Political Cortex: Brain Food for the Body Politic

Guiliani, lionized by Republicans and himself as the champion of vigilant 9/11 attack response, has never explained, nor has he ever been really called to account by a media he denounces as "left wing" for removing potential evidence from the Ground Zero crime scene as the hot iron from the smoldering, demolished buildings was hauled away and shipped out of America.

To hear Rudy tell it, America stands on the threshold of a great victory in Iraq that the Democrats seek to deny to the nation at the world.  Has he ever heard that the Iraqi government is in plain and decisive language demanding that we leave and the sooner the better?

Ah, and how about the pandering about "Drill baby, drill!" in an open call for more oil exploration.  How the attending fat cats in an audience where barely an African American, Hispanic or Asian American could be seen, loved that one and chanted themselves silly while the former Saturday Night Live comic lapped it up with glee, grinning broadly.

Then the "pistol packing mamma", the slayer of caribou who, as Fred Thompson described with sweeping pride, can both shoot and dress said creatures, came on stage and delivered written attack lines against Barack Obama.

There was one disquieting note about the whole exercise.  The question that was never answered was just which party has been in power the last eight years?  

Sarah Palin's denunciation of the "do nothing Democratic Congress" that has been in office only a scant two years with no power to override the servant of corporate America, George W. Bush, failed to address the question of why the hard working Americans to whom she was appealing for votes have seen a dramatically reduced standard of living while working longer hours than ever.

As the Republican hero Ronald Reagan asked, "Are you better off than you were four years ago?"  Sarah Palin, is America better off than it was when Bill Clinton, the same president your howling right wing audience sought to impeach and acted as if it would have been much happier than lynching?

Ah, how sound John McCain's judgment has been on Iraq!  Once more we hear that the great surge is working and terrorism is being crushed when Al Qaeda, by all measurable standards, is far stronger than it ever was before Bush took office and McCain began beating the drums for war.

Like Bush, McCain declared Iraq to be "Mission Accomplished" and has been in reality a trail of blood, sweat and tears as reliable European studies -- there are no such measurable studies, surprise of all surprises, from our "left wing media" -- to currently stand conservatively at over one million lives.

How easy it is to heap on the demagoguery, Rudy and Sarah, before a convention of well fed, cheering and foot stomping members of a small elite that does not represent the mainstream of the cultural mosaic comprising real America.

How much more mileage can the likes of Rudy and Sarah get out of John McCain's prisoner of war status?  How respectful were these same delegates and their ilk over the service of John Kerry four years ago?

The undaunted record, despite the lies and demagoguery of the "Swift Boat" attack machine, is that Kerry saved the lives of more Americans than McCain and received more battlefield citations.  The reason this point is made is not to demean McCain's stay in captivity but to denounce and renounce the excessive, choking hypocrisy of current right wing Republican America.

Palin went on excessively about the Vietnam War and McCain's service in it while, in the manner of unceasing right wing Republican blindness, she never learned the essential lesson of Vietnam that most American have by now learned.

To borrow a quote that was previously used regarding the Korean War, Vietnam was "the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time."

Have you ever heard, Sarah, about the poll that the CIA took in 1955, the results of which were hidden from the American public?  That poll taken among the citizenry of Vietnam, Sarah, revealed that if an election were held that 90% would have voted for Ho Chi Minh, North Vietnam's leader.

Ah yes Sarah, and now about the slight you felt was aimed at you and others at small town rural America and legions of hunters.  

Barack Obama was correct in his correctly measured criticism, which was based on the kind of bigotry that produced the likes of Senator Jesse Helms in North Carolina and his attack dog Lee Atwater.  Your speech made no distinction, as Obama's criticism did, but then again, this is the party that in the fifties lionized Richard Nixon and Joseph McCarthy.

Oh, and Rudy, can you really be even dumber than you seem?  You took Obama to task for being an Ivy Leaguer, and ostensibly therefore an elitist.  Can you be so ignorant that you are unaware that Bush I and II both graduated from Yale and that the younger member of that Republican family added insult to injury by graduating from Harvard Business School?

Actually, Rudy, you were much better on Saturday Night Live, where your showmanship demonstrated far more credibility.

As for you, Sarah, will you survive a continuing investigation in which both the chairman and the person you fired are holding their ground?  Will you be able to hoodwink America into believing that to even focus on an ongoing investigation into your conduct in office is nothing more than the Left Wing Media in action?

Sarah, when all is said and done you may well be on that "bridge to nowhere" that your fellow Alaskan Republican Ted Stevens sponsored and you supported before your celebrated U-turn and self-declaration as "reformer".