The Porter Bureau

Such is the editorial power of The Porter Bureau. I haven’t had a chance to watch the interview yet, but it should prover interesting. I’ll be interested to read people’s reactions.

Umm, ouch. It’s fitting, really. Sarah Palin now completes the trifecta of “undercutting every campaign message of John McCain.”
Uno
McCain pre Palin: Experience is everything!
McCain post Palin: Experience? meh, overrated.
Dos
McCain pre Palin: I’m a maverick, a M-A-V-E-R-I-K (I’m so maverick I even spell it my own way)
McCain post Palin: I’m all about the evangelical base! Always was! We’re the party of assault weapons and paternal rights for rapists, don’t ya know.
Tres
McCain pre Palin: Sure, anyone can give a “speech,” but it’s the ability to turn off the teleprompter and speak to the American people directly that shows true character and leadership.
McCain post Palin: Do they make White Out for life? I’d like a do-over.

So the great Palin saga continues in America, though overshadowed by a mere complete collapse of the US financial system. Now, in discussions here and in other places, Palinites have defended her tooth and nail. They have argued that the liberals just can’t admit that someone who didn’t go to an Ivy League school and opposes abortion even in the case of rape could posses a shred of intellect. In their partisan furor, however, they seem to overlook the fact that we as Americans have nothing to judge Palin’s intellect, political savvy, potential capacity as a commander-in-chief, or economic acumen on other than the constantly repackaged stump speech that she gave at the RNC Convention. Her one interview drew mixed reviews, so her handlers quickly placed her back in the cellophane wrapper–safe from those deference challenged liberals and all their pesky questions about irrelevant things, like her stand on the major political issues of the day.

So to the Palinites, I say be bold! Don’t let that old curmudgeon, John McCain, sequester Sarah Palin behind phony Sean Hannity interviews. Prove her detractors wrong. Do away with the infomercial-as-interviews and let her answer a question and prove her political chops. Do that, and if she’s half of what the right claims she is, I will be the first to stand up and say she’s qualified to be president of the United States. But if you let the McCain campaign continue to treat her like the red-headed stepchild hidden in the attic, then I will brook no more whining about how the MSM doesn’t show her proper deference.

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Yar me hardies, today be Ye ol’ Talk Like a Pirate day. So faar today, we ask that ye set aside yer political acrimony and celebrate with us a less complicate errra. An errra where vowels were long, women had bad breath, and wooden legs be all the rage. Ye may resume yar political bick’rin on the morrow.

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Though perhaps equal in unintentioned creepiness, John McCain’s recent spate of lies is significantly more disturbing than even a hallucination inspiring 80′s New Wave video. Before this week, McCain made a lair of himself by undermining his two greatest campaigning promises:

1: He promised to run an honorable campaign on the issues. Somewhere around Paris Hilton and Moses, I think he ditched those pesky values.

2: He promised the nation that the determining factor for who would be his VP was going to be their ability to assume the office of President were he to meet an untimely end. Enter Sarah “There’s a Bush Doctrine? None of my handlers mentioned that” Palin.

Well, this week McCain outdid himself. He outright lied in at least two instance: when he complained about Obama’s “lipstick on a pig” statement (a folksy colloquialism McCain has used himself), and when he released an add saying that Obama wanted to teach “comprehensive” sex education to kindergartners… Obama’s plan is to teach children how to avoid sexual predators.

So Mr. McCain. You’ve proven that you’ll do anything and throw anyone under the bus to get elected. Now that you’ve ruled out your experience and character, what, exactly, are you running on again? Oh, Palin’s appeal to the gun-toting right. Meh, it just might work.

In several recent conversations, I have expressed my desire for the US to establish itself as a leader in the coming renewable energy revolution. I have argued that the country that can develop a sustainable energy grid that divorces itself from the diminishing oil reserves will be the leader for the next century. The United States under Bush is reactionary and mind-locked into the ideas of the 20th century and will eventually be surpassed by Russia, Europe and China if we don’t find a way to stop shipping our wealth to the middle east, Venezuela, and especially those ner-do-wells up in Canada.

Well, just as I’m about to post these thoughts on my blog, Thomas Friedman swoops in and publishes a book with the same call for America to pull itself out of the Bush-Cheney-McCain “Drill Here, Drill Now!” mentality. He then has the temerity to scoop me and talk about it on NBC’s Meet the Press. Coincidence? Or does Mr. Friedman posses a mindreader device that pick the thoughts out of my head? We may never know.

