.
I thus first heard about Ayers and Rev. Wright at a time when my
preferred candidate was trailing Obama in a tight contest. At no time
have I thought that either of them were valid issues. I’m sure the
majority of African-Americans are closely acquainted with at least one
person who has expressed views similar to those we’ve heard in clips
of Rev. Wright.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L65nTKHq0v4&feature=related

The idea behind “The Audacity of Hope” is that you dare to have hope
even when times are tough. This is something we can all take comfort
in. It’s probably a good philosophy for a president who’s leading a
country through an economic crisis, too.

McCain’s criticism of Obama’s ability to lead in a crisis is
laughable. Remind me, where was John McCain the last time he had the
opportunity to help out in a national crisis? Oh, that’s right: while
Hurricane Katrina was ravaging New Orleans, John McCain was sitting
around eating birthday cake with President Bush. The pair of them were
playing their fiddles as Rome was burning. Barack Obama, meanwhile,
was doing the following:

http://thinkonthesethings.wordpress.com/2007/08/29/when-the-cameras-are-off-barack-obamas-hurricane-katrina-record/

John McCain – whose campaign slogan is “country first” – has openly
admitted that he knows he will lose the election if the focus is on
the economy, and thus that he would rather talk about other things as
a distraction (see Obama’s “Lose” ad):

http://origin.barackobama.com/tv/advertisements/

I guess this rather confirms Sen. Clinton’s ad from earlier in the
year when she remarked that “This time, the call is about the economy…
and John McCain wants to let that phone keep ringing”. Phil Gramm,
McCain’s top economic advisor, called the American people a nation of
whiners who need to get over their mental recession.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEtZlR3zp4c&feature=channel

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4egXbhSOhk

John McCain has admitted that he doesn’t understand the economy: back
in 2007, when he didn’t realise the economy would be such a crucial
election issue. His lack of prescience on this fact rather confirms
his statement, in fact. If John McCain doesn’t understand the economy,
then I guess that means he has to rely on advice from people whose
opinions he values: people like Paul Keating, and Phil Gramm, and now
loopy Sarah Palin (oh, and President Bush, who the fallen maverick has
been voting with about 90% of the time).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnb2IrsU1Cg

Sarah Palin – deceitful, manipulative, lying charlatan that she is –
has raised a number of dishonest criticisms of Barack Obama, including
suggesting that he will have to raise taxes because he can’t account
for his domestic infrastructure spending. If you’d like to know which
candidate would have most difficulty balancing the budget, it’s simple
enough to figure it out from this graph:

http://zfacts.com/p/318.html

Obama *has* in fact explained where the money will come from. He
explains it on his campaign website, and has mentioned it verbally as
well [last-minute addition to this essay: he explains it yet again
during his 30-minute ad]. Firstly, he plans to do what he can to
decrease military spending, whereas McCain and Palin have not so much
as even acknowledged the issue of military spending. Secondly, Obama
plans to greatly simplify the tax code and remove many of the
loopholes that have been bribed into the tax code by corporate
lobbyists (that’s why the tax code is so complicated in the first
place). Obama will easily be able to save over $1 trillion per year
from this measure alone, and this alone would more than cover all of
his domestic infrastructure spending put together. Given that Bribery
is in violation of the US Constitution, it is commendable that Obama
seeks to defend the Constitution by cracking down on bribery by
corporate lobbyists. (There’s plenty more, but those two points by
themselves are sufficient to explain how Obama’s plan will improve the
trajectory of the national debt whereas McCain’s plan will not.)

“I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied
corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial
by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.” – Thomas
Jefferson

A common talking point by some conservatives, including John McCain
during the third presidential debate, is that US corporations have a
high tax rate and thus that raising any taxes on them might drive them
overseas. However, this is in fact a vacuous load of nonsense (there
are other words in the English language to describe it, not all of
them fit for polite company). Whilst the US has a comparatively high
*nominal* tax rate, the actual amount of tax paid by corporations is
much lower due to loopholes in the tax code.

http://thinkorthwim.com/index.php?tag=economics

As you can see from the graph, US corporations only pay a miniscule
amount of the overall tax paid in the US. Corporations in Iceland pay
an even lower amount of the overall tax than US corporations do, and
Iceland has regressive (as opposed to progressive) taxation. Heard
anything about Iceland on the news lately?

http://zfacts.com/p/318.html

This graph is absolutely central to understanding US politics. I
suggest you all bookmark it to refer back to.

The US national debt, which has been rapidly increasing since Reagan
took office in 1980, has now passed $10 trillion (that’s
$10,000,000,000,000). It’s now up to almost $10.5 trillion. In a
country of about 300 million people, that’s an average debt of about
$35,000 per person, including people who don’t work such as children
and the elderly. It’s somewhere in the ballpark of $140,000 per family
of four. Had it not been for the Clinton presidency, the trajectory of
the national debt suggests that it would probably have reached
somewhere over $15 trillion by now. Neoconservative military spending
is the biggest contributor to the national debt, along with tax breaks
for the rich and corporations, and big government neocon Republicans
have engaged in all manner of deceptions to obfuscate the issue of
their reckless military spending.

President Clinton did a splendid job of fixing the economy. He reduced
military spending (and Jesse Helms threatened his life over this), and
he instituted a progressive taxation system very similar to Obama’s.
No doubt, if the Clinton healthcare reform attempt had been
successful, the economy would still have run smoothly under the
Clinton administration, and the trajectory of the national debt would
still have been fixed up by the time that President Clinton left
office.

For anyone who has qualms about the merits of progressive taxation,
let’s consider what John McCain had to say when he voted against the
Bush tax cuts in 2001 and 2003:

http://www.changetowin.org/connect/2008/04/mccainonomics_more_of_the_same.html

In May 2003, McCain voted against the second round of Bush tax cuts,
saying that they were unwise at a time of war. Perhaps these points
are so obvious that even a Senator who admits to not understanding the
economy is able to figure them out.

Here’s a link to what Sarah Palin had to say about Obama before she
was invited to run for vice president:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ws4Tl3vHryQ

Sarah Palin was the first mayor of Wasilla to hire a lobbyist to get
earmarks from Washington, and Alaska bludges heavily off the federal
government (even though Palin wants independence for Alaska, and has
expressed support for the Alaska Independence Party, whose founder
said he refused to be buried on American soil and advocated armed
insurrection against the US government). This contrasts sharply with
McCain’s position on earmarks, although I guess it’s fairly
immaterial, given that McCain could only save up to $18 billion even
in the hypothetical event that he could erase all earmarks. By way of
comparison, Obama can save over $1 trillion by removing tax loopholes
that are being exploited by corporations. Palin also has close ties to
Big Oil and her record as a reformer is inconsistent; often, she has
taken the moral high ground on issues only after they already had
widespread public support.

