Scarier than four more years?! The impossible is here.

[Joanne98]

My son, a recent Iraq veteran and once conservative Republican, rearranged my head last night with this stunning observation -- McCain/Palin was rapidly becoming a more terrifying proposition than four more years of Bush/Cheney. It took only a moment of consideration to accept the once unfathomable was now real.



Even George Bush wasn't so cynical and dismissive of the American people to make a vice-presidential choice as unqualified and pandering as Sarah Palin. At least Dick Cheney would bring to the presidency a depth and gravitas, however foul and menacing. Even as his decisions would have disgusted and horrified us, he would have made them knowing exactly what the hell he was doing. Sarah Palin presents the specter of a supremely empowered righteous idiot, actually LESS informed George Bush, more extreme Pat Robertson and more blissfully reckless than Donald Rumsfeld.

And when George Bush lied, there was within those lies some thin frayed thread of truth. When confronted with his falsehoods, at least George Bush seemed uncomfortable with them. His lies may have been outrageous, but they weren't bald-faced repeated reassertions that the sky is not blue. McCain doesn't lie in the traditional sneaky George Bush sense like a man always conscious of the possibility of being caught. McCain lies like a madman lies or a mad dog fights - as if he can own the truth through sheer willpower.

Dogmatic, inflexible, foolish, flippant, George Bush never seemed so feral and so self-righteous as to be utterly divorced from reflection. George Bush felt the need at times to justify his decisions to the American people and answer to the powers within his party. As much as he ruled with platitudes, we all knew he didn't believe them. McCain presents as someone accountable to no one but his own batshit crazy thoughts.

A McCain/Palin administration presents the once unfathomable possibility of longing for the good old days of Condoleeza Rice and Alberto Gonzalez, where even as our will was defied and our Constitution trampled, some sense of competency prevailed. With McCain making the decisions we could wake up to wall to wall Harriet Myers and Michael Browns -- people that struck McCain as "just like him" while utterly, spectacularly unqualified for their posts.

While Bush ran corrupt militaristic anti-Constitutional puppet coup, McCain may well give us a government driven by the ego of a true unrestrained kook, a Calligula's Rome. If nothing else, George Bush became predictable; we knew the Bush monster was driven by the rationale of greed, not the psychosis of divine mandates and pent-up POW rage.

And not to weaken the argument, but at least GW was fun to watch in his malapropisms and cowboy cluelessness surrounded by his cartoon cast of villains and grasping vipers. Given our collective fatigue and the dire nature of our shared circumstances, under their respective protective mantle of POWism and supermomism, McCain and Palin may deny us even the solace of laughter.

Imagine four years or more of unvarnished sanctimonious dismantling of the separation of church and state, married to "bomb bomb bomb" whomever. Imagine a band of brothers (and a sister or two) assembled by a man who long ago drank the red, white and blue Kool-aid and set out on a mission to win every fight he could find.


http://www.mydd.com/story/2008/9/13/73246/5264

[Beam Me Up]

1. I see it a bit differently.

I'm hardly qualified to go into detail but it seems to me that the point of all this is have people in the WH, especially as the "pResident", that are not qualified for the post. People who are, one way or another, malleable. After all, what good is a "puppet" that has a mind or a will or a voice of its own? All media attention if focused on the holder of that office and I've said this many times over the years here at DU. In a way * has been the "perfect pResident" because, love him or hate him, it doesn't really matter, so long as the media keep our attention primarily focused on HIM. All adoration and ire gets focused on HIM -- meanwhile who is really running the show? You certainly don't believe it is GB? Cheney? Perhaps. But behind both of them is a neocon cabal and an oil industry that has deep, familial ties to fascism going back more than half a century.

I'm not suggesting that your analysis is wrong. No, you are correct, a McCain/Palin administration WOULD be far worse than what we have precisely for the reasons you indicate. However, I think there is already something else at work here. You can call it "the invisible government" or "the octopus" or what ever you want. The point is, it is something sinister and, indeed, cynical. Something that detests democracy and the rule of law -- except in so much as it can be used to further subjugate an already dumbed-down and fearful population that prefers the semblance of democracy to the real thing.

IMO

[Usrename]

2. McCain/Palin - Just like Bush/Cheney only scarier

:scared: