Don't Fall for McCain's Speech – It's Time to Get Tough with the Hard Right

ok, the Unreconstructed 60's Radical is willling to play the Grinch on McCain's speech -

- "Not all conservatives are stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives." - John Stuart Mill

- Don't let this all seem easy in retrospect: Obama's victory was very, very difficult - it took enormous resources, an extraordinary candidate, an economic crisis and an unprecedented uprising of young people and new voters to overcome the powerful Republican machine that has controlled this country for the past 38 years - Clinton essentially fulfilling the role of a moderate republican by advancing globalism, NAFTA, and removal of the Glass-Stagall act which unleashed the economic crisis.

- McCain is a hard-right reactionary just as Bush is, and any sentimentality about him in defeat is soft-headed, inappropriate and even dangerous: we need to get rid of all such moronic Republican dimwits and move the political dialogue into arenas of real substance.

This election was a golden opportunity to discuss issues - Obama was ready - but it never happened. Why? Because McCain is an intellectual midget: he had no answers on the economy, the war, on global warming, down the line, so his campaign had to rely on smears, lies, nasty racist attacks, and the Sarah Palin effect, a "whack job" candidate whose appointment reveals the deep irresponsibility and lack of moral basis that McCain and the republican party truly represent.

They would run Donald Duck if they thought he could win - but the more you think about it, the less funny that gets. The republicans play Americans for fools with idiots like Palin, putting us all in danger and *removing any real political dialogue from the democratic process.*

That's the central problem all progressives and democrats have to address:

***how to return the national dialogue to real political issues. That means economics, class warfare, taxes, war, global warming and racism. Education and health care are subsets of these categories.***

The republicans take the low road because it's the only strategy that will work for them: if republicans revealed what they really think, and what they really want to do to people (basically, enslave the country and the world) no one would vote for them.

And they know it.

So their only strategy is misdirection - they get you to take your eye off the ball, and then the goofy stuff takes over. Americans are a little too ready to be entertained and amused - a weakness that a Palin can readily exploit.

But McCain's mealy-mouthed speech was just that same kind of tactic - trying to get us to forget who the guy really is, and what he really said and did during the election, which was excremental.

The reality is, the Republicans don't need or want a *real* candidate - they only need manikins, the more distracting the better: like an actor (Reagan), an empty suit (Dan Quayle), a lazy, corrupt rich kid (George W.), a phony "war hero" (McCain) or a flat-out ruling-class fascist (Dick Cheney).

But instead of pandering to such people and tactics, democrats and progressives and leftists such as myself must take a much, much harder line - in particular we have to remove nasty little opportunists like McCain from the body politic, not find sentimental and soft-headed reasons to praise him because he mouthed a few words that someone else wrote.

This election hurled Mccain into the trashbin of history, where he's always belonged. But Palin will not go away, and the danger the republicans represent to our democracy has sharply increased in the past thirty years.

Make no mistake: dominance by the right wing means war, perpetual war, war we'll never be able to stop. And it means economic chaos, on a global level, with greed unleashed in the name of "deregulation" and "globalism."

Only when democrats - in victory for once - get really tough ideologically and politically, can we begin to roll back the ongoing threat that the right wing has posed for the entire planet. Listened to Limbaugh today or yesterday? It's pretty interesting - they're screaming "socialism" (this after George W. has invested US Treasury funds in private banks across the board – these hypocrites never complain about socialism for the rich!!) and the rabid, mad-dog right wing is always ready to take the ideological battle to the next step.

Get tough democrats: crush them. We've shown we can. We have a great leader taking the stage, but we have to do the leading - the ideas and the political force for change will always come from the grass roots. It's no time to relax, and it's certainly no time to waste one breath praising the ludicrous and embarrassing departure of John McCain, a killer of innocent women and children in the Vietnam war, who has made a career by marrying a rich woman and parading around as some kind of hero.

The world doesn't need any more John McCains - good riddance forever. Now let's clean up the rest of the mess.

Thanks for your patience -

The Unreconstructed 60's Radical