The debate didn't need a certain person or personality to show up for that occassion, it needed the true person who will lead the country to show up. The mainstream media has already gave its persona for the socialist illuminati. It was up to the conservative candidate to expose the liberal for who they truly are, not who would show up or who the media puts in our faces.

Eisenhower kept the peace through strength. Kennedy put the world in constant peril through his disastrous novice judgment at the Bay of Pigs, and his ill advised Vienna summit. I respect Kennedy for recovering, and being a fast learner, but it was perilous all the same.

Eisenhower started us on the road to Vietnam with MAAG. He also started the planning and execution for the Bay of Pigs. His "Massive Retaliation" was a failure, and that failure was underlined by the Czech Crisis. U2 Crisis? Little Rock, which came from him dithering istead of cleaning Faubus's clock? All deliberate speed? Well. Eisenhower did want universal health care.

JFK inherited the Bay of Pigs. But his handling of the October Crisis was masterful. His dealing with LeMay were also nuanced and intelligent. The Vienna SUmmit was not ill advised... it paved the way for Nixon. His handling of the Diems was not masterful, but Eisenhower put those asses in power, not Kennedy. His "brushfires" strategy made sense, as did his "Flexible Response". While he had to be shamed into moving on Civil Rights (Ole Miss came from him dithering instead of kicking Ross Barnett's ass for inciting riot and ordering in enough marshalls and troops 6 hours earlier), he cut the capital gains tax and began the process of moving us out of the recession that Eisenhower fought.

You can't just say "Republican good, Democrat bad. It doesn't work that way. The facts on the ground don't fit that. I can go on. Eisenhower should have cut off that waste of money Joe "couldn't find a communist in Red Square" McCarthy, but lacked the courage necessary to do so until his beloved Army was in the venal distractobat's sight.

I suggest you read Ted Morgan's Reds. ANd Millett and Maslowski's For the Common Defense.

Don't count your chickens before they come home to roost!!

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.1445/pub_detail.asp

See if you can read this and remain unaffected!

You did a TERRIBLE job explaining what's "good" about McCain in that post. All of your points were about the fact that you believe Obama would be "horrible" in some way. But at least you realize there's nothing about McCain that you can reveal as a true strength. So congrats, you seem to live in our shared reality.

In reference to this:

Oops, gotta start with Obama. He and Pelosi favor tax "cuts" for 95% of the country, including 40% who pay no taxes. It's dangerous, in my opinion, for a democracy to openly bid on the give-away of other peoples' money. And, there is no public "need" here, like with farm subsidies or emergency welfare relief. Just "fairness." People going back to John Adams worried about this sort of thing; it was one reason we got an electoral college instead of direct vote and a veto for the monarch/president. It's a leap beyond progressive taxation . . . toward a late Roman empire bread and circus mentality, in my view.

Where did you find a statistic that "40% of people pay no taxes"?

That's total bullshit, not true, not even close. Even the vast majority of people below the poverty line pay taxes. They may not pay INCOME taxes specifically, but that's not your claim. You really should correct that.

Aside from being flat-out misinformed on that, however, I find your point fascinating in a surreal way.

It appears that you're saying that there is no "need" to increase US tax revenue.

Is that what you're saying? The deficit has ballooned to $11 trillion. It's so far beyond any past record that if I didn't know you were a paid Republican spin-meister, I'd have the impression you're being sarcastic.

Where's the money to pay that interest coming from? (If not raising taxes, I mean.) Tax revenue isn't going to be skyrocketing as our economy slows and more of the middle-class goes broke.

Currentl 3-month TBills are running at 0.5% interest (very roughly), which on 11 trillion is $55 billion a year.

In debt service. Assuming the lowest interest rate from the 3-month TBills ONLY...

Now, I realize that if McCain really does shut down the FBI, stop fixing roads/bridges, close all the Federal prisons, and lay off EVERY SINGLE non-"defense" Federal employee, he'll have more than enough to cover that debt service. (His plan is to freeze all spending except defense, veterans, and entitlements...correct?)

But what if that turns out not to be a practical solution?

"We were not with JOHN McCAIN at the HANOI HILTON. THANK GOD!BUT LET ME ASSURE YOU MY FRIENDS,he has faced situations worse than this!HE HAS ENDURED MORE PRESSURE AND HEAT and still survived!" -- rantianderson

You know what?

So he survived.

Great.

He's a gen-yoo-wine American hee-row.

Here, want a cookie?

I'll tell you what bub... the rest of America are all hee-rows now too. After eight long years of the Bush admonistration, Americans have been subjected to every psychological torture you can imagine. Terror, torture, loss of jobs, income, home foreclosures, pillaging the national treasury, sky-high gas prices, sending sons and daughters to a senseless war nobody wanted, watching savings, 401k's and nesteggs go up in smoke, loss of habeas corpus, getting illegally spied-on by the government, government officials in bed (literally) with oil companies and fat-cat bankers, shipping jobs overseas, shutting down factories and actual production manufacturing facilities, trying to decide whether to eat, have heat, or buy medicine, selling vital American assets like ports, railroads and other critical infrastructure to middle-eastern countries that "don't like us very much", mortgaging our children's futures to China in return for food that kills us and our pets, toys that harm our children, and sub-standard manufactured goods produced by near-slave labor and imported at subsidized prices that undermine America's ability to compete, crumbling schools, bridges that are falling down, roads that go nowhere, 2.2 TRILLION dollar bailouts to the richest bastards in the world, a do-nothing congress, regulatory agencies that are under-funded and under-staffed and cannot perform their missions, pathetic responses to national crisis such as Katrina or Faye, lying to the American public in order to start a war, revealing sensitive national secrets for political purposes... and the list goes on and on and on and on and on.

The American people can't stand anymore of your "Friendship". With "friends" like you, who the hell needs enemies?