September 21, 2008


IMPEACH BUSH



IMPEACH CHENEY


GOP IS THE TITANIC


When the Titanic was built its builders thought the ship was unsinkable. Impact with an iceberg destroyed that idea and countless passengers died. The GOP has run all kinds of ideas past us, claiming that privatization and the free market can cure all ills. Never mind that we had a successful run from the time of the New Deal until the early 1970's with ideas that go contrary to what the GOP dishes out.


Since the 1970's, life has gotten considerably worse for the working class in this country. Unions, under constant assault by business elites and right-wing politicians, have seen their membership decline. Good jobs, especially in manufacturing, have been globalized and shipped offshore. We have seen deregulation of many key industries, such as the telecommunications industry, the airline industry, and banking and finance. Airlines are in big trouble now and we have seen the virtual meltdown of the financial sector in the past few days.

The Great Depression should have been a powerful lesson, but apparently it eluded Republicans. In this article Frank Rich talks about the McCain campaign and the consistent and repetitious use of lies. The press has been notably derelict in doing its job in coverage of Republican lies in the past. This commentary is at www.nytimes.com:

If you doubt that the big lies are sticking, look at the latest Washington Post/ABC News poll. Half of voters now believe in the daily McCain refrain that Obama will raise their taxes. In fact, Obama proposes raising taxes only on the 1.9 percent of households that make more than $250,000 a year and cutting them for nearly everyone else.

You know the press is impotent at unmasking this truthiness when the hardest-hitting interrogation McCain has yet faced on television came on “The View.” Barbara Walters and Joy Behar called him on several falsehoods, including his endlessly repeated fantasy that Palin opposed earmarks for Alaska. Behar used the word “lies” to his face. The McCains are so used to deference from “the filter” that Cindy McCain later complained that “The View” picked “our bones clean.” In our news culture, Behar, a stand-up comic by profession, looms as the new Edward R. Murrow.

Network news, with its dwindling handful of investigative reporters, has barely mentioned, let alone advanced, major new print revelations about Cindy McCain’s drug-addiction history (in The Washington Post) and the rampant cronyism and secrecy in Palin’s governance of Alaska (in last Sunday’s New York Times). At least the networks repeatedly fact-check the low-hanging fruit among the countless Palin lies, but John McCain’s past usually remains off limits.