'Politics Makes Me Sick'

BY EDWIN E. VINEYARD

Politics make me sick! I am tired of politics! I’ll be glad when this election is over! How often do we hear these expressions lately?

Well, politics do make us sick! In particular, it is the stench that emanates from John McCain’s and Sarah Palin’s dirty, stinking negative campaign that makes us sick. While we can recall some really bad TV commercials in previous elections, we cannot remember as deceitfully negative and dirty stump speeches coming from the candidates own mouths on the campaign trail.

These Republican candidates will apparently do anything and say anything to get elected. Worse, they bundle themselves in the flag and patriotism while practicing their abominations.

What is this about being “pro-America” and “anti-America?” What is this about Obama’s being a socialist because his tax plan rolls back the Bush tax cuts on the wealthy to 2000 rates? What’s this about “palling around with terrorists?” And, Joe the plumber – what a red herring, and a fake one at that!

One seems to recall a quotation: “The truth is not in them.”

We have seen the Republicans during the past eight years try to label dissent as treason. “If you are not for us, you are against us,” they have been saying. Then they equate that with being anti-American.

One Republican congresswoman is declaring that the Democrats in Congress are anti-American. She also says that Obama is anti-American. Palin and McCain declare certain sections of the country to be “pro-American” and others as “anti-American.”

What kind of rhetoric is that?

Republican campaign tactics have repeatedly assured that whoever wins a presidential election will have a deeply divided, polarized, antagonistic nation to try to govern. Our country’s almost evenly divided citizens line up hostile to one another.

This has happened before. It happened in the past two elections. George W. Bush’s people fought dirty. When he could not defeat Al Gore, it went to the Supreme Court, where the case was decided on a party line vote and not on its merits. Yes, that left many of us hostile.

Bush’s second election was no better. The domination of the airways with anonymously financed advertising from the “Swift-boat” liars attacking distinguished war records turned the tide for Bush. The name has become synonymous with low-down, lying, filthy politics.

But it goes back farther to the Clinton Administration. Republicans spent eight years in legal and media harassment of the Clintons. This included bribing witnesses to give false stories to reporters and writers, investigating business dealings that were later cleared, and then trying to prosecute and impeach the president for lousy private, personal conduct.

Clinton never had a closely knit country to govern. Bush squandered a degree of mutual support after 9/ll by conspiring to falsify facts and giving spurious reasons to go into an unnecessary war against a country that had no part in the attack. His whole time has been a disaster.

Republicans have pushed a divisive agenda during these last eight years. Attempts to privatize Social Security come to mind. Tax cuts for the wealthy, particularly on income derived from wealth [dividends, capital gains, and inheritances], have proven divisive – especially as budget deficits increase and the middle class suffers lost jobs and losses in buying power.

McCain has been as much a loose chicken during this last economic calamity as was Bush during the hours after the strike on the World Trade Center in New York – from continuing to read “My Pet Goat” to flying hither and yon around the country for hours.

Who can truthfully say McCain is the one to lead the country out of this or any other crisis?

McCain’s campaign has had no focus, except to denigrate Obama. He has no finite proposals on which he can stand bravely and tell middle class people the real truth.

McCain’s choice of a vice president reveals his bad judgment. His desperate attempts to discredit Obama through any and all means, ethical or not, reveal his own character flaws.

– The author, AKA The Militant Moderate, lives in Enid, Oklahoma and is a regular contributor to The Oklahoma Observer