First, let’s clear up my reasons for doing this.  I have historically avoided political posts on this blog, as my goal has been to attract viewers, not alienate them.  However, on this occasion, I have realized that it has become necessary to put the needs of the many ahead of the needs of the few—or the one.  This country needs change we can believe in, it needs hope for a future that is workable, it needs respect in the global arena, it needs economic policies that help Main Street, not just Wall Street, it needs health coverage for the millions who cannot afford it alone, it needs tax policies that work to help those who put in a full day’s work for a full day’s pay, it needs education and schools that keep our children competitive in the emerging global markets, it needs equality for all people—man, woman, black, white, straight, or gay—in the workplace and at home, it needs oversight of astonishingly under-regulated financial markets, it needs an energy policy that helps both the economy and the environment, it needs a government that protects individual religious choices and avoids pushing a single religious agenda, it needs respect for the constitution and all of its amendments; this country needs an innovator, a leader, and an inspiration.

That man is Barack Obama.  American politics have reached the point of no return; if we pass this election and vote to continue the trend of imperialism and theocratic empire-building, the trend of borrowing billions and spending trillions, the trend of hate for hate’s sake, we will have brought about the end of the American dream and this great experiment in democracy.  John McCain represents the aging and ailing authoritarian establishment that seeks power to perpetuate their own ideologies at the expense of the American people.  He is a liar and a fool and we cannot fall for his false messages of maverick and change, or we will be our own undoing.

These claims are controversial and inflammatory.  But how are they different from any of John McCain’s current slew of sleazy advertisements?  His advertisements are false, based on twisted and blatant lies, with no regard for facts or the truth.  What I put before you are claims that are verisimilitudinous in their truthiness; they can be backed up with plain and simple facts, which I will present to you now.

Let’s first look at Sarah Palin.  The media darling for conservatives, who immediately portrayed her as a dainty damsel in distress, and then immediately slammed everyone in mock outrage for pointing out her deficiencies (and there are many).  You will note the “lipstick on a pig” metaphor I used graphically to open this message.  You may recall the McCain camp’s apparent outrage when Barack Obama used this phrase—similar to calling something a “polished turd”—to refer to the McCain campaign’s vain effort to appropriate the message of change.  They even ran a TV spot calling Obama “disrespectful,” as if he had some obligation to subjugate himself to Sarah Palin.  We’ll ignore the obvious racist overtones and implications of that assertion for the time being to point out that the first person to use the lipstick phrase was actually John McCain himself, talking about Hillary Clinton during the Democratic primaries.  How hypocritical can you get?

The Republicans like to claim that people who stand up to Sarah Palin and her total inappropriateness for the job are doing so because of some repressed high-school era jealousy.  That simply isn’t the case.  People stand up to her and stand against her because she is stupid, inexperienced, a total liar, a cheat, politically backward, cruel, and wrong for America.  She doesn’t know what the Bush Doctrine is.  She couldn’t name a Supreme Court decision other than Roe v. Wade.  She suggested we use unilateral military action in Pakistan mere days after her running mate, John McCain, blasted and belittled Barack Obama for saying the same thing.  She couldn’t name a single newspaper she’s ever read in her interview with Katie Couric. 

She ran an itsy-bitsy little town in Alaska which she drove into the hole with her outrageous levels of spending.  She was governor for a short while and accomplished nothing noteworthy; she thinks being able to see Russia off the coast of her state counts as foreign policy experience. 

She said she opposed the now-infamous Bridge to Nowhere when in reality she ran her gubernatorial campaign on being for that bridge, only flip-flopping when it became a PR disaster.  Yet, despite her claims to the contrary, she never actually said “thanks but no thanks” to Congress for that bridge; she actually said “thanks and screw you.”  She took the money for the bridge and refused to give it back, instead using it to build a road to where that bridge would have otherwise been.

She said she sold her jet on eBay but she did not.  She said she fired her chef to cut expenses, and invented a sob story about how having to do so upset her children greatly, but she did nothing of the sort: she gave the chef a different title, and that chef still cooks for her children to this day.  She uses her children to score political points in this manner and then feigns fury when others point out serious flaws of character in certain such children.  She fired the Chief of Police when said Chief refused to fire a State Trooper who was a former in-law of Palin’s that had become involved in a messy and dramatic divorce in her family.  She charges her constituents per-diem fees for travel and lodging expenses on the job, all the while working out of her own home and traveling nowhere.