Ok, so we’re all probably thinking the same thing, so it’s possible that this Baker guy and the NY Times editorial board came up with the idea to write about how the Republicans are presenting themselves as an insurgence candidacy … against themselves all on their own. Perhaps they say it better than I did. You decide.

The Party In Power, Running as if it Weren’t

and

Running Against Themselves

Of course, please feel free to dismiss their analysis out of hand because they’re the “liberal media elite”– the three foulest cuss words in the Republican lexicon. (For real, GOP kids cover their ears when you say “media” and parents use the euphemism “them know-it-all bastards on the east coast” when talking about the press to protect their children’s delicate sensibilities .)

So, nobody expected a magnanimous Republican Party to come out singing Kumbayah or offering healing circles for those who suffered under the last eight years of Dubya. What was amazing, however, was their ability to act as if the term “Washington is broken” doesn’t mean “the Bush administration has screwed things up beyond belief.” The basic logic that the people who are in charge are responsible for whatever failings currently exist in our federal government somehow escaped all of them… talk about lapses in judgment. What I find most perplexing is that a large swath of Americans will actually buy it. Somehow, they want you to believe that these white rich guys are actually your buddies looking out for you against the (favorite byword of the day) “liberal elites.” The truth is, Huckabee, Romney, and Giuliani do scare me. They peddle fear better than anyone since Bush and Cheney. In fact, through those three speeches I kept looking back over my shoulder–convinced that either an Islamic terrorist, an inexperienced politician, or an illegal immigrant was gonna jump me (I survived, but don’t think I’m gonna go unprotected like that again, no sir! www.assaultriflesrus.com here I come!). While the hypocrisy, distortions, and out-right lies were too numerous to count, here are a few of my favorite “no, we haven’t been in power for the last eight years… that was some other Republican Party, yeah… that’s the ticket!” moments.

1. Romney: “You see, Washington has been looking to the eastern elites…” This is a bad thing says the man worth over $250 million from Massachusetts? Ah, well then I guess we don’t need to worry about you running again in 2012.

2. Romney: “Change comes from the west! Arizona and Alaska” (but not Texas… nope, that’s not the West. No change there.)

3. Romney: “Is Washington now liberal or conservative?” Does he read the paper? See, there’s this guy named George Bush, and he’s pretty darn’d conservative. You know, I really shouldn’t have to tell you this, he’s been there for a while now.

4. Romney: “Is a congress liberal or conservative that stops nuclear power plants and off-shore drilling making us more dependent on middle-eastern tyrants?” Umm, again, news you should have known, the ban on off-shore drilling was an executive order by George H. W. Bush a few years back… so I guess it’s actually conservative, not liberal. To quote an earlier version of Romney, “facts are stubborn things.” Perhaps he should look them up now and again.

5. Romney: “Is government spending, putting aside inflation, liberal or conservative if it doubles since 1980? It’s liberal!!” Again from the office of “things you should probably know if you ran for president,” since 1980 the White House has been occupied by a Republican for 20 of those 28 years… To quote The Princess Bride, Mr. Romney, I don’t think those words mean what you think they mean.

6. Romney: “We have a prescription for everyone who wants change in Washington: throw out the big government liberals and elect John McCain and Sarah Palin.” Ok, so you have to follow Romney’s logic pretty closely. First, McCain and Palin are running for President and Vice President, so whoever you throw out for them to replace must be “big government liberals.” Second, Bush and Cheney currently hold the positions that McCain and Palin would take. Therefore, Bush and Cheney must be “big government liberals”! Wow, who knew? What’s more, since the only way to throw Bush and Cheney out is to impeach them, I do believe Mr. Romney has joined the rising calls to impeach Bush. Whoda thunkit? See America? You can learn something new if you just pay attention.

7. Romney: “America cannot long lead the family of nations if we fail the family here at home… Err, oops. Didn’t white that out, sorry Sarah.” Ok, I added that last part, sue me.

8. Romney: “You know, it’s time for the party of Big Ideas, not the party of Big Brother.” See, this is the short-term memory loss thing. There was this news story a little while ago about domestic wire tapping and telecom corporation helping the Bush administration spy on American citizens without a warrant. It was kinda a big deal. Perhaps they didn’t cover it on Fox News, so Romney has an excuse for missing it.

