John McSleaze

The Republicans, including the McCain campaign and its sycophants who act allegedly without McCain's knowledge so that McCain, a/k/a McSenile, can disavow them, are making me increasing disgusted and down right nauseous. If the only way they believe they can beat Barack Obama is to lie, spread false allegations and malign Obama, maybe they ought to question what they are trying to peddle to the voting public. I mean if your policies and proposals are so poor and/or are perceived as too ineffective to cure the ills facing the nation such that you are compelled to distract people from focusing upon them, would it not make sense to perhaps re-evaluate your platform? Sadly, no. Not for today's Republicans who increasingly act as dishonestly as the Christianist demagogues whose support McSleaze wants so badly that he's literally selling his soul and integrity. Or what ever integrity he pretended to have. Once upon a time I respected John McCain and even read some of his books. Those days are long gone. Here are some highlights from a piece in Time by Joe Klein which looks at the nastiness which is now the hallmark of McSleaze and the GOP:

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I heard about Jerome Corsi's book a few weeks ago . . . . Mary Matalin, who appears regularly on mainstream media programs like Meet the Press called the Corsi book in the New York Times today: “a piece of scholarship, and a good one at that.” But hey, Mary stands to make big bucks off this . . . and I'm sure her reputation and mediagenicity won't be damaged by this poisonous crap, and we're all friends here, aren't we?

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Back in the day, John McCain was the sort of politician who would stand first in line to call out this sort of swill. (As, I'm sure Barack Obama or John Kerry would do, if some hate-crazed, money-grubbing left-winger published a book claiming that McCain had been successfully brainwashed in Vietnam. . . . They are the sorts of claims that Republicans--Bush Republicans--make. They range from the blatantly extra-curricular, like Corsi's book, to the official McCain-sanctioned introduction made by Joe Lieberman--of all people--yesterday: that Obama doesn't "put America first."

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I know that people like me are supposed to try to be fair...and balanced. (The Fox mockery of our sappy professional standards seems more brutally appropriate with each passing year.) In the past, I would achieve a semblance--or an illusion--of balance by criticizing Democrats for not responding effectively when right-wing sludge merchants poisoned our national elections with their filth and lies.

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But there is no excuse for what the McCain campaign is doing on the "putting America first" front. There is no way to balance it, or explain it other than as evidence of a severe character defect on the part of the candidate who allows it to be used. . . . So he has made a fateful decision: he has personally impugned Obama's patriotism and allows his surrogates to continue to do that. By doing so, he has allied himself with those who smeared him, his wife, his daughter Bridget, in 2000. . . We'll see if the public decides to acquiesce in sleaze in 2008, and what sort of presidency--what sort of country--that will produce.