For those members of America’s dumb-ass electorate who don’t know why I keep yelling about the Supreme Court whenever there’s a presidential election…

…take a look at last Thursday’s horrible decision. The court, which is packed with corporate shills, has overturned a hundred years of case law and precedent by saying that there need be no limit on spending by corporations during political campaigns. That’s presidential campaigns, congressional campaigns, statewide campaigns and right on down to local elections for your own city council.

What this means for you and me is that in about five years, all elected officials will de facto be working for at least one corporation, having been supported/paid/bribed by them, and all governing from that point on will be strictly for the benefit of said corporations, even more than it is today.

Congress over the years has sensibly tried to restrict spending by corporations for political purposes, because corporations have no conscience and only one reason to exist: to make more money. Thus their interests do not often — if ever — coincide with those of the nation or its people. That’s you and me, and oh, by the way, corporations have unimaginably more resources than you and me, so don’t get the idea that if we all band together we can outspend corporations and defeat them in that way, because we can’t.

Consider: Worried that the Obama administration was going to hit drug companies with all sorts of regulations and demands for better deals on prescriptions for Americans, Pharma struck a bargain with the White House, agreeing to give up 80 billion dollars in revenue over ten years in exchange for no additional hassles. Yes folks, that’s 8 billion dollars a year that they are able to deal away, so let me ask you: If they have that much to spill, don’t you think they have a lot more that they’re keeping?

And now that they can spend it any way they want, why wouldn’t they just call Obama and tell him they have, say, a billion dollars to spend on his next campaign, and does he want them to spend it for him or against him? Obama’s been a big disappointment, but he’s not a fool. I’m sure his answer will be simple: “How can I serve you, Master?”

Or, consider: Just last June, a New York Times/CBS poll revealed that 72% of Americans favored a “government administered health insurance plan like Medicare that would compete with private health insurance plans.” But after several months of disinformation and fear-mongering by the insurance establishment, the peasants have changed their minds and hit the streets with torches, pitchforks and yes, semiautomatic weapons, crying “fascist,” and “socialist,” and “Marxist,” and demanding that the government stay out of health care.

The court case on Thursday was called “Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission,” and it was about a right wing group (a corporation) not being allowed to release a hatchet job movie about Hillary Clinton during the Democratic primaries. The FEC stopped them because everybody knows these video assassinations are potent and often change the course of elections. For example, look what the lies of the swiftboaters did to John Kerry, a decorated war hero. By the end of that election, many Americans thought Bush, a draft-dodger, was the hero, and Kerry was a lying, cowardly skunk.

So we know that you can determine the outcome of US elections with videos and advertising. Now all you need to do is get the money to make compelling, professional, good-looking videos.

Enter the Supreme Court, headed by ex-corporate attorney John Roberts. Here’s their position: Corporations are people, just like you and me (you and me with hundreds of billions of dollars in our pockets). But they have this handicap. You see, the poor corporations can’t talk. (That’s actually because they’re not people, but pay no attention to that.) So the only voice they have to make their political arguments is their money, of which they have more than God. Thus, according to five members of the Court, there must be no restrictions placed on corporations spending their money during political campaigns, because that would be the same as jailing you and me for standing up and saying “Change we can believe in” or “Country First.”

Anyone who thinks that wealthy corporations will not use this ruling to completely take over the government is simply not looking at what corporations do. (See above, the one goal of corporations.) And this ruling cannot be appealed. And no laws can be enacted to counteract this ruling. And for you slippery-slopers, here’s an icy one for you: Soon, this ruling will be used to show that corporations, being regular folks like you and me, can contribute cash directly to candidates. This will be much more convenient for them, as they will not have to have meetings with campaign managers to find out what to say in their political TV ads and their “documentaries” about opposing candidates. They’ll just be able to pay money openly to whomever agrees to play ball with them after winning the election.

This used to be called bribery. Now it’s Free Speech.

This is going to be even better than fascism. In fascism, the government and the corporations are bound together, and run things sort of as a team, with the government making the policy decisions. In the new era of the Roberts Court, there will be no government, only corporations. They are not interested in health care for all. They don’t care if the roads are fixed, only that the toll booths are operating. Education? Private schools only, charging the most the market will bear. I could go on, but you know what I’m saying. Picture a nation run by Halliburton.

Picture a nation run by Halliburton.

