The John McCain Thread

John McCain called his wife a c*nt
John McCain's temper is well documented. He's called opponents and colleagues "shitheads," "assholes" and in at least one case "a f*cking jerk." But a new book on the presumptive Republican nominee will air perhaps the most shocking angry exchange to date. The Real McCain by Cliff Schecter, which will arrive in bookstores next month, reports an angry exchange between McCain and his wife that happened in full view of aides and reporters during a 1992 campaign stop. An advance copy of the book was obtained by RAW STORY. Three reporters from Arizona, on the condition of anonymity, also let me in on another incident involving McCain's intemperateness. In his 1992 Senate bid, McCain was joined on the campaign trail by his wife, Cindy, as well as campaign aide Doug Cole and consultant Wes Gullett. At one point, Cindy playfully twirled McCain's hair and said, "You're getting a little thin up there." McCain's face reddened, and he responded, "At least I don't plaster on the makeup like a trollop, you c*nt." McCain's excuse was that it had been a long day. If elected president of the United States, McCain would have many long days. The man who was known as "McNasty" in high school has erupted in foul-languaged tirades at political foes and congressional colleagues more-or-less throughout his career, and his quickness to anger has been an issue on the presidential campaign trail as evidence of his fury has surfaced. As Schecter notes, McCain's rage is not limited to the political spectrum, and even his family cannot be spared the brute force of his anger. Schecter, who also blogs at The Agonist, said in an interview the anecdote is "an early example of his uncontrollable temper." In the book he outlines several other examples of McCain losing his cool and raises the question of how that would affect a McCain presidency. What should voters make of this pattern? In February 2008 Tim Russert succinctly described McCain on MSNBC's Morning Joe. A devilish grin spread from ear to ear as Russert, no McCain hater, leaned forward and spoke in a whisper, "He likes to fight." Russert got it right. But the big question isn't whether McCain likes to fight: it's who, when, and how. The exchange between McCain and his wife was not reported anywhere when it happened, Schecter said (a LexisNexis database search confirms this). In 1992, McCain's mention in the national media revolved mostly around his involvement in the Keating Five scandal, and only local reporters closely followed his re-election bid. McCain is well known for his rapport with the national media covering his presidential bid (he's jokingly referred to the press as "my base"), but Schecter said this incident was buried not out of fealty to the Arizona senator. Rather, it was uneasiness about how to get such a coarse exchange into a family newspaper, and he didn't fault the local press for not covering the incident. "Members of the media are squeamish covering stuff like this so they let it go," Schecter told RAW STORY in an interview Monday. "Back in '92, when people use naughty words, don't know as much what to do with it." Much has changed since then. President Bush's reference to a New York Times reporter as a "major league asshole" was reported in at least 47 newspapers during the 2000 campaign, when the off-color remark was overheard, according to a database search. And more than a dozen newspapers have reported Dick Cheney's recommendation that Sen. Patrick Leahy "f*ck yourself." McCain and his aides have brushed off suggestions that his temper could impede his ability to perform the sometimes-delicate tasks asked of a president. The candidate was asked about his legendary temper last week on "Fox News Sunday," where he cited his ability to work "across the aisle" while in the Senate. "You can't scare people or intimidate them if you're going to reach agreement with your colleagues and your contemporaries And I've worked hard at that, and that's what the American people want," McCain said. " The second thing is if I lose my capacity for anger, then I shouldn't be president of the United States. ... When I see the waste and corruption in Washington, I get angry." McCain's campaign did not return a call from RAW STORY seeking comment Monday morning. Schecter says McCain's anger is much more than a passion for the issues. One can only imagine what would happen if McCain were to try to squeeze that temper into the tight confines of diplomacy. "The public certainly has to know what this guy might do as president," Schecter says. Examples like the ones in his book "should worry people, quite frankly."