She is a proponent of the same abstinence-only sex education that got her 17-year-old daughter pregnant by an 18-year-old man who would consequently be a registered sex felon in 18 other states, all conservative states that supposedly espouse the same “moral family values” she does.  She doesn’t think abortion should be legal even in the event of rape.  She actually charged rape victims for their rape kits at Wasilla hospitals.  She has gone on record stating that she believes homosexuality is a choice.  She adamantly insisted on removing species from the Endangered Species List in her state because the species’ presence on such a list would be an impedance to the business of the oil companies that had just finished cleaning our collective pockets of $400,000,000,000.00 in pure profit over the previous four months.

After all the hyperbole that was shoved down our throats about Barack Obama’s pastor having some extremist views, it turns out that Sarah Palin’s pastor is several orders of magnitude more insane.  He arose to prominence after driving an innocent Kenyan woman out of her town, claiming that she was a witch that was responsible for dozens of traffic accidents in that town.  His beliefs have not tempered with time or experience.  He is on video praying over Sarah Palin during her gubernatorial run that witches be driven from her campaign so that she might win in God’s name.  Think about that for a second!  Not only does Sarah Palin believe in archaic witchcraft, but she believes she is doing God’s work.  We have heard that same line from the Islamic extremists that were responsible for the tragedies in September of 2001.  Do we really want someone of the same unstable mindset as Vice President of the United States?  Do we really want her as the second-most-powerful person in the world?

Even worse, do we really want her as the most powerful person in the world?  Recent medical examinations by doctors, quickly and quietly buried by the McCain campaign and the Republican party, suggest that his melanoma skin cancer is actually at a Level 3 stage, which has an 80% mortality rate after five years.  Assuming a linear scale, this means that, if elected, John McCain has a nearly two-thirds chance of dying in office.  In other words, if we elect John McCain now, there is a 66% chance we will have a President Sarah Palin by 2012.

These prospects are all horrifying.  I would hope that most people of sound mind would already have decided that Barack Obama is not just the right choice for America, he is the only choice for America.  Whatever is left of this country after the election of John McCain would not be something any historian would call America. 

And we haven’t even gotten to John McCain himself yet.  So let’s do that.

John McCain is no maverick.  He is no bucker of the party line.  He voted with George W. Bush at least 95% of the time Mr. Bush was in office.  And the American Conservative Union has him pegged near the top of their rankings since 1982. 

The chart below shows McCain’s voting scores as ranked by the aforementioned American Conservative Union as well as the Americans for Democratic Action.  As is painfully obvious, McCain is no friend of democracy; he is a loyal and staunch ally of the conservative agenda.  He claims that he has offended even George W. Bush himself.  Where?  When?  John McCain is not a maverick.  His “Straight Talk Express” bus, which recently grew wings, is the epitome of double talk.  And when called out on his lies and fabrications, reporters on the Straight Talk Express are given a line of expressly no talking.

McCain loves to run television ads claiming his battle against the Washington establishment has been a valiant and noble struggle for the success of the middle class.  In reality, McCain knows nothing about the middle class, and thinks people making $4,999,999.99 each year are of modest means and ought to be defined as middle class.  McCain, when asked, was unable to cite the number of homes he owns.  A conservative estimate places the number at 7, but further research has revealed that the more likely figure is 11.

Eleven homes.  Who needs eleven homes?  John McCain certainly mustn’t, or he’d do a better job being able to remember and recall how many homes he has.  He might even remember to pay the State of California the property taxes he owes on one of his vacation homes there, rather than dodging the taxes for years on end.  John McCain also doesn’t remember what kind of car he drives.  It’s a Cadillac.  The most expensive and luxurious Cadillac money can buy.

How many middle-class people do you know with eleven homes and a top-of-the-line Cadillac?  Is it even worth mentioning his Boeing 737?  One of McCain’s more infuriating ads suggested Barack Obama was nothing more than a celebrity.  John Travolta owns a Boeing 707.  One must therefore wonder who is acting more like a celebrity here.