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PS: A quick shout out to the voters of Massachusetts: You sure sent a message to that socialist Obama! Maybe you should work to throw him out of office in 2012, just in time for a Republican president to appoint a couple more big business conservatives to the Supreme Court. That’ll teach him.

All the major stuff is bad: The economies of the world are reverting back to feudalism, leaving only the super-rich and the dirt poor. The earth herself may be dying, and the very governments and corporations who might be able to stop it are either denying that it is even happening or blaming each other and refusing to act until somebody else does. Christian and Islamist extremists alike have evidently decided that the murder of innocents is OK with God as long as it’s done in the proper spirit. And here in the richest country the world has ever seen our legislators are bargaining away another chance for us to provide health care to all of our people, while big corporations are demonstrating — again — who is really in charge of things.

The British being massacred in Afghanistan, 1842.

On a personal note, while half the wannabe workers in the world don’t have jobs at all, I have to work at a job that I detest, doing the work of the devil.

Now forgive me for my one-track mind, but of all the major stuff that will be stinking up the new year, our various wars around the world are the ones that truly break my heart and sink my spirit. I see that I was conned again during the last presidential campaign. Not that I would have voted for John McCain anyway, but I let myself think that Obama was against the war and that if elected he would take immediate steps to extricate our country from the horrific and useless games we are playing in the Middle East. These days the best spin I can put on it is that his heart may be in the right place, but the War Machine has let him know that it won’t pay for another term if he tries to stop the carnage.

It’s not good enough.

I’ve said before — and pretty much lost all my readers because of it — that I don’t support the troops. (See also here.) They are, after all, the ones who pull the triggers. I got some half-hearted support in this, and at least one holier-than-me comment that I obviously don’t know any military people, because if I did I would know that they hate war more than anybody. That may be true, but there seem to be a couple hundred thousand of them right now who like it just fine.

But I am a poor writer, and I’m afraid I have never adequately been able to convey here the horror in my heart about war. Luckily, Chris Hedges has stepped up to help me out. Hedges is a divinity student turned war correspondent turned rabble-rousing author and columnist (at Truthdig.com). He has been to war and seen it for what it is:

War is brutal and impersonal. It mocks the fantasy of individual heroism and the absurdity of utopian goals like democracy. In an instant, industrial warfare can kill dozens, even hundreds of people, who never see their attackers. The power of these industrial weapons is indiscriminate and staggering. They can take down apartment blocks in seconds, burying and crushing everyone inside. They can demolish villages and send tanks, planes and ships up in fiery blasts. The wounds, for those who survive, result in terrible burns, blindness, amputation and lifelong pain and trauma. No one returns the same from such warfare. And once these weapons are employed all talk of human rights is a farce.

And:

War’s effects are what the state and the press, the handmaiden of the war makers, work hard to keep hidden. If we really saw war, what war does to young minds and bodies, it would be harder to embrace the myth of war. If we had to stand over the mangled corpses of the eight schoolchildren killed in Afghanistan a week ago and listen to the wails of their parents we would not be able to repeat clichés about liberating the women of Afghanistan or bringing freedom to the Afghan people.

Read the rest of Hedges’ column here. Caution, though: it’s a little more shocking (and sickening) than what you’ve been getting from the TV and the press and our politicians. Mostly, we see and hear about Freedom, Democracy. Human Rights and safety for the American people. The unspoken subtext in all this, of course, is Glory, Bravery and Dominance.

I call bullshit on all of it.

To you politicians who say we have to win by killing them all, bullshit. The more of them you kill, the more of us they will kill. To you generals and admirals and commanders who pretend to hate war, bullshit. Do you think we haven’t noticed that your lives are devoted to it? To you chickenhawks who want someone else’s kids to go kick some ass and lose their lives, limbs and minds, bullshit and shame on you.

To you young men and women who think you are “defending freedom” by killing the enemy and destroying the countryside, well, sorry kids, but that’s bullshit too. I fear for you, and I weep for you. Like me, you have been conned. When you strap on your weapons and your uniforms and march into someone else’s home, don’t you see that you are the enemy, and all the stuffed animals and candy you hand out to the children cannot counteract the hatred you engender when you haul their uncle off to “enhanced” interrogation or shoot down their brother for running a checkpoint?