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2008/03/12/mccain/index.html (Read it from the source. Lots of good links.) March 12, 2008 The most important thing about the endorsements proffered to John McCain by George W. Bush and evangelist John Hagee last week was McCain's reaction to them. The freshly minted Republican nominee for president, who has had harsh words in the past for both Bush's policies and evangelical "agents of intolerance," meekly accepted their support. He knows he cannot win in November if the evangelicals and pro-war conservatives stay home. How far will McCain go in presenting himself as Son of Bush in order to energize his party's base? To date, based on his willingness to embrace the Bush agenda and to associate with religious extremists, the answer seems to be pretty far indeed. When John McCain went to the White House last week, President Bush seemed to be offering him an out. Bush "welcomed" McCain as "the Republican nominee" in his official statement, but didn't initially use the word "endorse." It was McCain who leapt for the e-word. "Well, I'm very honored and humbled," said McCain, "to have the opportunity to receive the endorsement of the President of the United States, a man who I have great admiration, respect and affection ." McCain's strategists, meanwhile, are said to be privately plotting how best to deploy the deeply unpopular Bush, perhaps by quietly sending him to host fundraisers deep inside red states where he would not risk alienating the general population from McCain. But McCain is hewing so faithfully to Bush's legacy he may need no help from the man himself in alienating the population. Whereas in his 2000 presidential bid, the Arizona senator sharply criticized Bush for appearing at the anti-Catholic Bob Jones University, which at that time also still banned interracial dating, he is less vocal about such matters now. He is himself behaving as Bush did then. McCain once dismissed evangelicals such as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson as "agents of intolerance." But last week the senator embraced Hagee's endorsement. Talk about an agent of intolerance! Hagee is like Pat Robertson on steroids. The Democratic National Committee was quick to point out that Hagee said that Jews have faced persecution "right up to this very day" because they rejected Jesus and so demonstrated "disobedience and rebellion" toward Jehovah. He said that the difference between a woman with premenstrual syndrome and a terrorist is that you can negotiate with a terrorist. He said that Katrina was divine punishment on New Orleans for its sinfulness, and on gays for planning a parade there. He said that Roman Catholics were linked with Hitler "in a conspiracy to exterminate the Jews," and called the Catholic Church "the Great Whore." He suggested a faux "slave auction" as a church fundraiser. He told a startled Terry Gross on "Fresh Air" that the Quran directs Muslims to kill Christians and Jews. (In fact the Quran recognizes Christians and Jews as "people of scripture" and only urges the early Muslims to fight back against the militant "infidels" or polytheists who were trying to wipe them out.) McCain reacted warmly to Hagee's endorsement, saying, "I am very proud of Pastor John Hagee's spiritual leadership to thousands of people and I am proud of his commitment to the independence and the freedom of the state of Israel." (Apparently for Hagee Israel is good, even if Jews are bad.) Pressed by Roman Catholics and others, McCain refused to distance himself from the pastor, saying only, "In no way did I intend for his endorsement to suggest that I in turn agree with all of Pastor Hagee's views, which I obviously do not." This non-disavowing disavowal has not satisfied most of the people offended by McCain's having associated himself with Hagee. Hagee's endorsement is McCain's "Bob Jones moment," taken from the W. playbook of 2000. In other respects, McCain is trying to repeat Bush's big win of 2004, when he fended off a near-upset by a weak Democratic candidate by doubling down on fear. McCain has adopted foreign policy and domestic stances similar to those of Bush's successful reelection run. In July of 2004, Bush abruptly announced that he was looking into whether Iran played a role in the Sept. 11 attacks on the U.S., and accused the Shiite ayatollahs of Tehran of harboring al-Qaida operatives, who are Sunnis. The whole fantastic set of allegations was immediately denied by Bush's own intelligence officials. Hawkishness toward Iran was one way for Bush to take the focus off his failures in Iraq. Bush by his belligerence appealed to a combination of evangelical holy warriors and so-called national-security conservatives, and McCain seems poised to move in the same direction. Echoing Bush's fear-mongering about the Islamic world, which by August 2006, two years after his reelection, regularly included references to so-called Islamic fascism, McCain maintains that the "transcendent" challenge facing the United States in 2008 is "radical Islamic extremism." McCain alleges that "al-Qaida in Iraq" will "follow us home" if the U.S. withdraws from that country. McCain takes this line even though most Muslim countries are close allies of the United States and Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida has been revealed to be a small fringe, now in disarray. Hagee's endorsement, meanwhile, brings more than white Protestant intolerance to the table. The organization he founded, Christians United for Israel, is lobbying for a war on Iran and dismisses last fall's National Intelligence Estimate finding that Iran has no active nuclear weapons program as "incompetent." McCain himself has joked about bombing Iran, to the tune of an old Beach Boys song. George Bush has been closely wed to Pakistani dictator Pervez Musharraf, even in the face of the reverses of the last year, which have seen the general's fortunes plummet as he alienated the entire electorate by sacking the supreme court and ordering a ham-fisted invasion of a militant mosque. Even after Musharraf's party lost heavily in recent parliamentary elections, McCain insisted, "We appreciate the relationship we have with President Musharraf and hope to maintain that." Musharraf's high-handed tactics have turned the whole Pakistani population against him, and he seems set to be much weakened by a new alliance of the democratically elected opposition parties. McCain, like Bush, doesn't want to let go of the dictator. Bush's signature project has been the war in Iraq, which he has managed like a veteran Las Vegas magician, with a misdirection and legerdemain that can make a whole elephant disappear. Despite nearly 4,000 U.S. soldiers killed, 30,000 wounded, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed, millions displaced internally and abroad, the creation of a new and serious terrorism problem, high fuel costs at home, and the entire lack of any obvious benefit from the whole endeavor to the American people, more than 40 percent of Americans now say the U.S. is making progress in establishing civil order in that country. McCain went to the same David Coppersmith School of Prestidigitation as Bush. He says he is dedicated to nothing less than complete military victory in Iraq and the maintenance of bases in that country for as much as a century, and his audiences do not appear to break out in derisive laughter. The bad news for McCain is that about 63 percent of Americans, a figure that has been fairly steady for the past year, continue to believe launching the war in the first place was a mistake. Surely lack of health insurance for tens of millions, loss of good jobs, blighted cities like Detroit and New Orleans, and erosion of key civil liberties are a more "transcendent challenge" than the activities of small cultlike groups that are finding it harder and harder to operate on the soil of Middle Eastern and European allies of the U.S. But that's not to say that McCain isn't pushing a domestic agenda as well. McCain does have a domestic agenda. It's George Bush's. On domestic policy, McCain's nostrums for the bad economy are job training and "tax cuts." As Paul Krugman once pointed out, "tax cuts" were Bush's response to each and every economic problem that arose, however unrealistic they were. Half of all the benefits of Bush's 2003 tax cut went to millionaires, and the sad impact on ordinary Americans of consequent lack of services and the diversion of wealth to the wealthy, has now become amply apparent. The more economically literate Republicans have caught on to Bush's "tax cut" shell game. Ironically, John McCain used to be one of them, declining to sign on to some of Bush's tax cuts. No more. By "tax cuts," Republicans such as McCain mean lowering specific federal taxes on income and capital gains. This step would harm federal income, which will fall anyway if there is an extended recession, and would mainly benefit Americans in the top income brackets. A federal government with less income will be less able to pay for the services and job training ordinary workers and middle-class people need, especially in bad times. Moreover, in a recession, you want the government to spend more money, not less, which cannot be accomplished by reducing its income. McCain, like Bush, seems firmly stuck in 1929. Bush championed the North American Free Trade Agreement, criticizing Sens. Clinton and Obama for saying they might pull out of it if Mexico and Canada declined to renegotiate some of its provisions. Bush is now pushing for a free trade agreement with Colombia, arguing it is necessary for "national security." McCain is just as committed to NAFTA as Bush. Worried about the impact on U.S.-Canadian relations of Democratic attacks on the agreement, he said, "I want to tell our Canadian friends that I will negotiate and conclude free trade agreements and I will not, after entering into solemn agreements, go and say that I will abrogate those agreements." He denounced the Democratic candidates for risking "protectionism," and added, "One of the greatest assets we have in Afghanistan today, frankly, are our Canadian friends." He noted the unpopularity of the Canadian participation in the NATO mission there, which is part of a NATO contingent, given the 78 Canadian soldiers killed so far. He concluded, "We need their continued support in Afghanistan." Some 58 percent of Canadians reject the idea of extending their country's mission in Afghanistan past February 2009. Both at home and abroad, McCain appears intent on abandoning some of his most deeply cherished personal values, including his commitment to secular values and distaste for religious bigotry, in favor of catering to the great W. coalition of white evangelicals and security-obsessed conservatives. Like Bush, his mantras are war and belligerence abroad, and at home, fear-mongering, "free trade," lower taxes on the wealthy, and "job training" for the increasingly miserable middle classes. If he is elected, it will be "Groundhog Day," the Bill Murray film about a character doomed to live through the same day over and over again. It will be the last eight years that we will suffer through again under a President McCain. Only worse, because we have already eaten so much of our seed corn.