There isn’t exactly a shortage of counterexamples to Palin’s inflated
claims to being a fiscal conservative, but the one that gets me is her
wasting the town of Wasilla’s money on a $15 million sports arena.
That’s an awfully extravagant expense for a town of around 5,000
people, almost half of whom objected to this expense when a referendum
was held, and it (along with other Palin spending, in spite of the
fact that she raised taxes during her time as mayor) plunged Wasilla
over $20 million into debt. Furthermore, ongoing payments concerning
this sports arena are creating a deficit for the town of Wasilla,
including court cases over… guess what? Eminent Domain!

Mayor Palin did manage to save the town of Wasilla a little small
change here and there with some cuts to expenses, though. One such
example is where the town made female rape victims/survivors pay for
their own rape kits, which can cost over $1,000 (just imagine having
to pay the costs for the police to search your house for evidence
after a burglary). Why did Mayor Palin wholeheartedly support this
move? Because she’s a consistent fiscal conservative? You must be
joking. More likely, it’s because rape kits contain emergency
contraceptive pills, something which apparently offends Palin’s cuckoo
religious beliefs. Furthermore, as Governor of Alaska, Palin was found
guilty of abuse of power when she wrongfully fired Commissioner of
Public Safety Walt Monegan, who had been doing a lot of good work in
addressing Alaska’s significant problems with rape and domestic
violence. (Mayor Palin also tried to fire a librarian who resisted her
policy of censoring library books and banning them from the library,
but fortunately the citizens of Wasilla came to the librarian’s aid
and Palin backed down.)

An impostor who compared himself to JFK was once reprimanded with the
following words: “Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack
Kennedy; Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you’re no Jack
Kennedy.”

Sarah Palin… you’re no Hillary Clinton, that’s for sure.

If Obama wins this election, then Palin will go down in history as the
Republican version of Geraldine Ferraro. Frankly, all things
considered, I really think this is the best outcome for the cause of
feminism in US politics. Electing a black president successfully will
surely open the door to a subsequent first female president. Around
55-60% of women and around 90% of blacks vote Democrat, so a first
black president is a more difficult milestone than a first female
president. Being a black Democrat is a bit like being a Democrat from
California or Massachusetts: those states are blue already!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OAkRj6w-07Y&feature=channel

As for all this flap about ACORN, the larger context that people need
to bear in mind is that a considerably greater proportion of
Caucasians vote than any other ethnic group in the US, and people with
higher incomes are more likely to vote. What is wrong, then, with
striving to mitigate this discrepancy? Disenfranchisement of African-
American voters has been a crucial factor in swing states before, such
as Florida in 2000, which Al Gore lost by 537 votes and a 5-4 partisan
Supreme Court decision to His Royal Highness the Greatest President
Ever.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPnfnB7fRek

McCain’s temper: there are numerous examples of this, but the one
which stands out the most for me is when he assaulted a disabled woman
in a wheelchair, who was dependent on a portable oxygen tank and was
the mother of a missing soldier. This happened in the Senate halls in
1996. Sen. McCain initially threatened this disabled woman with his
fist; he didn’t punch her, but he grabbed her and shoved her
backwards, wheelchair and all.

As for associating with terrorists: well, I could discuss John
McCain’s mafia ties, but there’s something far more glaringly obvious
than that. John McCain was about a 46-47 year old US Congressman when
he served on the advisory board of the “U.S. Council for World
Freedom”, an organization that frequently “palled around with”
terrorists. In this capacity, Rep. McCain “palled around with” the
Islamic extremists who ended up becoming Al-Qaeda as we know them
today, and “palled around with” former Nazi collaborators. He also
“palled around with” the Contras and others who committed terrorist
attacks against innocent civilians and against peaceful,
democratically elected governments using weapons supplied to them by
John McCain, Col. Oliver North, President Reagan and others.

How did President Reagan, John McCain and others finance this support
of terrorism so that it didn’t show up on the books? They covertly and
illegally sold weapons to… guess which country? Iran. That’s right,
IRAN -- the very same Iran that took innocent US civilians hostage for
over a year, and then miraculously released them immediately after
Carter lost to Reagan in the 1980 general election. So apparently John
McCain thinks it’s unacceptable to negotiate with one’s enemies, but
yet it’s perfectly fine to covertly sell weapons to them in order to
fund terrorism.

Incidentally, the highest position in Iran belongs to Supreme Leader
Ayatollah Ali Khameini, and this is who a US president would negotiate
with on matters of foreign policy. Iran is a religious dictatorship,
not a democracy, and the highest elected position (president) is
gatekeeped by the religious establishment. Typically, candidates who
look like they might be too liberal are removed from the ballot. Obama
has never specifically said he’d negotiate with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad,
and it is highly deceitful of McCain to make that insinuation for the
sake of appealing to Jewish voters.

Here’s a link to Colin Powell’s endorsement of Obama:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/27265490#27265490

The U.S. Constitution states that there shall be no religious test for
office, and the First Amendment guarantees freedom of religion to all
persons. For the record, though, Barack Obama is not a Muslim, and he
was raised in a *secular* school with no particular connections to
Islam. Rather, Obama is a fairly conventional liberal Christian. If
Obama had ever been a Muslim and had converted to Christianity, Muslim
extremists (who call such a conversion “apostasy”) would want him
dead. Obama would be persecuted by the Taliban for his belief in civil
unions for same-sex couples, for his pro-choice position on abortion,
and for practicing Christianity. Sens. Clinton, Biden and Obama would
all be persecuted by the Taliban for voting for a bill that would have
given women the right to sue employers for pay discrimination. Sen.
McCain opposed this bill, saying he didn’t believe the federal
government should get involved (remember, this is coming from a
senator who has admitted that he doesn’t understand the economy).

Now, it’s time to play “connect the dots”, or (as JMS would say) to
step back from the tapestry and consider the big picture.

In his farewell address to the nation, Republican president and former
five-star general Dwight D. Eisenhower presciently warned the nation
of a threat from within, in the form of an entity which he used the
term “military-industrial complex” to describe.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8y06NSBBRtY&feature=related

Eisenhower was the first president to whom the two-term restriction
applied, thus giving him unprecedented freedom to speak his mind for
the last four years of his term, without needing to worry about
getting re-elected. Also, I have far too much respect for Ike to think
that he’d have thought that Richard Nixon would make a better
president than JFK. Yet, in spite of the lack of reasons for concern
about public opinion, Ike didn’t *dare* risk mentioning the military-
industrial complex until his *farewell speech* in January 1961, a
little under three years before his successor was assassinated. What
could this brave former five-star general, Supreme Commander of the
Allied forces in Europe and first Supreme Commander of NATO possibly
have been so afraid of?

http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/sou.php

In his 1961 State of the Union speech, Eisenhower reported that “Again
in 1958, peace was preserved in the Middle East despite new discord.
Our government responded to the request of the friendly Lebanese
Government for military help, and promptly withdrew American forces as
soon as the situation was stabilized.” For most of its history, the US
has a proud record of this kind of moral leadership and setting a fine
example for the rest of the world.