I know I’m a fool. I thought we were electing an antiwar president, and except for Dennis Kucinich, Obama did seem to be the strongest antiwar candidate. But he has already sent 60,000 more troops to Afghanistan (to fight an estimated 100 al Qaeda). And let’s not kid ourselves — there’s no way to bring that many people home in 18 months. What use is it to finally get out of Iraq if all he does is bring the ongoing invasion of Afghanistan to the front burner? Obama is the first president in my lifetime with both the requisite crises that demanded action and the juice to actually change the old, corrupt ways in U.S. government. That’s what he said he was going to do. And I, like a fool, believed it.

But here in the cold light of this harsh New Year, it looks like business as usual.

They didn’t shoot anybody. It was political theater designed to illustrate their point of view that “power comes out of the barrel of a gun.” Indeed.

It’s probably true that if you and I are in a serious dispute, and one of us has a loaded gun and seems willing to use it, that’s the one with the power, and the one most likely to “win” the argument.

But in the current national conversation (or screaming match) about improving our sick national health care system, logic, compassion, morality and the will of the people are no match for the weapon wielded by the medical-industrial complex:

Money.

Big pharma and the insurance companies have a lot of it, and they are throwing massive amounts of it into their effort to stop anything that might reduce their obscene profits. It’s working pretty well, as one liberal/progressive/Democratic proposal after another is removed from the discussion.

At the outset the one simple idea that is most likely to reduce cost, cover everyone and free us all from the indentured servitude of employer-provided insurance — universal government-run single-payer (or “Medicare for all”) — was simply taken “off the table,” with no discussion or debate whatsoever.

The Obama Administration fell back to advocating a “public option” plan, which would allow people to choose between their existing plan (if they even had one) and a public plan. The public plan would have been similar to Medicare, and would have operated without having to make a profit, which means it would have been less expensive by a wide margin. This was decried as a “government takeover” and is now not likely to make it into the final version of whatever reform bill is passed.

Next comes the notion of “insurance co-ops.” This is the worst idea so far, because co-ops are sort of ad hoc groups of consumers who band together and try to provide each other health insurance. They will not be able to compete against existing Big Insurance because it will take decades for them to get the membership necessary (an estimated 500,000) to spread the risk widely enough. In the meantime they will be snuffed out by the established industry.

And anyway, Republicans and Blue Dog Democrats in Congress are already saying they won’t vote for co-ops, either.

Here’s what I think, and I’m pretty sure I’m right: The corporations who stand to lose in any major reform of the health care system are simply paying to keep it from happening. They are able to legally bribe elected officials in the form of campaign contributions. And they are hiring media and PR consultants to confuse and frighten the electorate into demanding that the government “keep hands off my Medicare!” With their billions in cash they are able to control the debate from inception to the final vote in Congress. They don’t need guns. Their wealth is their power, and I am starting to wonder if there is any defense.

I mean, according to early polling Americans wanted universal single-payer health insurance by a margin of two to one. Now after a year of misinformation and specious arguments everyone is mixed up and angry and doubtful and suspicious, and if that’s not enough to turn the tide against reform, our elected officials have been given a a few hundred million dollars by the very industries they are expected to regulate, so how the hell do we expect them to behave?

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Recommended reading (these guys say it so much better than I):

• Chris Hedges, This Isn’t Reform, It’s Robbery
• Paul Krugman, Missing Richard Nixon

Barack Obama addresses a joint session of Congress.
Photograph: Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images

I saw Obama’s pseudo State of the Union speech tonight, as, I imagine so did most of the world. It was quite the event, with the whole Supreme Court there (including Ruth Bader Ginsburg, fresh from major surgery), the diplomatic corps and the cabinet (including Hilary Clinton, the only one who wore hot pink).

Obama basically said “You know that guy you voted for? The one with the progressive agenda? I’m still that guy.” Despite a lot of talk that he has moved to the center (or totally sold out, depending on who you listen to), it looks like he is still planning to cut taxes for workers, raise taxes for the upper classes and eliminate the free ride for the super rich. He is still planning to get some kind of universal health care for the U.S. He wants to bring back the days when everyone who wants one can get a college education. He still believes that government is there to promote the common welfare, build infrastructure, pass fair legislation and enforce it, and provide a safety net for the people.

He radiated confidence and calm, and even made a joke or two, in the best tradition of people who are up against it but are willing to work to overcome, and pretty much know they will. I bet that most Americans who saw him went away feeling that we are in this together, that we will recover, and we will be better than we were before.

