Conservatism vs. Nazi Fascism
by Jon Faulkner
Millions of Americans are ready and anxious to vote for Bush ll, the senile version. Why so many voters would do such a thing is entirely outside the province of rational explanation. Bush, one man, has visited fiscal disaster upon the nation. He has also presented the US as an imperialist nation, willing to invade sovereign states for corporate opportunity, thinly disguised as "freedom." If one such man may decide the fate of so many, then some assessment of their character, honor, and intelligence, seems vital.
Americans failed to hold Bush to any qualifier, and their reward is richly deserved. The ones who saw it coming and had to watch it unfold, like an automobile accident in slow motion, will be dragged down right along with the rest of the herd, which, it seems, is poised again to abandon all caution in their support of McCain, a mere codification of the previous eight years. Even a dumb animal learns that after it’s been burned a few times it doesn’t revisit the source of its injury.
Looking Back on the Bush Error
Pondering America's Greatest Shame
by Bob Patterson
The Republican National Convention will begin Monday and if historians were really as hip as they pretend, they would use the event to start the debate about what aspect of the Bush years, if any, qualifies as America’s Greatest Shame. Rather than having a week-long marathon of admire-the-emperor’s-new-clothes type fawning and hypocritical self-congratulations, historians, who have a proclivity toward iconoclastic behavior, could start the task of selecting what part of the decade of debacles could be suggested as the most likely candidate for earning the award for the greatest disgrace to the country.
McCain’s Baked Alaska
by Gail Collins
This year, Hillary Clinton took things to a whole new level. She didn’t run for president as a symbol but as the best-prepared candidate in the Democratic pack. Whether you liked her or not, she convinced the nation that women could be qualified to both run the country and be commander in chief. That was an enormous breakthrough, and Palin’s nomination feels, in comparison, like a step back.
If she’s only on the ticket to try to get disaffected Clinton supporters to cross over, it’s a bad choice. Joe Biden may already be practicing his drop-dead line for the vice-presidential debate: “I know Hillary Clinton. Hillary Clinton is a friend of mine, and governor, you’re no Hillary Clinton.”
The Ascension of Rachel Maddow
by John Halle
The ascension of Rachel Maddow to the highest rungs of the media elite has been greeted with near pandemonium on the left in some respects reminiscent to that which greeted Obama’s ascension as the Democratic nominee.
When the comparisons between the two are taken further they begin to tilt in Maddow’s favor. Obama’s shabby and unprincipled embrace of post-partisanism whether in the form of the FISA compromise, siding with the most reactionary wing of the Supreme Court, his saber rattling in the Middle East, has already begun to alienate more than a few of his erstwhile supporters. Maddow, in contrast, will have none of this: she recognizes that giving any quarter to the right inevitably confers fatal respectability on what Tom Frank calls the wrecking crew which has owned and operated the political system for the past generation. Unlike Obama, Maddow is ready, willing and able to call a right wing turd a turd and she can be counted on to thoroughly masticate and dispatch into oblivion the Republican talking point du jour the talent for which she routinely displays on her radio show.
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Hurricane Gustav already category 4, (and expected to be CAT5 by Sunday morning) and it hasn't even entered the Gulf of Mexico, where they usually pick up most of their steam. And it currently looks like it will make landfall where it will cause the greatest amount of damage to New Orleans. [