It may come as a surprise to Mr. Conason that during a time of economic distress that politicians with twangy accents or non-East Coast diction are not dismissed out of hand the way that elitists like him do. It's become harder to look down on people who are different, especially if they are temperamentally in line with the times.

Voters are very angry at this economic mess, and sooner or later they will come to the truth: Democrats stretched and broke the mortgage industry in their failed attempt to get the poor to own homes. In typical Liberal fashion of giving people fish instead of teaching them to fish, you have destroyed an industry.

This will go down as the Dems' Vietnam Redux. Voters didn't forgive the Dems' abandonment of the Vietnamese in the 70's and look how many Republicans have been president ever since. If you think voters are mad at Bush for his botched war in Iraq (and they are), imagine how they will feel when it's clear that the current fiasco is due to effete Liberals like Barney Frank and Chris Dodd and crooks like Franklin Raines and other Clinton-era cronies. Since you don't have a monopoly on the media any more (too bad, huh?), the word will get out, and voters will not forgive this Democratic thievery.

You can finger point all you want at Wall St. greed, but you cannot distract attention away from the likes of the Democrats at the heart of the problem. You can look down your nose at Sarah Palin and other funny-sounding Republicans, but get used to it. You and your cronies have made her possible.

Let Pelosi, Reid, and Obama arrange deck chairs on the Democratic Titanic, but change is coming, twang and all.

Homer Simpson for President:

can drink beer with the best of them

Dean Martin for Veep (even in his current state):

can through back shots with anybody in PA

Damn. We should look up to our leaders, not get down with them. Oh, and that noise you hear is Karl Rove shoveling dirt from Dino's grave.

For the GOP base, rational policy arguments won't work. Jesus is coming soon and none of this "material" stuff will matter anymore. It's all about "Godly" policy.

The rubes get convinced that the "flat tax" is "biblical," or that slavish support for Israel is necessary for prophesy to be fulfilled, or Obama is the antichrist, and there you go.

Irrational Christian other-worldiness contributed to the demise of the Roman Empire and it now seems to be doing a similar number on the USA.

You can't dumb down a party that's been electing stand-in leaders for almost 30 years. For republicans, it isn't the leader who runs the county, it's the controllers who stand in the shadows. It's the "platform." They can't afford intellegent puppets who might balk at their decisions, so we get Reagan and what's-his-name, Bush and fear-his-name, and McCain and Oh-My-God.

While you talk about dumb politicians, Phil Gramm, who caused this financial disaster, is preparing to become finance minister of a smaller, more personally enriching financial community. And I'm sure Halliburton will continue to direct foreign policy. And arms dealers are preparing for another decade of optimum sales.

Look who's dump now.

McSame spit in the face of the American voter by selling his soul to the rightwing religious groups with the VP pic. She further discredits professional women by her spew of lies and the McBush talking points.. How dare she wink at the camera and pretend the race is a cutzy beauty contest...She is setting the womens issues back 40 years...She only served to repeat talking points memorized over th past weeks- acted like a teenager and is a guiltless liar.

Mccain is an angry old liar with a bad health history and no physc records.....

The Right have been yearning for an affable nitwit armed with sharp folksy barbs and wooly feel-good homilies about "UHMERICA" since Reagan. He was the first Sarah Palin, although at his core the GIPPER actually had some misplaced beliefs that moved him, (along with an attachment to Hollywood notions of patriotism ). Remember that he often spoke of his military wartime experience when in fact he was employed at a Hollywood studio making American wartime propaganda films. He too, was stuffed with the self-same notions of "cut taxes, expand the military" that were/are the cornerstone of Dubya's Presidency. The only time George Bush sounded confident was when he spoke of cutting taxes and going to war, so barren was his intellectual grasp of the role of the executive branch. Palin seems motivated by base ambition as if simply wanting to be there and look nice is enough which is why her garbled rhetoric is such a amalgam of phrases which tangentially relate to any topic, (and ultimately why her performance is so galling to anyone else). She actually doesn't believe any of it in the sense that these are not actually concepts that she has thought about, perused on any level as intellectual constructs.

But ultimately what's quite scary is that it's pretty obvious that the GOP no longer has any more belief in elections than as a means to an end and they actually see them as no more than a cynical but necessary pantomine in order to achieve their goals of removing impediments to industry. And what's more, they are not even interested in well-run industry, only in profit. It's not hard to see how such a bankrupt "philosophy" could turn evrything it touches into shit so fast. Without constraints, the market, (like any phenomena), flails under the weight of it's own inertia especially when cut from the moorings of such notions as supply and demand. The common good is akin to socialism and threfore bad. Greed is by it's very nature is good. It's alarming to see how quickly those ideas have taken root under the rubric of "patriotism" and bantered about so cavalierly (and carelessly). I honestly believe that left to their own devices, the Right would discontinue elections altogether.