But to conservatives, especially those of the Apocalyptic, anti-Christ, End Times persuasion, this must have been a dismaying performance. They’re probably out buying more ammo and canned food for their mountain and desert hideouts right now. Even regular old Nixonian Republicans must have realized that Obama is on the verge of wreaking a permanent change in American society (as permanent and far-reaching as Roosevelt’s New Deal, which is to say not permanent, but pretty darn long lasting), and for better or for worse they may be consigned for the rest of their careers to the role of minority, opposition party. They don’t have much in their arsenal to fight back with, either. Expect them to pick at small points and try to make a big deal of them, and of course expect them to be yelling “class war” first thing tomorrow morning.

So, to sum up:

• inspiring
• confidence-builder
• campaign promises=not lies
• government part of solution, not problem
• Reagan/Bush era over
• right-wing freakout

My favorite phrase from tonight’s speech:

“…we have lived through an era where too often, short-term gains were prized over long-term prosperity; where we failed to look beyond the next payment, the next quarter or the next election. A surplus became an excuse to transfer wealth to the wealthy instead of an opportunity to invest in our future.”

Of course it was a show. And good show, Mister President.

Tuesday is the last day of the George W. Bush presidency. I don’t feel exhilarated about that, as I thought I would. It would have been more satisfying to kick him out in 2004, or impeach him after 2006. Heaven knows he deserved to be sent home, or to prison, for most of his time in office. Quite a few Americans knew the truth in November of 2000, that we would not be well-served by “electing” a nincompoop who was, as they say, “born on third base and thinks he hit a triple.” Alas, almost half the electorate thought they’d like to have a beer with him. I wish they’d done just that, instead of voting for him. Eight years later, all but a small fraction of us wish we’d had that beer, gotten him drunk, and sent him home in an ice storm driving an old pickup with one headlight and bad tires.

In any case, we can hardly wait for him to leave our White House.

However, I am not down with the new President Obama’s apparent intention to let George and his band of criminal pals get away with what they have done. This is not having sex in the oval office, or failing to pay your taxes. The Bush Administration did Big Crimes, and we will all be paying for them for generations, so really, shouldn’t someone involved be held to account?

Let’s look at the charges (highlights only – I don’t have all day):

• Asleep at the switch on September 11, 2001. He is still bragging about “keeping America safe,” even though he ignored repeated warnings that an attack was planned.
• Illegal wiretaps. Yes, he spied on Americans without warrants, a clear violation of federal law. Yes, he admitted it publicly, and promised to keep doing it. Yes, he kept doing it.
• Invading Iraq. They had no weapons of mass destruction and they had nothing to do with the terrorist attacks of 2001. He fabricated evidence because he wanted to attack somebody, and he ignored or lied about intelligence counter to his delusions. He took troops out of Afghanistan, where the terrorists were hiding, to do this, thus on multiple levels he made our country (and the world) less safe.
• Federal response to Hurricane Katrina. Here’s a few quotes from the National Weather Service’s warning about Katrina: “…MOST OF THE AREA WILL BE UNINHABITABLE FOR WEEKS…PERHAPS LONGER…THE MAJORITY OF INDUSTRIAL BUILDINGS WILL BECOME NON FUNCTIONAL…ALL WOOD FRAMED LOW RISING APARTMENT BUILDINGS WILL BE DESTROYED…HIGH RISE OFFICE AND APARTMENT BUILDINGS WILL SWAY DANGEROUSLY…A FEW TO THE POINT OF TOTAL COLLAPSE. ALL WINDOWS WILL BLOW OUT…THE BLOWN DEBRIS WILL CREATE ADDITIONAL DESTRUCTION. PERSONS…PETS…AND LIVESTOCK EXPOSED TO THE WINDS WILL FACE CERTAIN DEATH IF STRUCK…POWER OUTAGES WILL LAST FOR WEEKS…” As this monster storm approached, George Bush ate cake (literally!) with John McCain, leaving his totally unprepared crony Michael Brown in charge of FEMA. People died. The city was destroyed.
• Obstruction of justice at Justice. Competent U.S. Attorneys were fired for political reasons, and replaced by right-wing loyalists in an attempt to rig the Justice Department. The Department was used to carry out politically motivated prosecutions, in violation of the Constitution.
• Signing statements. When he was not able to veto a law he didn’t like, Bush would simply sign it and issue a statement indicating that he didn’t agree with it and would not comply. Depending on how you count them, he has challenged up to 750 legally-enacted laws this way, more than all other presidents combined. But, signing statement or not, once a law is signed by the President, it’s the law, and if the President ignores it he is breaking the law.
• Torture. Abu Ghraib. Guantanamo. Suspension of habeus corpus. Detention without charges. “Enhanced” interrogation. Kangaroo courts. Extraordinary rendition. I can say no more.
• Valerie Plame. Dick Cheney and Scooter Libby committed treason by outing her as a CIA agent to get back at her husband for calling them out on their lies about Saddam Hussein buying bomb materials from Niger. Bush either knew or should have.
• Looting the Treasury. A few contractors, most notably Vice President Cheney’s own company Haliburton, have made billions of dollars on no-bid government contracts, delivering crappy service at inflated prices. Adding insult to injury, contractors often work side by side with qualified U.S. service personnel making a tenth of the money. Meanwhile, Bush’s corporate welfare and tax cuts for the extremely rich have redistributed the wealth away from working Americans and up into the vaults of the upper upper class.
• Asleep at the switch as the economy tanked. Bush is trying to blame Bill Clinton for the current economic meltdown, and while there is more than enough blame to go around, you’d think the first MBA president, while in control of all three branches of government for six years, would have noticed what was happening in the Wall Street Casino and done something about it. But he didn’t, and he had no idea how to even slow the bleeding after the crash, and now we will have a depression. Thanks, George!

