Letters to the Editor
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post war
These guys are getting to sound more and more like the diehard rightwing in Japan after WWII, just never ever admitting that any wrong was done, and if it was, then it was done for the right reasons. It's clearly an illness or a syndrome, or maybe it's just that irreducible fact that 16 percent of any given human population are and will always be jerks.
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Re:16% of the population
Boo, hoo! My heart fucking bleeds for those assholes. Fuck 'em! Fuck 'em right in the ass! Just the way George W. Bush has been saying "fuck you" to us, it's time for us to return the favor. They all need to take a long walk on a short planet, and stop trying to cram their morality down our throats. Mitt Romney can kiss my ass. If he said anything like that in front of me, I would have booed him until I was hoarse. Boot to the head of the man with the magic underwear!
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Good Riddance
Romney ran a campaign that continuously evoked Reaganomics as the panacea for the country's current ills. But it's been 28 years since Reagan was first swept into office, and a lot has changed since then. The New Deal and Great Society have been scorned, dismantled and replaced with the current Corporatocracy.
As far as I can tell, then, Romney's vision for America had Ken Lay and Gordon Gekko as the prototypical management types, with the rest of us employed at Wal-Mart.
Somehow the Reagan mystique lives on, despite all the disproven canards and utter bullshit about Trickle Down. With his fifty million dollars Romney tried to paint himself as the reincarnation.
None of our 24-hour news heroes called him out on it either, with the exception of that one AP reporter who made that off-handed, in-your-face challenge to Romney's lie about not having Beltway lobbyists campaigning alongside him.
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mark my words: Huckabee takes Texas and Virginia
Why all the talk about the Republican race being over? McCain's opposition can now consolidate on Huckabee, and he can do well. He must be aware that he alone speaks for 2/3s of Republicans. He ain't going nowhere. He's taking Texas, Virginia, and probably Ohio too (redneck as it is, though most people don't know).
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John McCain's VP Best Pick
I think Ralph Reed would be a great pick for VP by McCain to seal the deal with movement and talk radio conservatives. He knows the Evangelicals and could ensure that they are motivated in their southern bastions, he knows how to talk to the media, he knows how to raise money. Great idea or what?
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True Choice Now
Romney told a half hour of pathetic cliches today. Then McCain stood up and sounded better, but not good enough.
We can get out of Iraq, and be much better off, and leave Iraq much better off. That is Hillary's or Barack's program.
Or we can stay in Iraq, and possibly invade Iran, Pakistan, Syria too boot, and drown in blood.
Clear choice.
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Good Bye Mitt?
As usual, these wingers have it figured out. Ask them. Those I work with know it all. They calculate that Hillary or Obama will take it for four years while the Republicans reveal the screw ups and lay the blame on the Democrats.
Then their Reagan reincarnate will rise again and save us all. Jesus will be his (definitely a white male) guidance, albeit if Christ hasn't came and raptured them all by then.
Let's just hope their Reagan President does not come with that well known mushroom cloud.
It really is hard not to despise these right wing nuts.
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Correct me if I'm wrong...
but wasn't Romney considered the phony just a few short weeks ago when Fred and Tom and Duncan were still in the race? NOW he's the real deal? When did that happen? Either conservative voters have the memory spans of goldfish, or there really is no such thing as conservative "principles". And of course no speech from the party of "less government" is complete without a call to regulate private behavior! Which brings up an interesting point in and of itself...
Why don't Limbaugh and company push for Huckabee? After 15 years of pushing for a "culture war" they finally have someone who will take it seriously. So what do they do? They back the business man instead. What's it going to take to get the dittoheads to finally see that this thing is a species of fraud? Limbaugh could call dog shit chocolate ice cream and they would still eat it, that's how easily led these people are. Not that it matters, this time next week, Limbaugh will be talking about McCain like he was always the reincarntation of Ronald Reagan. Just like they will the next republican nominee, and the one after that, and the one after that...
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Gosh, and to think...
