Centerblue.org

As the Obama juggernaut looms like a tsunami on the horizon, we are witnessing nothing less than the final, well-deserved, and overdue destruction of the Republican Party in its current form.

Not only is Obama ahead by double digits in the polls, he is strongly ahead in ridiculously red states like Indiana, North Carolina, and Virginia–and may have brought the polls to a draw in ultra-conservative states like North Dakota and Montana.

His Congressional coattails are a mile long. Democrats are poised to possibly take a filibuster-proof 60 seat majority, and dire predictions for the House are that forty or more Republicans are about to be washed away.

McCain’s disastrously erratic campaign is now springing more leaks than a worm-eaten boat, with a long New York Times Magazine article detailing internal blow by blow accounts of how McCain’s campaign has careened from one campaign message to the next, unable to gain traction against Obama.

McCain, cracking under the pressure, let loose a barrage against the Bush administration that has been weighing him down like a millstone. Said the Washington Times:

Sen. John McCain on Wednesday blasted President Bush for building a mountain of debt for future generations, failing to pay for expanding Medicare and abusing executive powers, leveling his strongest criticism to date of an administration whose unpopularity may be dragging the Republican Party to the brink of a massive electoral defeat.

“Spending, the conduct of the war in Iraq for years, growth in the size of government, larger than any time since the Great Society, laying a $10 trillion debt on future generations of America, owing $500 billion to China, obviously, failure to both enforce and modernize the [financial] regulatory agencies that were designed for the 1930s and certainly not for the 21st century, failure to address the issue of climate change seriously,” [were among the issues cited by McCain].

It’s too little, too late. He needs to, and cannot, explain where he was and what he did while Bush and the GOP Congress unleashed these depradations on America. He was, under his own admission, voting for Bush’s wishes 90% of the time.

Bushites did not take McCain’s words lying down. A top Republican strategist issued a searing response:

“Lashing out at past Republican Congresses, … echoing your opponent’s attacks on you instead of attacking your opponent, and spending 150,000 hard dollars on designer clothes when congressional Republicans are struggling for money, and when your senior campaign staff are blaming each other for the loss in The New York Times [Magazine] 10 days before the election, you’re not doing much to energize your supporters.

“The fact is, when you’re the party standard-bearer, you have an obligation to fight to the finish. I think they can still win. But if they don’t think that, they need to look at how Bob Dole finished out his campaign in 1996 and not try to take down as many Republicans with them as they can. Instead of campaigning in Electoral College states, Dole was campaigning in places he knew he didn’t have a chance to beat Clinton, but where he could energize key House and Senate races.”

How did the GOP get to this point, poised to lose all of the power it accumulated over the course of a generation? In my view, primarily because of the imposition of ideology over intellectualism.

E. J. Dionne perfectly captures how ideology and pandering took over the Republican Party:

For years, many of the elite conservatives were happy to harvest the votes of devout Christians and gun owners by waging a phony class war against “liberal elitists” and “leftist intellectuals.” Suddenly, the conservative writers are discovering that the very anti-intellectualism their side courted and encouraged has begun to consume their movement.

The cause of Edmund Burke, Leo Strauss, Robert Nisbet and William F. Buckley Jr. is now in the hands of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity — and Sarah Palin. Reason has been overwhelmed by propaganda, ideas by slogans, learned manifestoes by direct-mail hit pieces.

The GOP became very good at convincing voters that their pocketbooks didn’t matter as much as God, guns, and gays. It degenerated from having thoughtful ideas about individual responsibility, limiting government intervention into citizens’ private lives, and a strong national defense–to a party dominated by bigots and ideologues hell bent on keeping power at any cost. Why come up with and sell good ideas when they could win elections by banning gay marriage, ending affirmative action under the guise of “quotas,” overturning Roe v. Wade, and the like?

Again and again, many Americans turned away from the cool intellectualism of Democrats like Dukakis and Kerry in favor of “sunny” and “folksy” actors who proudly proclaimed themselves to be the anti-intellectual, anti-elite Everymen. Even today, Sarah Palin pumps up her crowds by proclaiming herself to be proud to be a redneck.

The death of intellectualism in the GOP became a slippery slope, culminating in the twin debaucheries of slaughtering the economy on the altar of unfettered regulation on the one hand, and the evisceration of our Constitution and most profound ideas about human rights and civil liberties on the other.