Some of this behavior is patently criminal, some of it merely incompetent. Either way, the Bush presidency has ruined the lives of millions and caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands more, both in the United States and around the world. No U.S. president in history has done so much damage, been so unqualified, so blithely clueless or so stupidly stubborn in the face of the facts. And he continues to make speeches and give interviews, making excuses for his failures, trying to rewrite history, and convince someone, anyone, that he is not leaving the world in a shambles. I mean, he took just eight years to fuck everything up, and the least he could do would be to show a little humility as he departs.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m hopeful for the future. I’ve always thought that smart people, while not infallible, have a better chance of governing well than dumbasses, and I believe we are getting a smart and thoughtful new President to lead us through the coming dark years.

Hey, we’ve had our fun. We scornfully blew off Old Europe, we abrogated nuclear treaties, we drove huge gas guzzling pigmobiles, we borrowed money we had no way of paying back, we used the exploding equity in our homes as ATM machines, we kicked some Muslim butt in the bad, bad Middle East, we partied hearty for eight years. But We The People now have to suffer the throbbing hangover, and accept responsibility for our part in it, and pay the bills for our gigantic party of self-absorption. It seems only right that George W. Bush should have to chip in in some real way to pay for his ruinous eight years in office, for his crimes and misdemeanors, for his wooden-headed arrogance, and for his constant mispronunciation of the word “nuclear.”

After that, let the new era begin!

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I know I’ve left out some important Bush outrages and scandals, if not some more impeachable offenses. Feel free to fill in the blanks in the comments below. Truth now, reconciliation later. It’ll do you good.

Also, for excruciatingly more detail on the Bush crimes, see Hugh Makes A List. And thanks, Hugh, for this invaluable reference.

Please forgive my anti-Semitic, overly simplistic stance on this, but that is like saying you are going to keep smashing up the china shop with a baseball bat until everything is back in one piece. The Palestinians and the Israelis might have intractable differences and tribal grudges and no doubt there is a history of ugliness between them such that almost all of them have some event in their family’s past to prove that the other side is evil and intent upon destroying them. They need to get over it and start trying to figure out how to settle their differences before any more schools or hospitals or lives are destroyed.

I used to think that my country, the U.S.A., had the responsibility and the credibility to enter into the violent affairs of others in the world and help negotiate a truce, one that might lead to a lasting peace. Certainly the parties in the Palestinian mess have demonstrated that they can’t manage it themselves. Sadly, the United States no longer holds the moral high ground in these matters, and any attempt at diplomatic intervention on our part would justifiably be met with suspicion, if not outright jeers. Who knows if any nation has clean enough hands to step in and help resolve the ongoing bitterness?

I’ve heard it said that the first casualty of war is truth. That’s a nice metaphor, but there is real blood spilling in Palestine right now, and no civilized nation should sit by and allow it to go on.

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John McCain looks like a loser in this election, but don’t think the Republicans have given up.

The New York Times reports today that tens of thousands of voter registrations in swing states have been purged, apparently illegally. The Times is careful to say that they can’t tell if one party or the other is orchestrating the mass removal of names from voter registration rolls, but when you are the (Republican) party of the elite wealthy minority, it stands to reason that you’ll benefit if fewer of the rabble get to cast their votes. The Republicans have been trying to make an issue of “voter fraud” for decades, but the truth is it’s not really a problem in our democracy.

