???Nowforsomethingotherthanthetruth??? exemplifies the measures employed by the McCain campaign starting with the anonymous smear emails that began when McC hired the Bush propaganda machine.
This deception campaign tries to benefit from party loyalties. It preys upon hate, prejudice and fear, and on the ???unanswered questions??? fabricated by the anonymous emails this campaign perpetrated. Links to debunks of many of those fabrications are in an earlier posting.
This is by far the greatest extreme ever in American politics. It is a fundamental threat to our political process. It would further entrench the Bush operatives who took over the McC campaign, and the republican lobbyists who represent only the megarich who looted our economy.
McC was a maverick. He promised to root out the lobbyists he said are what???s wrong with Washington. He said he would not take the low road employed by the Bush machine when it smeared him. He sold out when he got behind and subscribed to the ideology that the end justifies the means.
McC would continue the Bush tax give away to the rich that McC previously opposed and called ???irresponsible??? because ???it only benefits the rich.???
McC now wants to give more billions in tax give aways to oil companies that have just reported the largest profits in history for two consecutive quarters, while he claims that lowering taxes for everyone under $250k in after-deduction income will somehow keep businessmen from starting businesses.
???Nowfor??? has employed many of the themes in the anonymous viral emails. He recently said it was ???revealed that Obama has PLO buddies??? referring to Rashid Khalidi to whom McC donated $440k:
http://richmonddemocrat.blogspot.com/2008/10/mccain-funded-rashid-khalidi.html Guilt by association.
"Nowfor" continues repasting that the cause of our problem is a law decades old that encourages loans to qualified low income people.
Alan Greenspan said the cause is that an entire financial system was built outside of regulation; "we trusted" these self-interested looters ???to regulate themselves???. Credit Default Swaps resulted. They increased from $106 trillion in '02 to $531 trillion under R stewardship.
The legitimate news has reported that Fannie and Freddie paid many millions to McC's campaign manager, Rick Davis, who received up to $35K/mo. from Fannie and Freddie from 2000 to while he has been McC's campaign manager.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/22/us/politics/22mccain.html and http://www.newsweek.com/id/164732/page/1
Trillions were looted from our economy because the Rs allowed it. The Rs, including McC's campaign manager, are in the pockets of big money.
Without solutions, it is necessary to campaign with deception, misdirection, fear, smears, hypocrisy.
Attempts to hijack our political process with deceit and abuse of the trust of party loyalties are reasons I'm voting for Obama after 40 years of never voted for a Dem.
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It’s Not Easy Bein’ Blue
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Republican presidents, too, are frequently pulled from the right to the center. Nixon instituted wage and price controls and created the Environmental Protection Agency. Reagan cut taxes, then increased them, presided over the expansion of the federal government and wound up successfully negotiating with what he had once called the Evil Empire. George H.W. Bush swore he would not raise taxes, but did.
So are we a centrist country, or a right-of-center one? I think the latter, because the mean to which most Americans revert tends to be more conservative than liberal. According to the NEWSWEEK Poll, nearly twice as many people call themselves conservatives as liberals (40 percent to 20 percent), and Republicans have dominated presidential politics—in many ways the most personal, visceral vote we cast—for 40 years. Since 1968, Democrats have won only three of 10 general elections (1976, 1992 and 1996), and in those years they were led by Southern Baptist nominees who ran away from the liberal label. "Is this a center-right country? Yes, compared to Europe or Canada it's obviously much more conservative," says Adrian Wooldridge, coauthor of "The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America" and Washington bureau chief of the London-based Economist. "There's a much higher tolerance for inequality, much greater cultural conservatism, a higher incarceration rate, legalized handguns and greater distrust of the state."
The terms we use in discussing politics and culture can be elusive and elastic. The conservative label is often applied to people of all sorts and conditions: libertarians, evangelical Christians, tax cutters, military hawks. (There are just as many, if not more, varieties of liberal.) But in broad strokes I mean "conservative" in the way most of us have come to use it in recent decades: to describe those who value custom over change, who worry about the erosion of the familiar and the expansion of the state, and who dislike those who appear condescending about matters of faith, patriotism and culture. (In other words, think of figures ranging from Edmund Burke to Thomas Jefferson to David Brooks to Sarah Palin. It is an eclectic crew.)
The argument I am making—that we are at heart a right-leaning country skeptical of government once a crisis that requires government has passed—is probably going to look dumb, or at least out of step, for many months to come. A big blue tsunami appears imminent. Election night and the first phase of a possible Obama administration may feel as though we have left the old categories behind, striking out on a bold new path in which pragmatism trumps dogma. (Bold new paths are a specialty for new administrations, until they become safe old paths.) Economically, the deficits are so vast that we're all supersized Keynesians now, and there will most likely be political and intellectual cover for a stimulus package of new spending in the new year.
The American relationship with government is so fraught with hypocrisy and cognitive dissonance that it is difficult to discuss with any degree of rationality. Many dislike the state, except when the state is helping them; many hate paying taxes, except they expect the government to be able to fulfill the obligations (war, infrastructure, emergency relief, the rescue of investment banks) they think it should fulfill. If we are in a season in which government appears to hold answers to certain problems, then there will be much talk for a time about an emerging Democratic governing majority.
Such speculation is not crazy. From the Adam Smith-inverting bailout of the financial system to evidence of slightly less religious intensity, there are signs that the Americans of 2008 are far from the crusading townspeople of "Inherit the Wind." Context is all, however. Yes, the country may show signs of a receptivity to more-activist government and to a gentler tone on social issues involving religion and sexuality, but when we compare ourselves with, say, Europe—which the left loves to do, especially when assessing our foreign policy—we remain strikingly conservative. In the Pew survey, the number who say they have "old-fashioned values about family and marriage" has declined 8 percentage points since 1994—but from 84 percent to … 76 percent. That is hardly a landslide toward the libertine. In California, at least one poll suggests that social conservatives may pass an anti-gay-marriage ballot proposition next month (perhaps boosted by a high African-American turnout for Obama). "If you compare the Democratic Party to European Labor, in lots of ways [the Democrats] look quite conservative," says Wooldridge. Will a Democratic administration, he asks, "ban handguns? No. Will it throw its weight behind legalizing gay marriage in every state? No. So even if you have, as we will, a Democratic Washington, America will remain a fundamentally conservative country."
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