People are finally waking up and realizing that rednecks and actors might make you feel good, but they have run our country into the ground. As the markets continue to plunge seemingly without end, we are remembering that there is a real value to ideas and the thoughtful men and women behind them.

In Obama, people see a mature, well-read, calm, intellectual opposed to McCain’s anger, inconsistency, and “shoot from the hip” gambler’s mentality. They realize that the gravity of the times needs a man of ideas, not a volcanically-tempered cowboy. And hopefully they have come to understand the connection between Republican ideology and the economic/cultural precipice upon which we now find ourselves.

Out of ideas and like rats abandoning ship, Republicans are now every man to himself. Like the last violinist on the Titanic, Charles Krauthammer eulogizes his movement as it faces the coming wave:

I stand athwart the rush of conservative ship-jumpers of every stripe — neo (Ken Adelman), moderate (Colin Powell), genetic/ironic (Christopher Buckley) and socialist/atheist (Christopher Hitchens) — yelling “Stop!” I shall have no part of this motley crew. I will go down with the McCain ship. I’d rather lose an election than lose my bearings.

Well said, Charles. Too bad your party has not had the same integrity to risk losing elections over ideas, choosing instead to shred the Constitution, our economy, and our nation.

I think it’s fair to say that McCain’s campaign is imploding.

1) Nero fiddling while Rome burns (or is it Daniel vs. the lions?): Hoping to look like a hero and in control of the dire financial crisis, he swooped into Washington to inject presidential politics into a very delicate compromise happening between Bush, Democrats, and Senate Republicans. Instead, he observed passively without saying a word for the majority of a meeting called by Bush at the White House, and towards the end he garbled something unintelligible that vaguely sounded like he was siding with a conservative House Republican revolt against the plan. The compromise fell apart later in the day.

McCain is now in the unenviable position of being in between Bush/Democrats/Senate Republicans who are trying to save the nation from financial ruin on the one hand, and renegade conservative House Republicans who despise McCain but whose constituents McCain cannot afford to lose on Election Day. Who knows how this will play out, especially because a lot of Americans do sympathize with the House Republican position to some extent–but right now it’s looking like a nasty vise for McCain.

2) “Crawling to your corner and hiding behind your blanket”: this is how Barbara Boxer framed McCain threatening to walk out of the first debate tonight, and it was painful to watch. But various polls I’ve seen agree with her: most Americans want McCain there tonight. A president needs to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time, and attending some high level meetings where you hardly say a word is no excuse for failing to come before the frightened American people and present your case for why you should be the one to lead this mess in a few weeks.

3) Palin plunge: Did anyone see the horrendously embarrassing performance Palin put on for Katie Couric? This would be all over the news if it weren’t for Debate-gate. Here’s the bit about Putin “rearing his head”:

And then there was this little gem, where a question about the $700+ billion bailout devolved into an unintelligible set of talking points about healthcare:

Her answer was so nonsensical that she reminded me of this answer given during the Miss Teen USA contest last year:

Former Palin defender Glenn Greenwald put it best:

Sarah Palin’s performance in the tiny vignettes of unscripted dialogue in which we’ve been allowed to see her has been nothing short of frightening — really, as I said, pity-inducing. And I say that as someone who has thought from the start that the criticisms of her abilities — as opposed to her ideology — were much too extreme. One of two things is absolutely clear at this point: she is either (a) completely ignorant about the most basic political issues — a vacant, ill-informed, incurious know-nothing, or (b) aggressively concealing her actual beliefs about these matters because she’s petrified of deviating from the simple-minded campaign talking points she’s been fed and/or because her actual beliefs are so politically unpalatable, even when taking into account the right-wing extremism that is permitted, even rewarded, in our mainstream. I’m not really sure which is worse, but it doesn’t really matter, because with 40 days left before the election, both options are heinous.

This is all quite apart from the new story in today’s Washington Post about how Gov. Palin accepted $25,000 in gifts from industry executives and others. So much for being a reform-minded maverick!

As I said–”ka-boom.”

The more I read and think about the proposed government bailout for Wall Street, the more outraged I get. As are many others across the entire political spectrum, I’m coming to view this bailout as nothing less than the mass raping of the American taxpayer–with no accountability, no help for people in foreclosure who really need it, and no stopping the people who benefited from this disaster from benefiting even more.