The problem is vote suppression, (seriously, watch this 30-second video by one of the leading neocon thinkers, Paul Weyrich) and the Republicans have made an industry out of it, from jamming Democratic phone banks on election day to challenging peoples’ legal right to vote to rigging electronic voting machines. Low voter turnout translates into greater success for Republicans, and according to the Times article, these vanishing voter registrations are all taking place in swing states, so forgive me if I get a little suspicious about this. Even if this is not an orchestrated plan by the Republican National Committee, as the article points out, the Democrats have registered huge numbers of voters during this election cycle, and in some states for every new voter added to the rolls, two have been removed. Advantage — and suspicion: Republicans.

Meanwhile, across the nation Republicans are raising outraged cries of “voter fraud.” If you are a real wonk for details, you can read Columbia University professor Lorraine Minnite’s excellent paper, “The Politics of Voter Fraud” (PDF). The bottom line is “…the available evidence here suggests that voters rarely commit voter fraud.” The claim is simply a smokescreen to give cover to Republican operatives who know that they have a better chance of winning if the turnout is low.

Normally this is where I’d tell you that the solution to this particular problem is to make damned sure you get out on election day and cast your ballot, thus thwarting those who would prefer you stay home and watch John McCain eke out a narrow victory November 4. Unfortunately, if your name has been taken off the voter registration rolls, maybe because you’ve moved in the past year or so, maybe because you didn’t answer a letter from the RNC that looked like junk mail and so went directly into the recycle bin, the solution will be much more complicated than that.

You’ll be given a “provisional” ballot and told that it will be counted after proper verification. These are often called placebo ballots, because their main purpose is to get you to leave the polling place without making a fuss. The odds are that they will never be counted. You won’t know that, of course, and the only way all the votes will be counted is in an elaborate judicially-mandated recount, kind of like what happened in Florida eight years ago, and we all know how well that went.

I still think Barack Obama will be our next president. I’m just not sure how many lawyers and recounts it’s going to take.

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RECOMMENDED READING: The Bradblog, for all sorts of voter fraud and machine-rigging stuff.

As you can see from the map (which appears today at pollster.com), she won’t be Vice President this time, because McCain won’t win.

But the wingnut Right has found their new George Bush, and you can be sure we’ll see her again. Maybe she’ll be a senator from Alaska next, which will give her a national platform and greater recognition, and then she’ll be running for President in 2016 or even 2012, maybe against Hillary Clinton.

For all I know the fundamentalists may be sincere in their screwball beliefs, but they sure don’t know anything about reality, nor do they have any interest in learning. They could never get elected on the basis of their “every-egg-is-sacred, evolution is just another theory” platform, so in order to get into a position where they can impose their thinking on the rest of us, they have made a deal with the devil, namely the demonic, scorched-earth “New American Century” gang, whom we shall call the Neocons.

Here’s the deal: The fundamentalists provide the empty vessel — know-nothing social conservatives like Reagan, Bush and now Palin, and in exchange the neocons provide the muscle (and the computer hacking) needed to win elections. The Christianists get a President (one of their own) who will appoint right-wing Supreme Court judges to reverse Roe v. Wade, oppose gay marriage, etc., and the neocons get a President who will let them make endless war on the rest of the world, while eliminating government regulation of business and robbing the Treasury of every last dime.

The Left, rightly convinced that their own programs and policies benefit the largest mass of voters, gets whipped every time, and they can never figure out what happened.

If you think this is far-fetched, I refer you to the cases of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, a senile old movie actor and a congenital fuckup. They spoke to the religious right directly and unabashedly, stood right up and called other countries “evil,” and claimed Jesus as their role model. Neither of them had any particular presidential skills or aptitude. Most of us on the left laughed at them pretty much the same way we are laughing now at Sarah Palin.

But it turned out that being clueless did not disqualify them from being President. The hardcore right-wing power structure, which had taken over the Republican Party, saw in them attractive candidates, dummies who’d be able to talk the Jesus talk convincingly, and who’d go along with whatever fiscal and military policies the Party handed them, because hey, who understands all that economics and diplomacy stuff anyway?

Palin is the political descendant of Reagan and Bush: attractive, zealously religious, folksy and vacant. She can be molded by campaign handlers such as Karl Rove (and Lee Atwater before him), and she can plausibly pose as presidential material, easily mouthing platitudes, slinging personal attacks and avoiding serious questions on substantive issues. Merely by virtue of who she is she can deliver the votes of the religious right, a coveted and loyal bloc.