Perhaps Ike misspoke, and what he really meant to say was that he’d be
happy to stay in an occupied country for 100 years, even if around 75%
of people in that country wanted US troops gone. Alternatively,
perhaps Ron Paul is right, and big government warmongering and
military spending was not historically part of the Republican party’s
platform, nor for that matter the platform of any other party nor what
the Founding Fathers intended when they framed the Constitution.
Perhaps that’s why post-1980 big government imperialist warmongers get
called Neo-cons, or “New Conservatives”.

“Conquest is not in our principles. It is inconsistent with our
government.” – Thomas Jefferson

“If there is one principle more deeply rooted in the mind of every
American, it is that we should have nothing to do with conquest.” –
Thomas Jefferson

How, then, did this happen in a country that was once the world’s
finest democracy?

“We were sure that ours was a nation of the ballot, not the bullet,
until the murders of John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy and [the Rev.
Dr.] Martin Luther King, Jr. We were taught that our armies were
always invincible and our causes were always just, only to suffer the
agony of Vietnam. We respected the Presidency as a place of honor
until the shock of Watergate. We remember when the phrase "sound as a
dollar" was an expression of absolute dependability, until 10 years of
inflation began to shrink our dollar and our savings. We believed that
our Nation's resources were limitless until 1973, when we had to face
a growing dependence on foreign oil. These wounds are still very deep.
They have never been healed.” -- President Jimmy Carter, in his
“malaise” speech in July 1979

The McCain-Palin campaign have – subtly but undeniably – raised some
interesting questions lately: can we trust a highly charismatic
politician who gives great speeches, or are his words more style than
substance? Might such an eloquent talker who promises change to an
ailing country in its time of need actually be concealing a hidden
agenda that would lead the country down a dark path to its detriment?
I’ll respond with a question of my own: are these concerns more likely
to be valid for a former community organizer who has done a lot of
good work helping the poor and disadvantaged, or are they more likely
to be valid for a charismatic, smooth-talking former Hollywood actor?

Ronald Reagan was a great actor, you see. Ronald Reagan was a
brilliant actor, a top class actor, an exceptionally talented actor.
In fact, JMS and Clint Eastwood could spend all eternity searching the
universe for its greatest actors, and still not manage to find as
great an actor as Ronald Reagan. What most likely happened is that the
military-industrial complex searched the universe for its best actors,
and they must have been simply delighted when they discovered that the
president of the Screen Actors Guild, a man named Ronald Reagan, was a
highly militaristic, conservative extremist who had gleefully
collaborated with McCarthyism (credit goes to JMS for this info). We
can be really sure that Ronald Reagan was a great actor, because he
demonstrated his acting skills constantly during the eight years of
his presidency.

Ronald Reagan displayed his acting skills when he claimed that he was
a former Democrat and that he hadn’t left his party, but his party had
left him. If you believe that – and if you believe many of the things
that Reagan had to say, in fact -- then Bill Clinton has some real
estate he’d like to sell you. It is worth noting the irony of the fact
that the white, working class “Reagan Democrats” who got sucked into
voting for this exceptionally talented actor were among the worst hit
by his tax hikes, whereas the rich and corporations benefitted most
from Reagan’s tax cuts.

Reagan was involved in a group called Democrats for Eisenhower. Hey,
I’ve got no problem with that; I like Ike, and I’d have seriously
considered voting for him over your average Democrat. However,
subsequently Reagan also got himself involved in a group called
Democrats for Nixon, which is rather suspicious. Oh, I guess there’s a
common theme here: Richard Nixon was Eisenhower’s VP. Okay, so I guess
either Reagan was no Democrat, or else he really liked Richard Nixon,
or both. I say it’s both.

Ronald Reagan displayed his acting skills when he made a show of
working collaboratively with Democrats. At the same time, he steered
the country in as extreme a conservative (read: neocon) direction as
he could get away with. Meanwhile, the military-industrial complex had
other people smearing liberals and Democrats, setting up the workings
of the Republican smear machine as we know it today, while President
Reagan was playing a “good cop” role by playing nice with Democrats in
Congress.

These smear attacks against liberals and Democrats have served an
additional function besides the obvious. By directing venom at
liberals and Democrats, making a salient outgroup out of them, Reagan
and co. sought to bolster their own ingroup’s solidarity, which they
felt they needed to do in order to obfuscate the volatile nature of
the coalition they’d brought into the Republican party. Libertarians,
neocons and religious conservatives make for a terribly awkward mix.
Jesus talked about turning the other cheek and taking care of the
poor, but the military-industrial complex wanted Christians distracted
by thinking about sexual morality rather than the morality of war and
greed. Even more glaring, though, is the fact that libertarians and
neocons hold diametrically opposing views on whether to expand the
federal government with imperialist military spending. Reagan sought
to obfuscate this fact by racking up the national debt to pay for his
military spending, thus enabling him to lower taxes and give the
misleading impression that “small government” pertained mainly to
*domestic* spending.

Here’s another quote from Republican president and former five-star
general Dwight D. Eisenhower: “Every gun that is made, every warship
launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft
from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not
clothed.”

The last thing that McCain and Palin want is for voters to view this
election as a referendum on this quote, and they’ve engaged in all
manner of deceptions to steer voters away from making that connection.
This basic truth is what Reagan sought to obfuscate by pretending to
be an advocate of “small government”, while applying this standard
only to *domestic* spending at the same time as he greatly increased
military spending during peacetime. McCain and Palin are obfuscating
this fact, too, by completely avoiding discussing military spending
while falsely claiming that Obama has not accounted for his domestic
spending and how it will be paid for.

Ronald Reagan displayed his acting skills when he heartlessly cut
essential domestic infrastructure, such as housing for the mentally
ill and the homeless, and made the bogus claim that “small government”
was his reason for doing so. In reality, Reagan was the biggest neocon
hack around and he increased the size of the federal government and
the national debt with his wasteful and reckless military spending.

Ronald Reagan displayed his acting skills when he jumped the credit
for winning the Cold War. The real reason for the breakup of the
Soviet Union, of course, was that it had long been on a trajectory to
implode due to the imperialist military spending of its own military-
industrial complex. Gorbachev’s well-intended liberal social reforms
were too little, too late; they only drew people’s attention to how
their government had been screwing them. The Chernobyl disaster (I
won’t call it an “accident”, since it’s not entirely clear whether
that’s the correct description) made it more likely that Gorbachev’s
liberal social reforms would fail and simply lead to the Soviet Union
imploding faster. In any case, one known cause of the disaster was
that Chernobyl was run by an arrogant buffoon who didn’t listen to
criticism of many of his stupid ideas.