A disease that can only be cured by enbalming fluid
John McCains says: "I am fully prepared to be commander in chief... I don't need on-the-job training." Yet, at a time when the U.S. economy is tanking, he admits he doesn't know much about economic issues: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XazpaYwFKd8 "I'm going to be honest: I know a lot less about economics than I do about military and foreign policy issues. I still need to be educated." He insinuates his grasp on "military and foreign policy issues" is strong, yet he has repeatedly shown that he doesn't know the difference between Sunni and Shia: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgwoBHbD0rY In 2001, on the Bush tax cuts: "I cannot in good conscience support a tax cut in which so many of the benefits go to the most fortunate among us at the expense of middle-class Americans who need tax relief." In 2008: "I think have to be made permanent..." In 2004: “I believe my party has gone astray. I think the Democratic Party is a fine party, and I have no problems with it, in their views and their philosophy.” In 2004: “John Kerry is a very close friend of mine. We’ve been friends for years. Obviously, I would entertain .” In 2005: “I am sure that Senator Clinton would make a good President. I have no doubt that Senator Clinton would make a good President.” In 2008: "I am a Republican. I'm loyal to the party..." "I can't abandon my principles." "It is my sincere hope that even if you believe I have occasionally erred in my reasoning as a fellow conservative, you will still allow that I have, in many ways important to all of us, maintained the record of a conservative." Confused: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edUuhfcJPzg Why is John McCain so eager to fall in line with the drum beat of the conservative wing of the Republican Party? "Presidential ambition is a disease that can only be cured by embalming fluid."