9. Romney: “Our economy is under attack. China’s acting like Adam Smith on steroids…” Ok, HUGE props to him for putting the image of Adam Smith shooting up and getting ripped in my mind, but I wonder if he didn’t talk over his audience just a bit. He almost, kinda, just a smidgeon, sounded kind of intelligent and well read. Isn’t that (warning, dirty word ahead) elitist?

10. Romney: “Our economy slowed down this year and a lot of people are hurting. What happened? Mortgage money was handed out like candy and speculators bought homes for free. [made possible by government deregulation pushed through by Republicans]… and stratospheric gas prices made things even worse [a combination of the political instability in the middle-east because of the Iraq war and speculators in the oil futures markets, who have also been deregulated]” See, this is what I’m talking about. The Republicans cause a laundry list of problems, and then get up with a straight face and tell us they have the solution to them. I mean, if it weren’t so terrifying (one sec, gotta check the closets for Islamic terrorists…. ok, I’m clear for now), it would be funny.

11. Delegates: Chanting “ZE-RO, ZE-RO, ZE-RO!” when the speakers talked about experience. The problem was that they kinda did it at the wrong queue and ended up chanting “ZE-RO” when the speaker was talking about Gov. Palin’s experience.

12. “Country First” Oohhhkaaaayy, McCain puts country first. Obama, on the other hand, is just in it for power an fame, of course. Talk about petty. What’s worse, however, is that it’s a lie. After his failed bid for the White House in 2000, in his book Worth Fighting For, McCain wrote, “I didn’t decide to run for president to start a national crusade for the political reforms I believed in or to run a campaign as if it were some grand act of patriotism. In truth, I wanted to be president because it had become my ambition to be president . . . In truth, I’d had the ambition for a long time. ” For the love of GOD man, quit disparaging the motivations of others when yours are so transparently self-interested.

13.Guiliani: “[Obama] worked as a community organizer… *snicker* what? *more snicker*” Umm, see when people are in need and they can’t help themselves they can get together and work for the common good. As Guliani was technically a “public servant,” I would hope this basic civics lesson would be something he had already figured out. Ah well.

14. Delegates: Laughing at the thought that someone would work to better their community and not just to make themselves rich. I mean, damn, that’s just stupid, right? Who would so such a thing?

15. Guiliani: “[Obama] got elected to the state legislature. And, nearly 130 times, he couldn’t make a decision. He couldn’t figure out whether to vote ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ It was too tough! He voted ‘present’! … For president of the United States it’s not good enough to be ‘present.’ You have to make a decision.” John McCain, Mr. Decisive himself, voted “Not Voting” either because he was absent from the congress or because he chose to abstain 407 times in 2008 ALONE! Let me spell that out so you can see just how freaking disingenuous Guiliani is being: McCain voted the U.S. Senate equivalent of ‘present’ FOUR HUNDRED AND SEVEN times in a SINGLE SESSION of congress. That, my friends, is NOT change I can believe in.

16. Finally, can we have enough with the asinine assertion that “executive” experience is so much better than legislative experience? It’s a logic stretched so thin it’s transparent (at least lets hope). The great irony is that the Republicans can only use the “executive experience over legislative experience” argument to try and justify the selection of (dare I say it?) a symbol by disparaging their own presidential candidate and undercutting McCain’s sole line of attack against Obama. Just own up to the fact that Palin, who is likely a lovely person and a good mother, has had a whole 20 months of service in any position even remotely pertinent to the job of President of the United States. She got the nomination for two reasons: she’s a woman and she’s a raging conservative that will placate a party nearing revolt. The Republicans had two ex-governors and the mayor of the largest city in the US running for their nomination and they chose a senator, but now they’re all about “executive experience”? *cough* *cough* bull *cough* s@#t *cough* (works better verbally)

So there you have it. A quick run down of a national convention that wallows in hypocrisy, laughs at people who are interested in bettering their community, ignores the fact that if Washington is broken, then they’re the bastards who broke it, and who really, really want you to buy that Sarah Palin is qualified to run the US if, heaven forbid, a 72 year old multi-cancer surviver ever meets an untimely death.

Kool-aid anyone?