Once in the Oval Office, like Reagan and Bush she’ll be content to let the serious ideological thinkers within the Party set policy and run the show. She’ll make good on her Supreme Court promises and other just-for-show religio-political stances, but important decisions about whether Halliburton gets all the contracts (they do) or what country needs invadin’ will be made by unelected guys behind the scenes.

There has been speculation that there was backstage neocon maneuvering to force McCain to put Palin on his ticket. I don’t know if any of that is true, but I’ve been saying for at least a year that the Republicans don’t have a chance in this election. It’s obvious to the voters who is responsible for the horrendous mess we are in, and they are ready to dish out some well-deserved punishment. Party insiders don’t really like McCain, so he was the perfect guy to sacrifice this time around. Nonetheless getting Palin on this ticket will give her the name recognition and credibility to be a believable candidate in the next election or in 2016.

We are about to emerge from eight years of Rove/Cheney/Bush darkness, and won’t it be a relief to see a little daylight for a change!  But don’t turn your back on Sarah Palin. She’ll be back, and tougher than ever.

His campaign is in trouble, and he wants to stop and . . . what? Go back to the beginning? Start over and try a different strategy? He never had a serious chance to win this election in the first place. God bless him, he’s too moderate for the right-wingers who now control the Republican party. When the current president has screwed up as badly as George W. Bush, it goes without saying that the next president will not be from your party. McCain was the sacrificial lamb, an expendable candidate that the party didn’t really like anyway, so who cares if he loses? After they threw him to the wolves they decided to get a little fundamentalist mileage out of the campaign by throwing Sarah Palin into the mix. She’s somebody they can use later, maybe in the next election, once they’ve established her “credentials” as an actual player on the national stage.

But McCain is just doing crazy shit now. He’s like a guy in a board game who — realizing he’s too far behind to win — spends the rest of his time in the game making unpredictable suicide plays, screwing everything up for those who are still serious about the outcome. Picking Palin was crazy. He’d be doing much better now if he had a running mate who knew his ass from page eight about. . . well, anything. But he wanted to spoil Obama’s convention, and the Palin choice did do that.

Then he essentially canceled the first day of his own convention, saying in effect that you can’t do politics during a hurricane. A hurricane a thousand miles away. As if the Republican Party is somehow in charge of emergency preparedness for the Gulf Coast. WTF?

And now he has “suspended his campaign,” so he can rush to Washington to help solve the current economic crisis. And he wants to postpone the long-scheduled first debate. Never mind that he hasn’t found anything in the Senate important enough to warrant his presence since sometime in April, or that in a time of crisis the voters might actually want to hear what the candidates have to say about it, or that ranking members in both houses say they’re doing fine without introducing presidential politics into the wrangling, or that (as Obama has said) it is possible to do two things at once. Never mind that McCain has solidified his place as one of the nuttiest major presidential candidates in history.

I probably live in a liberal bubble here in California, and I watch MSNBC and listen to Air America, but I can’t believe Middle America is going to think this latest move is anything other than proof that John McCain is just too volatile — or kooky — to be president.

I’ve been a Democrat since the 1960’s. That’s right — a liberal, a “progressive,” a left-winger. But I think I come to this place honestly. My mother was not political, and my father was a WWII veteran who voted for Eisenhower. I figured out for myself what I needed to know to make my decisions. You can believe me or not. That’s up to you, but I say this just to let you know that I’m not a “knee-jerk liberal,” that I have thought through my positions

Over the decades since my first Presidential election I have remained hopeful, although there have been times when I couldn’t stay optimistic. My basic belief is that we are all we have, and it’s crucial that we take care of each other, and that’s the measure I use when I’m deciding who to support in an election. I’m not pretending to be all that altruistic. It’s just the way I think. I’ve never been able to understand why warmongers get elected, or pompous hypocrites who wear their religion on their sleeve.

But high public office, it turns out, confers great power on it’s holders, and so the competition to gain these offices has grown ever more cutthroat. Men — and now women — are desperate to get this power, and I mean desperate. We won’t go into the reasons why, but they are desperate. And in their desperation they have turned election campaigns into elaborate, amoral displays of deception.