What else has John McCain forgotten?  The answers are distressing.  One of his most trusted advisers, Dr. Henry Kissinger, has suggested that the United States needs to use a greater level of diplomacy when interacting with nations with whom our relations are not in good shape.  John McCain likes to quote Dr. Kissinger’s suggestions about foreign policy and diplomacy.  Unfortunately, he gets those suggestions wrong, instead implying something completely different and diametrically opposed to the spirit of Dr. Kissinger’s ideas.  McCain wants to continue the no-talk method of diplomacy we have been using, completely without success, towards nations like Iran and North Korea.  McCain violently opposes the notion of diplomatically discussing options with these nations at an executive level, and even went so far as to belittle Barack Obama for correctly noting Dr. Kissinger’s agreement with such an idea.

The very morning that the credit bubble began to burst and Wall Street began to tumble headlong, John McCain stated that he believed the fundamentals of our economy were strong.  He has used that selfsame quote on countless occasions, despite its total inaccuracy.  John McCain seems to have forgotten about the housing crunch, the mortgage collapse, soaring oil prices, the tumbling dollar, the evaporation of market regulation, and the inability of the average American—”Joe Six Pack,” as Sarah Palin would call him—to make ends meet.  John McCain says his campaign fought big oil, while he poses for photo-ops on oil rigs after allowing the ban on offshore drilling to expire.  His party chanted “drill, baby, drill” during their convention (which was preceded by preemptive arrests of protestors who had not even left their houses yet), as part of a massive package of delusion being sold to the American people.  Even the present Bush administration readily admits that offshore drilling will have no measurable impact on the price of gasoline for decades to come, and is not a solution to our long-term dependence on foreign oil.

John McCain, at a campaign rally, stated that he “did not disagree” with an attendee’s idea of bringing back compulsory military service, better known as the draft.  That’s right.  John McCain supports the draft.  A policy that wiped out an entire generation of Americans in a fruitless and vain war in the sixties and seventies is a policy that John McCain can get behind and support with a straight face.  John McCain supports expanding the disastrous war in Iraq to include Iran, even going so far as to bastardize the lyrics of “Barbara Ann” into “Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran.”  Evidently, John McCain thinks forcing an entire generation—or two—of young people into an illegal and unjustifiable war for oil in the middle east is funny.

Has John McCain forgotten his own experiences as a prisoner of war as well?  He certainly likes to remind everyone of the fact that he was one.  It has become embarrassing to hear McCain fall back to his time as a POW when he becomes otherwise unable to follow, answer, or defend a line of questioning or a position he has taken.  His abuse of that fact is a disgrace to all former and current prisoners of war; it makes a mockery of their service to this country.  He has pulled the largest, and perhaps most unforgivable political stunt a man can pull: dishonoring war veterans.

Take a look at John McCain’s own war record.  He graduated fourth-from-bottom of his military class, only managing to succeed by riding on the coattails of his powerful and well-connected admiral father.  He crashed four multi-million dollar military jets with his lackluster piloting skills, including the mission which resulted in his capture.  His fellow pilots saw the trap ahead and avoided capture; McCain blindly and brazenly forged ahead, in a startlingly accurate foreshadowing of the war in Iraq decades later.  McCain was subsequently shot down and captured through his own terrible judgment and planning.  As a prisoner of war, he received preferential treatment as the son of a powerful admiral, and as a courtesy to his captors divulged state secrets and participated in anti-America propaganda campaigns.  That kind of behavior is more commonly associated with irresponsible traitors than heroic presidential candidates.  It seems that McCain has, to use one of his favorite phrases, put lipstick on the pig that is his military career.

It is imperative to avoid glossing over the obvious fact that McCain is suffering from the effects of old age.  While this may not be polite, it is important for us to consider all potential detractors when examining a candidate for President of the United States.  His positions on things such as the recent $700,000,000,000.00 bailout (which he participated in actually increasing to an $850,000,000,000.00 bailout) of the Wall Street industries that raped the pocketbooks of middle-class America changed on a daily basis.  First he was against it; then he blamed the whole situation on Barack Obama; then he was for it; then it wasn’t good enough; then he voted for an expanded and even more wasteful version of the bill.  As a senator who has made a large component of his campaign his alleged resistance to earmarks and pork-barrel spending, it is awfully hypocritical of John McCain to shove an ill-advised bailout plan through only after earmarks, pork-barrel, and pet projects had been added to it.  And it is awfully startling that some of his closest campaign advisers are lobbyists for the very industries in need of bailout.

The truth is clear.  John McCain’s health is failing.  His mind is failing.  His policies are failing.  John McCain represents one big shipment of failure, from his military career to his track record in the Senate.  If America elects him as President this coming November, America will fail too.