By far the main causes of the breakup of the Soviet Union were
internal processes that had virtually nothing to do with the US’s
immediate actions. The Soviet Union was on a collision course to
implode since long before 1980, and certainly would still have
imploded if Walter Mondale had won the 1984 US election and balanced
the budget by cutting Reagan’s reckless military spending. If there’s
any US president who deserves a very, very, very small degree of
credit for ending the Cold War, then it’s probably Jimmy Carter, who
baited the Soviets into war in Afghanistan. Other than having enough
diplomatic skills not to say “tear down this wall or I’ll tear it down
for you”, Reagan did not contribute in any substantive way to the end
of the Cold War. (Reagan’s support of Islamic extremists during his
presidency didn’t help create the breakup of the Soviet Union, which
would’ve happened anyway, but it did help to create Al-Qaeda.)

Truman and Marshall had the right strategy for winning the Cold War
all along: keep the Soviet Union’s military threats contained while
outperforming them economically. It is important to note that the
period during which the US outperformed the Soviets economically
*precedes* Reagan’s presidency. The four New Deal presidents – FDR,
Truman, Ike and JFK – ran the economy very, very well with their
moderate capitalist (*) policies. After JFK’s assassination and the
fabricated Gulf of Tonkin incident, LBJ came along and escalated the
Vietnam war (which JFK had strongly opposed), and LBJ also increased
domestic spending during a time of war to a degree that was clearly
over the top, whereas JFK had been more of an economic centrist. The
LBJ and Nixon economic policies combined to produce an environment
ripe for Reagan’s “small government” scam, with poor Jimmy Carter
caught like a deer staring into headlights.

(*) Moderate capitalism works better than extremist capitalism,
because two processes need to co-occur for capitalism to succeed:
people need to live within their means, and they also need to
stimulate the economy through spending. The present mortgage crisis,
which Sen. Clinton was talking about in 2007 while Sen. McCain was
admitting he didn’t understand the economy, is one such example of
what happens when income inequality and low wages exclude people from
being able to do both of these things.

Yes, the military-industrial complex could very easily have played LBJ
on one side, and Nixon and Reagan on the other. Remember the Shadows?
As for Ted Kennedy, he should have been kicked out of the Democratic
party for not providing a satisfactory explanation for the
Chappaquid*** incident, and it reflects badly on the Democratic Party
that they didn’t do that. He’s dangerous in the Senate either way, but
there’s a possible conspiracy explanation here: if you’ve already
tried to murder someone and you’ve previously murdered that person’s
two brothers, things might start to look like more than a coincidence
if you just keep on killing Kennedys. So, another option is to attack
the person’s character instead by framing a crime on them, after which
Ted Kennedy could have untold horrors threatened upon him and be
returned to the Senate with a Keeper around his neck. Remember how Ted
Kennedy hijacked Carter politically and helped Reagan beat him in the
1980 election, and how Ted Kennedy failed to provide a good
explanation for why he was running against Carter in the 1980
Democratic primary?

This might be a good time to watch Endgame and listen to Sheridan’s
speech.

“It is said that in every age, there is one singular event that
forever changes the world around us. A nexus, if you will.” – Delenn

Ronald Reagan displayed his acting skills when he exploited the Cold
War to incite paranoid fears of “socialized medicine”. Today, at last
count, there are 36 countries in the world with a better healthcare
system than the US. A key feature of the countries which have the best
healthcare systems in the world, including many of the US’s greatest
allies such as Britain and Australia, is that hospitals are run by the
government and private individuals support them with tax rather than
buying health insurance or paying anything when they need to visit a
hospital.

Ronald Reagan displayed his acting skills when he contributed to
introducing global warming denial into the US’s national
consciousness. Prior to 1980, the prospect of global warming and other
environmental concerns had always been processed by Congress as
nonpartisan scientific issues; Republican presidents Eisenhower, Ford
and Nixon all took environmental concerns seriously. Ike particularly
held scientists in high regard (yes, scientists were concerned about
global warming as far back as the 1950s, and even earlier in fact).

Jimmy Carter did his best to cope with difficult circumstances. One
thing he did well was to develop alternative energy programmes.
Problem is, that con artist Reagan came along and trashed Carter’s
good work on alternative energy. Why might the military-industrial
complex have wanted Reagan to do that? Perhaps because it suits their
interests very nicely for the US to be dependent on foreign oil and to
be paying their corporations countless hundreds of billions of dollars
over wars in oil-rich countries like Iraq.

http://middleeast.about.com/od/oilenergy/a/me080207d.htm

If you look at a map of the Middle-East (easily available from a
Google search), you’ll see that Iraq’s position on the map makes it
pivotal to controlling a number of other oil-rich countries as well as
Iraq itself. During much of Bill Clinton’s rude interruption to
Republican hegemony over the presidency, *** Cheney was CEO of
Halliburton, a corporation involved in both the oil business and
armaments industry. Halliburton sought Cheney out due to his previous
government employment, and they rewarded him handsomely with an
unprecedented $20 million golden parachute.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YENbElb5-xY

There’s little doubt that Bush and Cheney subsequently followed
policies that have suited Halliburton very nicely. The US Constitution
specifically forbids bribing a high-level government official, but
Bush and Cheney don’t care about the Constitution, a document which
they clearly view as an inconvenience to be circumvented. If one
wishes to commit cruel and unusual punishment against prisoners, for
example, then the trick is to transport them out of the US, rather
than wondering whether the Founding Fathers would have considered
torture wrong regardless of where it was committed.

“It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished
without the forms of law than that [s/he] should escape.” – Thomas
Jefferson

Ronald Reagan displayed his acting skills when he managed to convince
the American people to swallow the poison he offered them, regardless
of how many people warned of the long-term consequences of following
his economic agenda. Among them was Reagan’s opponent in the 1980
Republican primary, George H. W. Bush, who derided Reagan’s ideas as
“voodoo economics”. On this particular point, the oil businessman and
former CIA director was quite correct.