Oh my, it is so entertaining to read the quotations of a REAL flip flopper. :D

I never liked McCain. His politics and mine have always been at odds. But up to a point in time, I respected the man. He had, or at least appeared to me to have, integrity. Beginning sometime after loosing the Republican nomination in 2000, he started to change. By the Republican National Convention in 2004, his tongue was firmly up the asses of Bush and Cheney. It was pathetic to watch him come to the realization of what he would have to do to become viable to the GOP in 2008. Now he is a shameless whore and hypocrite. He should have given it a go as an independent. I'd never, under any circumstances, have voted for him anyhow. But at least I would have respected him for sticking to his principles and doing what he felt was the right thing for his country. Now that's out the window, too. He absolutely is a flip-flopper, and when the Democrats finally finish cannibalizing themselves and focus on him, I suspect that point will be made quite effectively. McCain finally determined Hagee was too much of a detriment and officially rejected his endorsement. Took him long enough! This is part of McCain's problem. He doesn't know who he is anymore. He once referred to Jerry Folwell and Pat Robertson as "agents of intolerance", but these days he actively seeks out and enthusiastically embraces the endorsement of a fire-and-brimstone, Catholic-hating zealot, and only gives up that endorsement once he learns that the lunatic in question claims that Hitler was sent by God to chase all the Jews out of Europe and into Palestine. Just like Hurricane Katrina was sent by God to punish New Orleans for a gay pride parade that was scheduled for that day. :roll: McCain will do and say anything to get where he wants to go. He's totally unscrupulous and reminds me a bit of Gerry Adams... while the preacher whose endorsement he eagerly chased after before reluctantly throwing away reminds me of Ian Paisley.