Nobody puts the flaws I find in this proposal better than my friend and consumer advocate Boztopia. I shamelessly rip this off from his blog, because I could not possibly say it better myself:

No oversight. The Bush administration is asking Congress to hand it a blank check for $700 billion without any controls or strings attached. This is the same corrupt regime that has wasted uncountable billions in Iraq through fraud, graft, corruption, and simple wasteful spending on unnecessary projects. The same regime that demanded vast new powers of surveillance with only the most minimal oversight to ensure that it is not abused. Do you really think Paulson is going to tell the truth in those reports to Congress, or that Congress will do anything about it if he lies?

Unchecked power. If this bill passes as written, it will make Henry Paulson the most powerful man in America, with incredible leverage to utilize trillions of dollars’ worth of capital as he sees fit. As an unelected official not chosen by the people, do you trust him to look out for your interests?

Foreign bank bailouts. Henry Paulson is on record as saying that Americans are too stupid to care if he uses our money to prop up banks based outside of the United States (Seriously, go read this article–that’s essentially what he says.) If that doesn’t set my right-wing friends in firm opposition to this plan, I don’t know what will.

No protections for homeowners or curbs on CEO pay. Paulson is actively resisting any attempt to add punitive or regulatory measures to the package, including foreclosure protections, additional economic stimulus packages, or stronger oversight of the financial markets to prevent something like this from happening again. This is a life raft to the very people who got us into this mess, mortgaging our financial futures to do so.

Rewarding irresponsibility. This is a clear message to Wall Street and the global markets that it’s completely okay to engage in ever-more-complex and opaque financial tomfoolery, because the government will bail you out when it gets rough. No consequences, no responsibility, no real fear of the vicissitudes of capitalism. In a true free market, banks that overleveraged themselves with crappy loans and nonsensical derivatives would collapse. It would be painful and turbulent, but is that really worse than enabling them to keep on going with the same awful practices that have left thousands of people with homes worth less than what they paid for them, with 401ks barely performing at a value worth the investment, and a dollar that can’t buy a fraction of what it used to? Again, tell your right-wing friends that this is as blatant an example of ignoring personal accountability as there ever has been.

Constraining our future. As I said yesterday, not only will this bailout deny us access to capital that we could have used for countless new projects and investments that we desperately need, but it will further constrain us from engaging in any sort of new infrastructure building or real innovation to put this country back on track. While Obama’s administration may be able to push through legislation that amends or changes existing laws, the real big-ticket items–climate change mobilization, national health care, broadband investment–will not happen without capital to fund them. This is a political time bomb designed to sabotage any attempt Obama will make at real change by hamstringing him financially until the Republicans move to take back Congress in 2010. It’s no coincidence that Paulson’s package is on a two-year timeframe, after all. [Me: I don't agree with this last characterization, I think the intent is truly to rescue the economy no matter how misguided the effort--but I can see why Boztopia would feel as he does.]

It won’t solve anything. Most of all, this bill is a Band-Aid on cancer. As this excellent article by Joshua Holland details, our financial structure and system is fundamentally sick, crippled, and retooled to act solely as a process to transfer money from the many to the few. Pumping more capital into it is like giving a blood transfusion to someone who’s undergoing heart surgery and is being kept alive by machines–it’ll help keep them alive, but it won’t fix the problem at hand.

On the last point, the issue really is that nobody knows if it will solve anything. The crisis on Wall Street is exactly because nobody knows what these toxic financial products are worth, and people therefore refuse to buy them or trust others who have them. That’s why it’s impossible to say how much this bailout will really cost, or whether it will work.

I’m not stridently opposed to ANY bailout–just THIS one. I’m deeply troubled by the complete lack of accountability, the inability of taxpayers to potentially profit from this move, and by the concentration of too much power in the hands of the Treasury Secretary.

In an interview with the Omaha World-Herald, Nebraska Republican Senator Chuck Hagel on Sarah Palin:

“‘She doesn’t have any foreign policy credentials. You get a passport for the first time in your life last year? I mean, I don’t know what you can say. You can’t say anything.”

…

“‘I think they ought to be just honest about it and stop the nonsense about, “I look out my window and I see Russia and so therefore I know something about Russia. That kind of thing is insulting to the American people.’”

…

“‘I think it’s a stretch to, in any way, to say that she’s got the experience to be president of the United States.”