Ronald Reagan displayed his acting skills when he announced in 1984
that "We must balance the budget, reduce tax rates and strengthen our
defenses." To claim that he could do all three is indeed “voodoo
economics”. Please also note that Reagan made these comments *in
1984*, AFTER he had already plundered half the country’s domestic
infrastructure and kicked the mentally ill and homeless out onto the
streets, so he no longer had that card up his sleeve to balance the
budget. Oh, and also, Reagan had already made tax hikes (mostly on
lower income earners, whereas his tax cuts went more to the rich and
corporations) during his first term due to the failures of his
economic policies. He made more tax hikes during his second term, too,
just as Walter Mondale correctly predicted that he would. Overall, I’m
not too sure whether to call it 1/3 or 2/3 regarding his above
pledges, but either way, his claim to balancing the budget was a huge
and deliberate lie. No president in US history has failed to balance
the budget worse than Ronald Reagan, with George W. Bush in second
place.

Ronald Reagan displayed his acting skills when he visited a Nazi
cemetery, and expressed sympathy for the fallen SS soldiers, saying
that they were victims too. This time, though, even the military-
industrial complex’s greatest actor couldn’t overcome the basic
goodness and decency of the American people, and Reagan’s approval
ratings dropped accordingly. The Republican Party has ties to Nazi war
criminals, and the far-right of the Republican Party has actively
consulted Nazi advice on propaganda (I’m adamant that Eisenhower was
innocent of this, though). I’m guessing that much of the Republican
propaganda on “patriotism” and smearing liberals comes from the Nazis;
similar things were said in Germany by the Nazis. [This is all TRUE,
and I’m not comparing another poster to Hitler or the Nazis, so
Godwin’s Law doesn’t apply here.]

Previously, Ronald Reagan had displayed his acting skills when he
repeatedly tried to convince people that his hero, President Nixon,
wasn’t a crook. Even a top class actor like Reagan wasn’t able to
convince the American people of that, either.

Ronald Reagan displayed his acting skills when he said “I am a
Contra”, and tried to generate widespread public support for the
terrorist activities that he was supporting against innocent civilians
and a peaceful, democratically elected government. This only worked
for a time (and John McCain helped with the fallout). While he was
funding terrorism by covertly and illegally selling weapons to Iran,
Reagan was also offering significant support to Iraqi president Saddam
Hussein, including ingredients for biological weapons (yes, the US
government has biological weapons labs, as well as terrorist training
facilities). The Iran-Iraq war went from 1980-1988, a similar
timeframe to Reagan’s presidency.

Ronald Reagan displayed his acting skills when he produced an ad
called “Morning in America”, in which he told the American people in a
very trustworthy sounding voice that they should re-elect him because
the economy was going well.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EU-IBF8nwSY

If it was morning in America in 1984, perhaps it’s now the cold dead
of night.

Reagan thus jumped the credit for the economy improving during his
first term, which in actuality may have been more attributable to the
good work done by President Carter, combined with outside forces
beyond the president’s control. Bill Clinton was determined not to let
the same thing happen to him as happened to Carter, so he started
fixing the economy immediately upon taking office; it is likely this
move on his part, more than anything else, that made him a two-term
president.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F0CE5DF1630F935A25756C0A965958260

Check out this link, and listen to Ronald Reagan the big government
borrow-and-spend neocon criticize President Clinton for cutting
military spending! Listen to the lying con artist repeat his claims
about his military spending helping end the Cold War, and listen to
him make the excuse that the US still needs to spend huge money to
protect itself from its enemies. Then consider how many times the US
has been attacked since those comments of Reagan’s were made in 1993,
and the fact that President Clinton responded far better to the
terrorist threat than George W. Bush did. (That link is a rare find;
if there’s two words that deceitful big government neocons like Ronald
Reagan really, really, really hate to see in the same sentence, it’s
“military” and “spending”.)

http://zfacts.com/p/318.html

If Ronald Reagan was a smooth-talking, charismatic actor who was
talented enough to hide his real agenda and character, perhaps we can
get more of a glimpse of it from his son. Michael Reagan displays his
contempt for the First Amendment by saying the following about a group
of 9/11 conspiracy theorists:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWxEyplLzRk

"We ought to find the people who are doing this, take them out and
shoot them. Really. You take them out, they are traitors to this
country, and shoot them.... I'll pay for the bullets." – Michael
Reagan

There’s an irony here: the son of the most expensive big government
neocon president in US history (*) is offering to PAY for the
bullets…? Why, how generous of you, Mr. Reagan. How about paying back
the trillions of dollars that your demented father plundered from the
American people to indulge his militaristic obsessions? Oh, I guess
that’s not really possible; after all, not even Bill Gates, Rupert
Murdoch and the Sultan of Brunei have that kind of money at their
disposal.

(*) George W. Bush gets second place, but first place clearly goes to
Reagan, for it was he who introduced big government neoconservative
military spending into the Republican party’s platform. Since 1980,
the three Republican presidents have all increased government
spending; only one president – Bill Clinton – has decreased the size
of the federal government. How ironic, given that the Democrats don’t
even boast “small government” as a central part of their party’s
platform!

Incidentally, given that the Bush administration have stonewalled
investigations into what happened on 9/11 (possibly on advice from the
military-industrial complex, without being told that there might be
more to hide than just incompetence), we should at least be open to
the possibility that the Drakh might have sent away the ships guarding
Centauri Prime and turned off the planetary defence network. The Iraq
war was made possible by the Bush administration, run by a president
and vice president who are both oil businessmen, cruelly and
shamelessly exploiting the country’s collective PTSD for their own
ends. (Just hours after the planes struck the towers, Rumsfeld was
asking “Can we pin this on Saddam?”) Similarly, JFK’s assassination
and the Gulf of Tonkin incident made the escalation of the Vietnam war
possible. The military-industrial complex certainly benefitted from
9/11; without it, there would have been no Iraq war and George W. Bush
would’ve been a one-term president. It’s a notable irony that Bush’s
re-election was helped both by the intolerant religious conservatives
who flew the planes into the buildings on 9/11 and by the intolerant
religious conservatives back home.

Conspiracy or not, we should question whether the 9/11 terrorist
attacks would even have occurred if Al Gore had won the 2000
presidential election. President Clinton did a great job of fighting
Al-Qaeda (including preventing terrorist attacks and breaking up about
20 al-Qaeda cells), even while the Republicans and the “liberal”
mainstream media had nothing better to do with their time than gossip
about his personal life. The neocons thought President Clinton was too
obsessed with Al-Qaeda, and wanted him to focus less attention on
them. President Clinton and his national security team repeatedly
warned the incoming President Bush and his staff that terrorism should
be a huge priority. President Bush responded by cutting
counterterrorism funding, demoting counterterrorism expert Richard
Clarke, and largely ignoring the issue of terrorism. He continued
ignoring the threat of terrorism even after being given a report
titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US” on August 6th, 2001.

Please note that the issue I take with Sarah Palin is not her lack of
experience per se. I’ve called her “loopy” and a “charlatan”, and
pointed out her rank dishonesty, but none of those things were true of
Bill Clinton immediately after he started his term as Governor of
Arkansas in (CHECK) 1978. Bill Clinton would have been a reasonable
enough running mate for Jimmy Carter in the 1980 election, which is a
fair comparison to Palin’s current level of experience. (President
Clinton did become dishonest as part of his scheme to take the edge
off the worst of the damage Reagan did to the country (*), but he’s
never been loopy or a charlatan.)

(*) And yes, this was true even of Bill Clinton’s dishonesty about
matters of a more personal nature: he had to set up a scandal in order
to protect his wife’s political career from the Republican smear
machine, who had been hitting both Bill and Hillary Clinton with
fabricated scandals including trying to frame them for murder. I’ll
say more about this later on, if Obama wins this upcoming election.

If you read Sarah Palin’s convention speech…

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/09/03/sarah-palin-rnc-conventio_n_123703..html

…you can see the parallels to Ronald Reagan’s deception. Palin attacks
Obama’s tax plan and spreads lies about it, paying lip service to
“small government” and lying about the fact that she supported the
Bridge to Nowhere during her campaign for governor, but she does not
discuss military spending. Instead, she ignores the issue of military
spending and covers the topic by getting into personality politics,
talking about the great American hero John S. McCain and about how
Obama doesn’t mention the word “victory” except with respect to his
campaign (*). Military spending is by far the main cause of the US
being over $10 trillion in debt right now, and yet it doesn’t even get
a mention. I guess Sarah Palin and Ronald Reagan have a fair bit in
common: for starters, Palin pulled a Reagan on the town of Wasilla
when she left it over $20 million in debt.

“War is an instrument entirely inefficient toward redressing wrong;
and multiplies, instead of indemnifying losses.” – Thomas Jefferson

(*) I say there can be no such thing as “victory” in a dishonorable
war that should never have been waged, and that has needlessly cost
the lives of over 4,000 US soldiers and countless hundreds of
thousands of Iraqi civilians, while transferring countless hundreds of
billions of dollars from US taxpayers to the military-industrial
complex’s corporations. Back in 2002, we knew that Al-Qaeda had bases
in around 40 countries. Iraq was not one of them until George W. Bush
and John McCain decided that it would be a clever idea to invade it;
both remarked as early as 2003 that the war would be over “soon”.
Instead of continuing to dismantle Al-Qaeda bases successfully like
President Clinton had been doing, and instead of focusing on
Afghanistan and Osama bin Laden, Bush and Cheney (both oil
businessmen) decided that invading the country that’s most central to
controlling the Middle-East’s oil reserves was a more pressing
concern. Meanwhile, the genocide in Darfur continues largely
unchecked; Sudan has far more pressing and urgent human rights
problems than Iraq did, and has far more concrete ties to terrorist
groups including Al-Qaeda, Hezbollah and Hamas than Iraq ever has.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nycvN6xk_tY

http://millercenter.org/scripps/archive/speeches/detail/3934

Notice how President Clinton stresses, right there in his farewell
speech: “Tonight, I want to leave you with three thoughts about our
future. First, America must maintain our record of fiscal
responsibility. Through our last four budgets we've turned record
deficits to record surpluses, and we've been able to pay down $600
billion of our national debt…”

I guess his successor took about as much notice of this as he took of
the Clinton administration’s repeated warnings to take terrorism
seriously.

Joe Biden talks about how the present economic crisis has resulted
from eight years of George W. Bush’s economic policies. This is a fair
point and a good point, but it’s not the whole truth. There’s a bigger
picture that’s not being discussed. Even a Democrat with as big a
mouth as Sen. Biden dares not speak the name of the very popular (*)
con artist that Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale went down against.
These are the truths that mainstream parties, constrained by their
desire to attract swing voters who live within the Matrix of
mainstream social norms, dare not speak. The Democrats are too scared
to run against Ronald Reagan, and they’re too scared to run against
the military-industrial complex. Fancy that: the Republicans feel very
confident about running against a fictional “liberal media”, whereas
the Democrats are too afraid to run against a very real military-
industrial complex.

We have to create the future, or others will create it for us. The
kind of constraints placed upon politicians that hamper the truth
serve to further illustrate that political issues need to be discussed
by the people. They need to be discussed by those of us who are not
politicians, who do not belong to a party that stands to lose seats in
Congress if we speak unpopular truths. This is the democracy that the
Founding Fathers sought to create.

(*) Statistically speaking, Reagan was only average in terms of
approval ratings. The highest average approval ratings for the past
ten presidents have been Kennedy (70%), Eisenhower (66%), GHWB (61%,
gulf war inflated), Clinton (55%), Johnson (55%, inflated by JFK’s
assassination) followed by Reagan at 52%. Clinton left office with an
approval rating of 66% after fixing the economy and greatly lowering
the crime rate (particularly gun-related crimes), whereas Reagan left
office with an approval rating of 63%, inflated by the happenings in
the Soviet Union which had virtually nothing to do with him. However,
it’s still accurate to call Reagan “popular” because his acting skills
gave him a manipulative kind of cultural appeal with swing voters who
don’t pay much attention to politics, and he has changed the country’s
trajectory in a poisonous way.

Libertarian-leaning candidates such as Ron Paul, Bob Barr and Chuck
Baldwin are too afraid to speak the truth about Reagan, too. They keep
praising him for “small government”, when surely they know damn well
that Reagan was actually a neocon hack and the most expensive big
government president in US history.

Speaking of Ron Paul, apparently US soldiers have donated more money
to his campaign than they did to any of the neocon Republicans that he
was running against. Al-Qaeda supporters, on the other hand, seem to
want John McCain:

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/news/2008/10/al-qaida-linked_web_site_backs.php

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/26/opinion/26kristof.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

Osama bin Laden issued a videotape that helped Bush win the 2004
election just four days before election day that year. This year, al-
Qaeda supporters are calling for a pre-election terrorist attack in
the US in order to help John McCain’s chances. The rationale of these
al-Qaeda supporters is that the “impetuous” McCain is more likely to
continue or escalate the wars in the Middle-East, thus getting the US
into further economic strife. It seems that even the US’s enemies are
able to see clearly enough that military entanglements will cause the
US economy further problems, whereas Obama’s moderate domestic
spending will not.

All along, it has been Al-Qaeda's intention to provoke the US into as
massive a retaliation as possible in order to get the public opinion
of the Islamic world on their side. Most Muslims don't view Osama bin
Laden as a legitimate religious leader, and he's hoping to change that
by presenting himself as a leader to stand up against the US. He
probably doesn't really care about US imperialism, but he just uses
resentment about it as an excuse for his own ambitions; his real
agenda is that he's a lunatic religious conservative who wants more
power for his ideology (and ditto for the people backing him; in many
ways he’s just a figurehead leader).

