Friday, September 5, 2008

The Circus Ends With a Dull Thud

Finally, the political circus is over. And an awful one it was. It makes me wonder just who gets to go to these conventions. That chanting , “drill now, drill now” all seemed a bit crazed, perhaps in keeping with the lipstick-wearing pit bull hockey mom who seemed to so thrill the assembled conventioneers. A scary bunch indeed.
And Big Mac has now embraced virtually everything he had so firmly rejected in his last outing as a candidate. The “Agents of Intolerance” have been transmogrified, and seem even scarier than I always thought they were originally. The "maverick" now supports creationism, deficits ad nauseum, and oil drilling everywhere-- drill, drill, drill, regardless of the effects on either the environment, or the actual eventual supply of fuel. Maybe prayer will deliver us all from the Arab grip on "our" oil.
It made me wonder how we had come to this pass. How could we embrace such clearly wrong-headed solutions? What ever happened to American ingenuity, that sense that we would always devise some real solution to our problems? Now, we seem stuck in some time warp, unable to examine anything from scratch. Maybe that’s what happened to that pathetic bunch in Detroit. While the Japanese and the Europeans were out and about creating cars for the 21st century, Detroit has been rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. Seems entirely suitable for this republican governance.
A McCain-Palin presidency scares me greatly, she perhaps even more than Big MAC. But apparently, any criticism of her is considered by the rabid Reps off limits. That she has managed to leapfrog all the other potential women candidates with actual experience is not to be mentioned. Everyone has leaped on her lack of foreign policy experience. As scary as that is (I ignore the terminally stupid assertions that because Alaska is near Russia, she has experience), I find that she really has no experience at anything that resembles what we might want in a potential President. Shooting moose, or shooting wolves from an airplane are not high on my set of criteria for president. She seems a fairly typical small-town Alaska product, where she made, no doubt, a nice mayor. That she wants to teach “Intelligent Design” in our school systems is one her scarier ideas. But it goes along with her whole image—a retrograde mind set in a frontier body mold. She might have been great were this 1867.
What was he thinking?

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