Techniques have evolved that can get anybody elected, no matter their background. Negative advertising, whisper campaigns, sabotage and outright lies about your opponent actually work. I mean, let’s just face it, it’s far easier to cast enough doubt in your mind to stop you from voting for someone than it is to inspire you enough to go out and elect that person.

This is why no one in this campaign is talking seriously about the war, the broken military, the crumbling economy, the failure of the healthcare system, the corrupt Bush Administration or any of the other real issues that face us. This is why we are talking about real or imagined personal slurs or sex ed for five-year-olds. That stuff works, unfortunately, far better than real (and boring) discussions of monetary policy or international diplomacy. Sadly, the introduction of a smear campaign instantly brings both sides into the muck. There is no way to defend against it. You fight dirty or you lose. (This is a corollary to Jones’ First Law of Social Interaction: Bullies always win.)

So every four years I think maybe we’ve seen the worst of the negative campaigning, and every time it gets worse. Fine. I can stipulate that this is how all elections will be run, now and forever. It won’t stop me and you from knowing about the actual issues, and trying to get someone elected who at least seems capable of doing something about them.

I’ve written in this blog that I am a one-issue voter in this election, and that issue is the war in Iraq. I hate it. I hate the fact that it was not necessary, that our president tricked us into supporting it, that it has destroyed my country’s credibility and good will throughout the world, that it is draining the U.S. taxpayer’s pockets to the tune of ten billion dollars a month, and that it has killed and maimed hundreds of thousands of victims.

But the war has disappeared from our political radar, except for the candidates bickering over who was right and who was wrong about “the surge.” In the meantime, see the previous paragraph for a short list of all the stuff that is still going wrong with no end in sight. I accept the fact that we have made such a mess of things that whoever is elected will make almost no difference in the outcome. We’re stuck there for the foreseeable future. There is no honorable way out — as if anything we’ve done there has been honorable up to now.

So, while my Big Issue simmers on the back burner, here’s a little negative campaigning of my own: Last Sunday on 60 Minutes they re-ran a segment about Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, the 76-year-old right-wing “originalist.” Among his many smug responses, he was arrogantly impatient with interviewer Leslie Stahl when she asked him if he had any regrets about his part in selecting George W. Bush over Al Gore for President in 2000. Despite Bush’s disastrous presidency — the incompetence, the corruption, the stupidity — he said (paraphrasing) “That was so long ago — get over it!”

Get over it? I can hit my finger with a hammer and get over it. I have apparently missed my chance to get into Gwyneth Paltrow’s pants, and I’m over that. But I’m having a little trouble getting over the ongoing catastrophe that is the Bush Administration. And now it occurs to me that if John McCain wins this election, he’ll get to appoint a couple of Supreme Court justices himself, and what with his voting so often in agreement with Bush, and since he has actually said that Roe v. Wade should be overturned, I’m not feeling real good about the kinds of appointments he will make.

The Democrats, much as I love ‘em, have a bad habit of approving bad appointments to the Supreme Court, even when they have multiple methods of stopping said appointments, and plenty of good reasons to do so. So even though they will probably have a majority in both house of Congress for the next few years, I don’t trust them to block a possible wild-eyed nutcase from getting onto the Court and screwing up the whole country for 50 years.

These judges are there as long as they want to be. Their terms never expire, and they almost never retire. The impact of a heavily packed right-wing court will be felt for thirty years at least, followed by a couple of generations that will have to live with their decisions until such time as the Court gets around to hearing and correcting old decisions. They are likely to make abortion illegal in this country. They will probably approve laws requiring all of us to carry guns (just kidding). They will continue to make it easy for government to take your property and give it to developers, for, well, development. They will continue to uphold obstacles to equal pay for equal work, as they did just this year. They will be unchecked by any kind of liberal balance. The conservatives will simply be able to steamroll any opposition, because they’ll have an automatic majority in every case.

Let me put this bluntly: They will be very conservative Republicans. Republicans are the party of the rich. They will stand with their party in making sure that rich people remain the ruling class (and get richer), while the rest of us hope for something to trickle down. They will continue down the road of making the U.S. a Christian theocracy, with rulings against abortion and in favor of displaying the Ten Commandments.

If you’re sick of all the slimy campaigning and you just want politics to go away, or if you just can’t decide from among the candidates, think about The Supreme Court. They will have a much greater effect on your life and the lives of your children than the guy who sits in the White House for the next few years. This election is a chance to halt the Court’s slide to the far right and bring some balance back to this crucial branch of government.

It may be your last chance for a long, long time.