You want to hear some honesty that you don’t get from the Democratic
Party? Go and vote against the Reagan-Bush-McCain tax cuts to the
rich, and the Reagan-Bush tax loopholes for corporations that make the
tax code so complicated, along with other forms of corporate welfare.
Go and vote against the Reagan-Bush-McCain big government borrow-and-
spend neoconservatives who spend your tax money wastefully and
recklessly on imperialist warmongering, and are primarily responsible
for the US national debt of over $10 trillion. The omission of just
one word, just one name, omits such a huge amount of context. (Oh, as
for people who think that moderate spending on healthcare and domestic
infrastructure is “socialist” whereas spending larger amounts of money
on unnecessary wars is not, remember that it was military spending
that ultimately caused the Soviet Union to implode.)

“All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience
to remain silent” – Thomas Jefferson

Ronald Reagan is the elephant in the room, and both parties know it.
The military-industrial complex and the Republicans hammered the
country with Ronald Reagan. Now, anyone who runs for president is
faced with the spectre of the fact that the country has been damaged
and poisoned by a very popular Republican president who they’re too
scared to speak out against. Any Democratic presidential candidate has
little choice but to avoid the whole topic of Ronald Reagan, and in
doing so, they’re giving the Republicans an opening by not being fully
open, honest and sincere. The Republicans are very, very, very good at
taking advantage of this opening for all it’s worth and hammering
their opponents with attacks on their character.

To anyone who wishes the Democrats were more honest with the American
people, consider this: THEY TRIED! They freaking tried! Jimmy Carter
told the truth in his “malaise” speech. Walter Mondale told the truth
when he said that he’d have to raise taxes if he wanted to balance the
budget, but so would Reagan (and doubly so for Reagan, given his
reckless military spending). This comment of Mondale’s has
subsequently been ridiculed by Newt Gingrich as political suicide.
What was Carter’s and Mondale’s reward for being honest with the
American people? They were nailed – Mondale in a 49-state landslide –
by the con artist and exceptionally talented actor who’s primarily
responsible for the US now being over $10 trillion in debt. Reagan
also hiked taxes on low-income earners, just as Walter Mondale
predicted he would.

I’m not here to chastise the American people, for they’re a good and
decent people who were conned by a very talented professional actor
and his associates (yes, the comparison to Morden is intentional). My
purpose, rather, is to explain the context behind why the Democrats
have sometimes been disingenuous for their political safety. In the
1980 and 1984 elections, swing voters sent the Democrats a very clear
message that it’s not politically safe to be honest with them. It’s
that message that Bill Clinton was responding to, and I don’t fault
him for it in the slightest. He did what he had to do to save the
country he loves from Reagan’s treachery.

Bill Clinton knew the nature of his mission from the outset, and he
knew that hell would freeze over before he’d get to be president and
leave office with his reputation intact. Regardless of what choices
they made, regardless of anything they said or did, no Democrat could
conceivably be president in the 1990s and leave office with an intact
reputation. Holding the line against the Republican smear machine and
coming away unscathed was never a possibility, so the next best option
was to hold the presidency for eight years in spite of the damage to
one’s reputation. In the 1990s, the priority for the Democrats was
simply to do whatever it took to hold the presidency long enough to
reverse the worst of the Reagan damage and illustrate the processes
with graphs like the one I’ve been linking. Healing and inspiring the
country was not an option back then; it’s more of a realistic option
this time around, thanks in significant part to the Clinton presidency
having already stopped the worst of the bleeding from Reagan’s
neoconservative military spending, and Clinton’s good work on crime
prevention.

I’ll tell you what the US’s problem is right now: it’s suffering from
Reagan poisoning. What the US needs right now to heal itself is a
change away from Ronald Reagan and the military-industrial complex.
Obama knows this damn well but he can’t say it, and thus the less than
fully explained account he gives of what he means by “change” gives
the Republicans an opening. It’s an opening that the McCain campaign
has systematically exploited, starting with the attack ads about Obama
being a “celebrity”. The goal has been to portray Obama as insincere,
more style than substance, not complete in depth and concealing a
hidden agenda that will be bad for the country. Obama has little
choice but to take the hit and keep on avoiding any mention of Reagan
to a nation whose swing voters showed in 1980 and 1984 that, sadly,
they weren’t very willing to listen (at least, until Obama is a two-
term president who’s extremely popular for fixing the economy).

As Edgars said to Garibaldi, you have to pick your target very
carefully, because you only get one shot. George W. Bush’s presidency
is merely a symptom, rather than the root cause, of the US’s problems.
John McCain may be General Lefcourt, but Bush is not Clark. Ronald
Reagan is Clark, and it’s long past time that a good, decent, fine
country was liberated from his putrid influence. The Psi Corps are
neither the Religious Right, nor corporate lobbyists generally, for
there are far worse evils than bribery and religious intolerance
haunting Washington’s halls. Those things are merely convenient
distractions for the real infestation that threatens to rot the US to
its core: that entity which Eisenhower presciently warned of in his
farewell speech, the military-industrial complex.

If you live in the US and you want to see first-hand the damage that
Ronald Reagan’s economic agenda has done to your country, then perhaps
you should consider doing what I did back in 1995, and take a trip
with the Greyhound bus service to see all the homeless people. Bear in
mind that the timeframe of these consequences of Reagan’s cuts to
domestic infrastructure coincides with the timeframe of the US
national debt increasing to over $10 trillion national debt as of
today.

Let me describe my views prior to visiting the US in 1995, and seeing
all the homeless people with my own eyes. To the very limited degree
that I was interested in politics at all, my economic beliefs were
fairly centrist, and I had high regard for libertarian and centre-
right New Zealand politicians like Roger Douglas and Richard Prebble
(who most readers of this essay will of course have never heard of). I
had been top of the class in high school economics, and I had an
ongoing interest in economics, though not really in a partisan kind of
way in either direction. I had made the mistake of accepting Reagan’s
economic ideas based on faith, as most people did. (Oh, and I’d
received prompt, efficient and top-quality service in government-
funded hospitals without paying anything or needing health insurance,
and I’d never even given any thought to whether government-funded
healthcare had anything to do with “socialism”.)

I’m fairly well travelled, but I had never seen a homeless person in
my entire life before I visited the US in 1995; and when I did, it’s
fair to say I was a fairly neutral outside observer. I’d never seen
Rush Limbaugh on television or listened to years of Republican
propaganda, and without that context to bias my views and desensitize
me to the homeless people’s suffering, it was a very eye-opening
experience.

My reaction was not to wonder if these individuals were lazy or should
just go and get jobs, but rather, my reaction was to wonder what kind
of damaged, ailing country would let this happen. For the first time
ever, I wondered if the US might be on a trajectory to implode as the
Soviet Union did. This was a horrifying thought for me, and I hoped
desperately that this wouldn’t happen (if the US does manage to avert
this fate, it will be due in significant part to Bill Clinton’s
presidency, as you can see from the graph that I’ve been linking). I
had never had a negative thought about the US in any way, shape or
form in my life before I saw these homeless people with my own eyes.
It was quite shocking to see this happening in a country that I’d
always had the highest regard for and associated with innovation,
technology and a successful and bright future.

I supported the first Gulf War without questioning it, and I thought
it was really awesome that the US had “patriot missiles” that could
stop an Iraqi scud missile in midair. It was sad that there had to be
a war, but I never questioned the necessity of that war because I was
never given a reason to by the media or anyone I knew, nor did the
media show the footage of the full extent of the damage to Iraqi
civilian infrastructure. I accepted on faith that Saddam Hussein was
invading Kuwait for reasons related to oil, yet that the US
government’s motives were far more noble and altruistic than that. I
didn’t even think about whether some of Saddam’s weapons originally
came from the US, which in hindsight was a careless oversight, given
that I’d previously accepted on faith that Iraq was “good” because it
was on the US’s side, whereas Iran were the baddies.

"There's an old saying in Tennessee… I know it's in Texas, probably in
Tennessee… that says: fool me once, shame on… shame on you. Fool me,
you can't get fooled again." – George W. Bush

After resolving its internal problems at the end of the fourth season,
Earth joined the Interstellar Alliance and played an important
positive role in maintaining peace and order in the galaxy. In the
21st century, this planet badly needs the US to return to the moral
leadership intended by its Founding Fathers, and once again be the
fine beacon of democracy and freedom that it was on November 21st,
1963. The US could stop genocide in countries like Sudan, the way that
Thomas Jefferson fought the Barbary Pirates. Among the challenges in
the 21st century will be global warming, and I predict that China and
India will continue to be problems for longer than the US will.
Consequently, developing alternative energy technology and selling it
to developing countries will be a priority. Terrorism by extremist
religious conservatives will no doubt continue to be an ongoing
problem for many countries, long after the US removes the speck from
its own eye. Most conservative religious terrorism is of the Islamic
variety, although this is not invariably the case; take, for example,
the “Army of God” anti-abortion terrorist group.

Some people have suggested that this election is about Barack Obama. I
disagree. On the contrary, this election has become an epic struggle
over something much bigger than individuals: it’s become a referendum
on whether or not the American people are ready for the kind of change
that their country needs to heal from the damage that’s been done to
it by the military-industrial complex and the Reagan/Bush era
Republicans.

In many respects, John McCain’s campaign slogan – “country first” --
explains how this came to pass more than Barack Obama’s campaign
slogan does. The subtle but undeniable insinuation in John McCain’s
campaign slogan is that his Democratic opponent is not a patriot and
does not love his country, and every attack that the McCain-Palin
campaign has made on Obama to try to divert the focus away from the
economy has played on some version of that theme. McCain’s campaign
strategy hasn’t been as fragmented as it appears; calling Obama a
“celebrity” was the first step in a very, very clever strategy
designed to lead voters to question whether he might have a hidden
agenda beneath his eloquent words. (Who’s the real fluffy-bunny
celebrity, Obama or Palin? Who’s the real smooth-talking Hollywood
actor, Obama or Ronald Reagan?)

If you don’t support going to war in an oil-rich country for whatever
reason the neocon Republicans give you, you’re not a patriot. If you
object even slightly to the Republican economic agenda of tax breaks
for the rich and corporations, then you’re a “socialist”, and thus by
extension you’re not a patriot. If you think the US should look into
having the government provide healthcare like it does in the countries
that have the best healthcare systems in the world, then once again
you’re a socialist and thus you’re not a patriot. If you think that
alternative energy is more important than offshore drilling, that must
be because you’re not a patriot, rather than because the merits of
offshore drilling are pretty dismal compared to the merits of
alternative energy.

That’s pretty much the central plank in the Republican Party’s
platform these days. It hangs like a spectre over everything they say
and do. Oh, and if you don’t approve of legislation stripping away
your civil liberties, then you’re not a patriot. You have to support
the “Patriot Act” if you want your government to consider you a
patriot. (This differs starkly from how the Founding Fathers intended
the term to be used. Thomas Jefferson, who talked about patriots and
tyrants as opposing forces, remarked that “When the people fear their
government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people,
there is liberty.”)

John McCain and Sarah Palin, your tactics are focused around a central
theme. Whether it’s ACORN, or a “washed-up old terrorist” (John
McCain’s words), or an outspoken black preacher, or manipulative lies
about Obama’s tax policies, it’s all part of the same overall
strategy. Your goal is to play to the fears of voters, to incite
paranoid fears that your opponent is in some way less than patriotic
and that he must be hiding some kind of hidden agenda. Your strategy
is based on appealing to the fear and ignorance of voters in the
country you say you love. That’s a deplorable way to run a
presidential campaign, and it’s no way to introduce yourselves to the
country as leaders who can uplift it.

Go back to the Senate, John McCain. That’s where you belong, and it’s
where you’re at your best. There’s no doubt in my mind that President
Obama will reach across the aisle and pursue warm and friendly
relations with you. Thinking back to the presidents with the highest
average approval ratings in recent times, JFK (70%) and Eisenhower
(66%), it’s worth considering the spirit of bipartisanship which they
both demonstrated. Ike was constantly referring to “our two great
parties”. Several months after taking office, JFK issued an executive
order returning General Eisenhower to Active Duty of Regular Army in
grade of General of the Army, backdated to Dec 1944 (Gen. Eisenhower
had resigned his Army commission in 1952 to run for president).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-R5Vh5tOWk&feature=related

John McCain, after this election is over (one way or the other),
there’s something you could do which would really earn my respect:
give the American people an apology for the deceitful, manipulative
and dishonest way in which you’ve run your presidential campaign this
year. You’ve given such an apology before: after you flip-flopped on
the Confederate flag during the 2000 Republican primary in South
Carolina, calling it a symbol of “heritage” when in actual fact your
real belief is that the Confederate flag is a symbol of “racism and
slavery”, as you’ve called it on other occasions. You subsequently
admitted that “ambition” was the reason you told this lie – and I
think it would be healing for the American people to hear the truth
about how ambition was behind a lot of the lies you’ve told during the
presidential campaign this year, too. You capitulated to the nastier
elements in the Republican party and allowed them to keep tearing your
country apart for the sake of your ambition, and the American people
need to hear the truth about that.

How about it, Senator McCain? After running for president with a
campaign slogan that says “country first”, perhaps you should think
back to George Washington’s admonition to put country before party.

Matthew

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