It was only 2 days ago that Romney pledged to fight on, to take it all the way to the convention, and to win.
One would almost think that politicians will do or say whatever they think is most expedient at any given moment. It's almost like they're liars, even.
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What Now McCain? Only One Challange Left
Now John McCain is one of only three people in the world who will be the next President of the United States.
The others still have an internecine battle to resolve. And though they both might prefer to launch their missiles exclusively at Johnny Mac, each will find it necessary to direct at least some torpedoes at each other.
Sen. McCain, however, for the first time no longer has to compete with members of his own party. He can safely adopt the Reagan Commandment of "Never speak ill of a fellow Republican."
He now has one goal and one goal only---winning the general election in 10 long months from now, essentially an eternity in politics.
What does he know today with virtual certainty?
1. He will be the nominee of the Republican Party.
2. Either Clinton or Obama will be the Democratic nominee.
3. He lacks strong support from the conservative right of his own party.
4. He is considered experienced, well informed and in command of National Security issues, perhaps so in foreign policy issues in general, though there is little evidence that beyond the boundaries of his party the general electorate agrees with his positions in these matters.
5. He has been essentially mute regarding domestic policy, including its largest component, the overall economy. It has not been an area of great personal or professional interest to him and one would assume he knows that better than anyone. His sundry presidential campaigns have made that apparent to the voters as well. He's been a one-trick-pony.
6. Voters have found his semi-rumpled, shoot-from-the-hip, take no guff personality attractive, perhaps because it is in such stark contrast to the typical politician's. He either purposely lets his personal imperfections show, or they are such a dominant part of him that he can't fully mask them from public view.
7. John McCain will not have the luxury of running against an incumbent president of the opposition party. (See later comments regarding Reagan's campaign vs. Carter.)
For brevity's sake, we'll terminate this list here.
Relatively speaking, McCain's got some time on his hands now to do other things than outright campaigning day after endless day. He's not about to repeat Rudy's cataclysmically ineffective strategy of hiding in the bushes, keeping his powder dry until he sees the whites of his enemies' eyes; but some non-camera time is available to him over the next several months leading up to the convention.
Ronald Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter with simultaneous attacks on both the domestic and national security/foreign policy fronts. And back then the targets were so large--17% inflation, zero-growth economy, Iran hostages, Soviet threat--that he couldn't miss. He did not run as a one-trick-pony, he was a candidate with a clear vision of the job of the president, agree with him or not. And he was running against a seemingly overwhelmed incumbent of the other party.
Unfortunately for McCain, and as the economic news becomes more negative and more complicated in the months ahead, George Bush is rapidly taking on some Carteresque characteristics. (The botched War on Terror, the Keystone Cops adventure in Iraq, minus the humour and the multifaceted shakiness of the economy.) This time around, it's the republicans who have to defend the record of their incumbent.
Shoring up the ranks of his own party, while a challenge of sorts, will more likely be done by the words of his democratic opponents rather than McCain himself. A pithy speech or two by Clinton or Obama will do the trick.
McCain must at least project that he has real interest in and concern with the state of the economy. It's way too late for him to transform himself into the dual-barreled Reagan who was as effective in promoting his domestic agenda as his foreign.
McCain need not be nominated for the Nobel Prize in economics by September to project some knowledge and concern in that area. And he's unlikely to come up with anything as catchy and simplistic as Supply Side economics as a slogan. But he must show a reasonable command of those issues, or have a VP nominee whose domestic policy credentials are beyond dispute.
He won the nomination by perching atop a double pronged foundation of 1) his indisputable, deeply felt interest in National Security matters, even if his positions thereon were open to question by some in his own party, and 2) his gutsy, if erratic, bulldog personality. [And he's proven under the most unimaginable conditions that he sure is a bulldog.]
That's not a solid or broad enough foundation to win the general election....Add to that having to defend the record of Jimmy Carter--oops, I mean George Bush--and John McCain may have a task before him more daunting, in a much less painful way, than his years of captivity in Nam.