McCain's Empty Campaign

Read the following article and weep for the country we once had -- and have now lost. Yet, McCain wants to continue the Bush/Cheney policies that brought us to this low estate. With the plunge of our stock market today and the markets all over the world--zooming us right past recession, into a worldwide depression--there is very little chance of McCain getting the presidency. But it will be a Pyrrhic victory for those of us who have had to endure Cheney/Bush the last 8 years because of the votes of our duped fellow citizens (and vote fraud!). The Republicans have taken us all over the cliff with them.

Obama and Biden will inherit ashes where there once was a booming economy and a strong, proud country. Cheney/Bush took a national surplus, handed over to them at the end of the Clinton years, and ran it into the ground, replacing it with trillions and trillions of dollars worth of debt, leaving us with nothing but ashes. I wonder if Obama and Biden will be able to create a phoenix bird to rise from those ashes. It will take a miracle...and many years of hardship and suffering for all of us (except for the rich 1% who profited and thrived -- and who will continue to live comfortably, while the rest of us scramble to keep body and soul together). It's a tragedy of unprecedented proportions.

Yet McCain wants to CONTINUE to enrich the wealthy by cutting their taxes even more. Does this make sense to you? How have you profited these last 8 years from the Republican "trickle-down" economics? How much has "trickled down" to you? Are you liking that we have to bail out the richest people in the world, at taxpayers' (that's us!) expense? The greed-driven burdens placed on us by Cheney/Bush and the neocons ("we are creating a new reality and you will have to accept it") will be shouldered by our children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. This is the legacy we are passing along to future generations. How do you like the neocons' "new reality" that we all were forced to accept????

There is enough blame to go around -- first, the Democratic candidates who refused to protest when two elections were handed over to the Republicans, even though the Dems had actually won. Next, the mainstream press that were sycophantic lapdogs for much of the Bush/Cheney administration (thank God for Helen Thomas, but her voice alone wasn't enough -- and none of the rest of the cowardly reporters supported her courageous outcries for real answers to her real questions). And it goes without saying that the duped voters who thought Cheney/Bush were just what our country needed must share the blame, too. Some of them still continue to wave their flags at the Palin rallies -- and cheer her vacuous empty "you betchas", "folksy" winks, and shrill-voiced lies. Amazing, isn't it? Then there were the rest of us, who could see this train wreck coming before the train even pulled out of the station in the 2000 selection by the Supreme Court -- and who have felt for eight long years like voices crying in the wilderness (because we were!), calling out warning after warning--voting against the neocons, only to see vote fraud wipe away our votes. It didn't matter how much we protested, how big our marches were, or how often we called our representatives in outrage, our voices weren't heard and our votes weren't counted. And so we have come to this....

Welcome to the Cheney/Bush Legacy...and
The Empty Campaign of John McCain
by Jared Bernstein

About a year ago, I had a memorable chat with a high-ranking Republican operative. The presidential primaries were revving up, and he asked me which Republican candidate I feared the most. Without hesitating, I answered McCain. . . .

The most recent data show that in 2006, 23% of all income is held by the richest 1%, the highest level on record but for one year: 1928. Spending on the war has not abated, and the budget deficit is on the rise. Middle-class Americans, who allegedly weighed so heavily on McCain's conscience circa 2001, are much more squeezed now than they were then.

The economy is surely in recession. Financial markets are deeply screwed up, and on Friday we learned that the job market contracted by another 159,000 last month, the ninth month of consecutive job losses.

. . . if the Bush tax cuts didn't make sense in 2001 and 2003, they make a whole lot less sense now. Yet McCain doesn't merely want to extend these cuts forever. He wants to expand them dramatically, by cutting the corporate tax rate by about a third, at the cost of $735 billion over 10 years, according to the non-partisan Tax Policy Center (TPC). As Biden effectively emphasized in last week's debate, that move delivers $4 billion in annual tax cuts to the Exxon-Mobil's of the world.

Read the rest of the article at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jared-bernstein/the-empty-campaign-of-joh_b_132049.htm