Ouch!

When a network known for being sympathetic to your campaign calls you out for lying, it’s time to change your tactics.

Harsh video showing reporters and news outlets calling out McCain’s lies again and again and again.

The media is finally starting to do its homework, and a narrative about McCain’s campaign is beginning to emerge: that they’re liars, willing to lose their integrity to win the election. Obama better pound this point home–because if McCain is going to spread lies, he deserves to have them thrown back at him.

A blizzard of “you’re a liar” coverage has emerged against McCain/Palin in recent days:

–McCain’s claims that Obama would raise taxes were called a lie–by none other than Fox News! So did the Washington Post’s editorial and factcheck.org.

–On McCain’s claim that Obama supported sex ed for kindergarteners when in fact he favored a bill in committee that would have optionally taught kids how to protect themselves from predators in language they understand, he was called a liar to his face before millions of people watching the View program with Barbara Walters.

–On that same show he was similarly called to the mat for the whole “lipstick on a pig” silly brouhaha, which has been exposed as the empty and irrelevant indignation that it was.

–On Palin’s claim that she opposed the Bridge to Nowhere/pork barrel spending, we now know she was for it before she was against it.

–Along the same vein, her current claim (repeated by McCain on the View and then rejected by the hosts as another lie) that she opposed Alaska earmarks was flatly false, as she in fact requested $750 million in special federal spending from Congress–by far the largest request per capita for any state in the union.

–McCain has been crowing about large crowd sizes and claiming the numbers are backed up by fire marshals, the Secret Service and other officials. Now we hear that those officials are saying they have provided no such estimates and are unable to do so.

–Palin and McCain said she had been in Iraq, when in fact she had not.

A pattern of lying is extremely relevant in figuring out how a future administration would lead the country. I can’t remember a candidate, even Bush, that has simply and baldly lied as much as McCain has, in hopes that the speed of the Internet will make the lies true in the minds of people. Shameful.

In just a couple of sentences, Whoopi Goldberg reduces McCain to a blubbering mess over his claim he will appoint judges that aren’t activists and won’t legislate from the bench.

Watch (about 1:30 into the video):

She is so right. The Rabid Right is good at pushing this pathetic nonsense about activist judges, yet are quick to applaud every past civil rights ruling on issues that were clearly not in the Constitution.

Brown v. Board of Education? Yep, an “activist court” outlawed segregation (and segregation would have been fully approved by the writers of the Constitution, their slaves in tow.)

Griswold v. Connecticut? yep, an “activist court” found a right to basic privacy.

Gideon v. Wainwright? An “activist court” found that defendants are entitled to the most basic legal representation.

Miranda v. Arizona? An “activist court” found that a suspect must be told he has the right to remain silent.

Loving v. Virginia? An “activist court” found that members of two different races can marry one another.

There are many others, and no Republican in his right mind would say that he feels these decisions by “activist judges legislating from the bench” were wrong to rule as they did.

So why don’t these Rabid Righters call a spade a spade and say what they really mean? I’ll do it for them:

“When we say we don’t want activist judges, what we mean is that we don’t like judges ruling in favor of homosexuals, affirmative action, and abortion rights…and we will appoint judges who agree with us.”

Go on, say it. It’s good to get the bigotry off your chest. Because if you don’t, you’ll end up the same slobbering mess that McCain became at the hands of Whoopi Goldberg.

The McCain campaign trying to talk up Sarah Palin’s “foreign policy experience:”

I thought the convention was fantastic. The Clintons came home and really redeemed themselves in my eyes. There’s nothing like seeing Bill standing in front of his adoring fans, wagging his finger at McCain and telling the country in no uncertain terms why Obama is ready to lead. Hillary laid out an excellent case for why no person who voted for her could in good conscience ever vote for McCain.

Obama’s acceptance speech before 78,000 people was masterful, a symphony as said by David Gergen. It blended some much-needed economic populism with a call to personal responsibility and an appeal to people of all political stripes to come together as one nation to defeat the many problems that assail us. It also did not fail to bang McCain exactly where and how he needed to do so.

But nobody can say it better than some of the most hard-core Republicans on television who were flabbergasted by his speech:

(Love the last quote: “whatever Republican didn’t get picked as VP today may be a lucky Republican.”)

And how about the McCain camp? Speechless: