Tuesday, September 30, 2008

The Problem with Being in Charge


Wise words often came out of Jedi Knights. One I rhetorical question voters in 2008 should heed to is one Obi-Wan offered us a long, long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away: “Who is the greater fool? The fool, or the fool who follows the fool?”


This is a time to be judicious. This election is not all about change. It is about who will bring the change we need, the good change. It is not a battle between change agents, Obama and McCain, but between a change agent, Obama, and an extension of the current norm, a referendum on the Bush administration, McCain.


Why should voters see it this way, and not be led by ‘fools’ telling them otherwise? Senator McCain continually claims that he is a ‘maverick’, a rebel within his party, and would not win a Miss Congeniality vote in the senate. But his record voting by party lines is too long to dismiss, and his partisan worldview is too ingrained in him to set aside. Over 90% of Bush’s policies have been accepted with an Aye vote by McCain; he has only disagree with the president and the GOP at large when it favored his immediate constituency, Arizona, more than it favored his party or country. Immigration, environmental issues, pork-barrel spending, these are all issues that are favored in Arizona, leading McCain to vote for them in order to keep his job, but even then, he has flip-flopped when pressure from his party been too much to bare.


He was pro-choice, now he is pro-life; he was for renewable energy, now he is for offshore drilling; he was for immigration reform, now he is for militant border security; he was against pork-barrel spending, now he added to his ticket a governor with one of the worst pork-barrel spending records in the country; he was a straight-forward politician who was the victim of shameful, disparaging, and untrue negative ads, now he has become George W’s 2000 campaign in worse ways.


As far as his record and priorities are concerned, John McCain is as much a Republican as George W Bush, Trent Lott, and Newt Ginrich. He has always been Red, but teased with being Purple. With Sarah Palin, he is not just Red, but beet Red.

The problem with being in charge, as the Republicans have been for 14 years in Congress, 7 years in the Supreme Court, and the last 8 years in the Oval Office, is that whenever a set of problems as we have seen during the last week, month, year, dominate the forefront, then they engulf those who created them. They bite the hand that fed them. The disastrous situation of the economy, foreign policy, environment, and partisanship, are not creatures of serendipity, but your own. They are you and you are them. And you, Senator McCain, are part of them.


So when Senator McCain, or Sarah Palin, or any other Republican with a microphone in their face, start to talk about ‘change,’ or ‘reform,’ or ‘fixing Washington,’ or blame Obama, then they are living in the ridiculous. It is as if I borrowed my dad’s car, wrecked it because I was drinking, and then blamed the guy on the sidewalk who saw me crash into the tree.


You, Senator McCain, ARE the Washington you want fixing; you ARE what we need to change; you ARE to blame. How will you fix something when you embody the problem and just won’t leave?

This is not an election between two Jedi Knights. It is not between Obi-Wan and Yoda. It is between Luke and Senator Palpatine. And, yes, Senator McCain, you are the former.


lhp

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