If anyone here is unfamiliar with McCain at all I would have to say that what Fitz put up is really pretty accurate. Great observations about his change over the years.

Was it Gore Vidal who said that he should be tried for treason rather than being lauded as a war hero?

Brave New Films often does a nice job of putting this bits together in a clear-cut manner: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEtZlR3zp4c

Interesting to see the team of foreign policy advisors McCain has assembled. Bill Kristol, Robert Kagan, James Woolsey and Richard Armitage - all part of the Project for the New American Century. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_Century (Plus, war criminal Henry Kissinger.)

CARTAGENA, Colombia — John McCain denied a Republican colleague's claim that he roughed up an associate of Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega on a diplomatic mission in 1987, saying the allegation was "simply not true." Sen. Thad Cochran, R-Miss., told a Mississippi newspaper that he saw McCain, during a trip to Nicaragua led by former Sen. Bob Dole, R-Kan., grab an Ortega associate by his shirt collar and lift him out of his chair. The Republican presidential contender, who is known for his hot temper, was questioned about the alleged incident at a news conference Wednesday here. He noted that at the time, he had been asked to co-chair a Central American working group in the Senate with Democrat Chris Dodd, D-Conn., and had made several trips to the region in that role. "I had many, many meetings with the Sandinistas," McCain said. "I must say, I did not admire the Sandinistas much. But there was never anything of that nature. It just didn't happen." His comments did not square with Cochran's detailed recollection of the alleged incident. "McCain was down at the end of the table and we were talking to the head of the guerrilla group here at this end of the table and I don't know what attracted my attention," Cochran said in an interview with The Sun Herald in Biloxi, Miss. "But I saw some kind of quick movement at the bottom of the table and I looked down there and John had reached over and grabbed this guy by the shirt collar and had snatched him up like he was throwing him up out of the chair to tell him what he thought about him or whatever ... "I don't know what he was telling him but I thought, 'Good grief, everybody around here has got guns and we were there on a diplomatic mission.' I don't know what had happened to provoke John, but he obviously got mad at the guy ... and he just reached over there and snatched ... him." Asked why Cochran raised the incident now, his spokeswoman, Margaret McPhillips, told The Associated Press on Wednesday: "I think Sen. Cochran went in to as much detail Monday as is necessary to make the point that, though Sen. McCain has had problems with his temper, he has overcome them." "Decades have passed since then and he wanted to make the point that over the years he has seen Sen. McCain mature into an individual who is not only spirited and tenacious but also thoughtful and levelheaded," McPhillips added. "He believes Sen. McCain has developed into the best possible candidate for president." Cochran, who has complained about McCain's temper before, said only a handful of senators took part in the trip, including former Sen. Steve Symms of Idaho. He said he didn't know who the man McCain grabbed was except that he was an associate of Ortega. The newspaper posted the audio of its interview on its Web site. Lorne Craner, 49, a former foreign policy aide to McCain who took part in the trip to Nicaragua, told The Associated Press that he doesn't recall the incident Cochran described. "Honestly, if my boss had grabbed a foreign government official like that and lifted him up I would certainly remember that," said Craner, who is president of the International Republican Institute, which McCain chairs. Craner said he also doesn't recall whether the senators met with Ortega during the trip but believes they met with the Sandinista government's foreign minister or interior minister. He said the trip was one of several to Nicaragua made by McCain and other members of Congress around that time. McCain has battled for years with Cochran, a senior member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, over pet projects or "earmarks" inserted by committee members into spending bills. McCain sought to smooth things over with Cochran this year after the Mississippi senator said the idea of McCain as the GOP presidential nominee sent a chill down his spine. Ortega, who once allied himself with Fidel Castro and the Soviet Union, headed the leftist Sandinista government and battled U.S.-backed Contra forces in the 1980s. He won re-election as Nicaragua's president in 2006.

