Tired

[I just want to add a note to this, which was written last night when I couldn't sleep. I don't disagree with most of what I said, but I didn't mean to dismiss everyone who agrees with McCain. I'm sure there are people out there who honestly agree with him on the issues, or on what they believe the positions are on the issues. My frustration is largely with the so-called independents who seem to have swung to McCain. If you agree with McCain, and if you've taken some time to verify that the things you agree with are real and not just lip service, I have no problem with you voting for McCain. But I believe that number of people is relatively small, and it's the ones who are supposedly the independent thinkers who aren't bothering to think critically that are really getting under my skin. --L]

I'm about ready to give up on this nation's citizenry.

How incredibly stupid do we have to be, when one political candidate can successfully convince us that even the most basic questions about his (or more specifically, his running mate's) experience and credentials are partisan smears and not worthy of response, while at the same time successfully painting his opponent with lie after lie after lie?

I'm absolutely sick of it, and based on the polls our electorate is eating it up.

Keith Olbermann picked up a topic today I've talked about before: McCain has often used the phrase "I'd rather lose the election than lose the war", trying to paint himself as an uber-patriot who puts love of country before personal gain, and yet... He's been talking for months about his secret plan to get Osama bin Laden. He sells himself as the one guy who knows how to get bin Laden, a plan which he will reveal to us after we elect him.

I wrote about this weeks ago, but how do these two statements jive? If McCain honestly knows how to get bin Laden, why is he holding on to this information until after the election? Arguably the single most important enemy the U.S. has right now, and he's playing politics with it, which suggests to me either that McCain doesn't actually put country before personal gain, or that he's lying.

And if he's lying about having this great plan, this great knowledge of how to get bin Laden, you have to ask yourself why. And the obvious answer is that he's not got anything else. For all of his bluster, McCain has no more executive experience than Obama or Biden, and so instead of providing any real plans, he goes on about "secret" plans, and hopes that we, the electorate, will be too stupid to separate out "was a soldier in war" (a topic McCain keeps saying he doesn't want to talk about and yet magically manages to bring up, tourette's like, nearly as often as Giuliani invokes 9/11) from "is an expert on war".

And, it seems, he's right. I'm sick of it. Sick of every bit of it. In what intelligent world can a political campaign refuse to answer any but the most inconsequential of questions and manage to turn that lack of forthrightness into POSITIVE poll numbers? Meanwhile, Mr. Obama, who is not perfect, is at least trying to speak on the issues, trying to give specific answers and running a much cleaner campaign, and where is it getting him? Ever eroding poll numbers.

We're officially a society that does not think critically any more, and we actually buy the notion that the free press doing it's job is a BAD thing.

Or take the taxation issue. If I had I dime for every time someone has repeated to me that Obama was going to raise our taxes, I'd have enough to be in the top 5%, the only class of people for whom the assertion is true. In fact, for the vast majority of the lower and middle class, the Obama plan cuts taxes more than the McCain plan does. And yet the popular common knowledge is that Obama will raise all of our taxes. It's a lie, but it's winning.

Or take McCain's three latest attacks.

One, he claims that Obama's use of the phrase "lipstick on a pig", a phrase which McCain himself used in referring to a Hillary Clinton plan during the primaries, is now a sexist smear against his running mate, presumably because she happens to have used the term "lipstick" in her convention speech. How hypocritical, to use the same line to attack a woman, but when it is used against HIM, to conflate it INTO an attack on a woman.

Two, he has an ad out claiming that Obama supports comprehensive sex education for kindergartners. The truth is that Obama supported a bill to combat sexual abuse of children, and the extent of the training in kindergarten was to raise awareness of "stranger danger". Can you IMAGINE the McCain attacks had Obama come out AGAINST this bill.

Three, McCain has another attack ad out which lists a number of negative press articles about Obama, but... virtually every one of those articles is actually far more negative about McCain himself than about Obama. Really. How you can read an article that says your opponent isn't great, but you're far worse, and reference that article to say "See? The so-and-so newspaper says my opponent isn't great" and get away with it...

I'm tired, and I'm running out of patience.

I'll leave you with this article from the U.K.'s Guardian. It talks about just how much we risk in worldwide esteem (y'know, the stuff we had quite a bit of under Clinton, a huge amount of immediately after 9/11, but which we have record low amounts of today) if we vote in McCain.

The article posits, and I agree, that the world will see a McCain choice as America giving tacit approval to the finger George W. Bush has given to the rest of the world for the last eight years, and so instead of beginning to repair our standing in the world, we will hasten the point beyond which the free world stops accepting OUR president as THEIR de facto leader.

The choice at this moment could not be more clear. And we're on the verge of blowing it.

What a proud day to be an American citizen.

Liam.