Why waste time persuing/developing renewable sources of energy when you can simply drill up the oceans for a miniscule impact decades from now? Yet another flip-flop from this clueless old coot. It is hardly a secret that when it comes to offshore drilling, Sen. John McCain was against the idea before he was for it. On Monday, the Arizona Republican told a crowd in Texas that he was abandoning his long-time support for a federal moratorium on drilling along the nation's coastlines in favor of allowing states to decide for themselves. But how recent a convert is McCain to this position? In late May, during a campaign town hall, McCain was asked about the prospect of coastal drilling. His answer then was far more nebulous and skeptical of the idea compared to his recent, full-throated endorsement. On a campaign stop in Greensdale, Wisconsin, the Senator suggested that turning to the nation's coast for energy needs would be something of a waste in time and effort and do little to resolve America's broader energy needs. "ith those resources, which would take years to develop, you would only postpone or temporarily relieve our dependency on fossil fuels," McCain said when asked about offshore drilling. "We are going to have to go to alternative energy, and the exploitation of existing reserves of oil, natural gas, even coal, and we can develop clean coal technology, are all great things. But we also have to devote our efforts, in my view, to alternative energy sources, which is the ultimate answer to our long-term energy needs, and we need it sooner rather than later." Those remarks differ widely from the sentiment offered by the Senator yesterday, in which he presented coastal drilling as a move that would "be very helpful in the short term resolving our energy crisis." "I believe it is time for the federal government to lift these restrictions and to put our own reserves to use," he said on Tuesday, "as a matter of fairness to the American people, and a matter of duty for our government, we must deal with the here and now, and assure affordable fuel for America by increasing domestic production." In part because of these limited benefits, McCain was far cooler to the idea of ending to federal moratorium on drilling offshore back in May. Responding to an audience question, the presumptive GOP nominee stated his respect for states' rights while adding a healthy dose of concern about forcing states to open up their coasts. "Can I just say that this young man just pointed out that that he believes in states' rights, and so do I. And the people of Louisiana decided that they wanted to drill off of their coast. And they do. The people of California and the people of Florida, those two states decided that they didn't. What I would like to do, frankly, is to maybe give them a greater source of the revenues to help maybe encourage them to allow some kind of exploration far off of their shores. But if I told the state of California, you've got to have drilling off of your coast, that would frankly be a contradiction of what were just talking about, about -- that's their land and that's off of their coast." That McCain would, two weeks later, offer a full endorsement of removing federal restrictions on the drilling practice seems hard to attribute to the high price of gas (after all, gas prices were similarly priced in late May), but rather political posturing. A Republican with an environmentalism streak, the Senator has long stood against drilling offshore, arguing that longer-term solutions were needed to end the energy crisis. But the general election has changed that dynamic. On other issues as well, McCain has found himself back-tracking from his prior advocacy. In mid-May 2008, for example, the Senator was quoted saying he didn't "like obscene profits being made anywhere," and, as such, would be "glad to look" at a windfall profits tax on oil companies. Yesterday, however, he criticized Barack Obama for wanting "a windfall profits tax on oil to go along with the new taxes he also plans for coal and natural gas." Update: McCain's position also seems at odds with a study recently completed by the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) which in their Annual Energy Outlook 2007, reported: "The projections in the OCS access case indicate that access to the Pacific, Atlantic, and eastern Gulf regions would not have a significant impact on domestic crude oil and natural gas production or prices before 2030."

My how things have changed since this thread was started... Princess Pipeline is in da house and we must spend all our time dealing with the the false outrage any negative comment towards the mccain campain elicits. I am watching with stunned disbelief as McCain wages a successfull campaign against himsef. He and Palin seem to actually be convincing the public that mccain and rightie policy itself has not been at fault for our tanking economy. He has distracted the public with the shiny object, princess pipeline and her sarcastic zingers and and steaming ghetto mess of a family... so we dont ask him why his campaigns chief financial advisor and possible secretary of the treasury elect grams thought it was such a great idea that they deregulate our financial system, just in time for him to get out of congress and become an astoundingly high paid lobbyist for the industry he sold the taxpayers out for, and we are too distracted by her lipstick jokes to query why mccain himself, as chairman of the commerce committee lacked the economic acumen to see that his own policy of deregulation was bringing about big harm to the future oof this country he supposedly loves. Surely he must have realized how quickly this whole banking mess can spiral out of control when he was part of the Keating5, covering up and protecting the deregulated savings and loans who ran amok with our money the first chance they got when reagan and bush1 dereged them, right? I am cringing with disgust as americans are bamboozled into screaming DRILL BABY DRILL! when it is clear we cannot drill our way out of this energy situation. And I am deathly afraid of yet another presidency for the sake of oil.

There is no question of McCain being very dangerous. There is also no way i could vote for him, but there is no 'good guy' in all of this. There is no one to vote for, just someone to vote against.

You know, to me Obama is not my idea of the PERFECT candidate, one that I would support unflinchingly, but in this election, he is someone to vote for, warts and all. Not just a less bad alternative. On a scale of horrible, mccain is clearly a 10 while obama hovers at about a 1 1/2 The Stock market plunged another 500 points today, we are on the precipice of or already in another great depression, this election is basically a referendum between two very differing governing philosophys, one of which, has been in power basically for the last thirty years, reaganomics, and it has officially failed enough that it has the potential to completely ruin our country. The alternative to this philosophy of deregulation of capital to the point of robbery is basically, democracy, laws in favor of labor unions, minimum wages, health and social safety nets and capitalist accountability. If we do not at least vote in the party that will shore up social security, it will be gone by the time we retire, had Bush and Mccain succeeded in privatising social security into indivdual accounts like they wanted, the elderly TODAY would have been out of luck. Todays drop in the markets is probably large enough that you and i will have to work another three years or so, imagine if our individual social security accounts had been impacted by that loss today as well as our 401ks? And imagine again that you are say 2 years away from retirement today and ALL OF your non property assets had dropped 5 or 15% this week alone, after weathering the loss of your property assets by an average of 20% this year? You would be screwed. Obamas soundbite, this is not an ownership society, its a your on your own society is silly but it is true. Do we as a society think about only ourselves or each other? thats what this election is about. Do we want a crew in washington that believes that a government can do good things, like regulate capitalism so that they cant engineer the largest upward shift of wealth since the gilded age again? Or Do we want a crew in washingtom that believes only in the free market with no limits until it collapses in on itself , then they are socialist as heck, wanting to share the losses but keep the gains? We spent the first years of reaganomics, predicting what is happening today would happen, We have spent the last 15 years blaming republicans and democrats equally when republicans are technically the ones engineering this. This is thier PHILOSOPHY of government. they do not believe in regulation, except when it comes to who can marry who or what women choose to do with thier bodies. When it comes to giant lenders driving our country into bankruptcy by making usorious loans they know people cannot pay back, leaving families foreclosed on, broke and with rotten credit ratings well that is perfectly acceptable.

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