In the last couple of weeks, as it became more likely that John McCain would be the Republican nominee, and as Dennis Kucinich and John Edwards were tossed aside by early Democratic primary voters, a bizarre idea kept cropping up in my head. That Americans need to suffer significantly greater hardships before they will finally reject Republican political philosophy.
Listening to John McCain on the stump talking about 50 to 100 more years of war in Iraq, and more wars to come, it got me thinking that maybe a four year dose of McCainian hegemony is exactly what the US electorate needs to snap it out of its apathy and indifference. Just maybe, America will need to suffer a severe Republican tax cut, trickle-down economics-induced recession, and protracted wars across the globe before they will finally have had enough of Republican economics and empire building. Much more death and destruction meted out by the American military-corporate complex.
Maybe, and I have heard it from others, what America needs is four more years of unbridled, psychotic Republican rule and oppression, and just maybe John McCain is the right man for that job. Maybe Democrats who find the two remaining Democratic candidates much less than what they had hoped for in a progressive choice for president, should just sit this one out and let McCain win so that the bad times will continue to roll. Indeed, four years of McCain could be the final nail in the Republican Party's coffin. Like a drunk, or a drug addict, maybe America needs to hit bottom before it can start the process of recovery.
Then, after I regain control of my hypothalamus and limbic system, I find it relatively easy to suppress those urges. Emotional responses are really great when you're getting married or being chased by a lion. They probably don't play out so well when picking a president.
So without wasting any more of your time, I'll just quickly go over some of the rational reasons why almost any Democrat other than Joe Lieberman would be a better choice for President than John McCain or any of the current Republican candidates.
1) John McCain thinks we can “win” the Iraq war by staying indefinitely 2) Bolstering the five vote Republican majority in the Supreme Court 3) American spending priorities will never shift from the military to the US infrastructure with McCain as president 4) say goodbye to any kind of universal health care coverage 5) say hello to even more regressive, pro-corporate tax policies 6) forget about any kind of middle east peace accord 7) paint a nuclear bunker buster bull's-eye on Iran
There are plenty more reasons, but you get the idea. Just calculating the number of lives saved by getting out of Iraq sooner is more than enough reason to make sure John McCain never becomes president of the United States. The Supreme Court has been handing down some terrible rulings recently, and that will only continue unabated if the court is stacked with more ultraconservatives.
So when that little voice in your head says, “maybe America hasn’t suffered enough at the hands of the Republican party yet”, take out that mental stick and beat your hypothalamus into submission.
Dr. John Moffett is an active research neuroscientist in the Washington, DC area, who has published articles on the nervous and immune systems. Dr. Moffett is also the author and webmaster of the political opinion website www.Factinista.org, and is a Managing Editor at OpEdNews.com.
which does exactly that- it helps McCain to win. Oh, God, why I am the only one who says that. THEY ( the DEMs) work for GOP! IT IS A DEAL! Oh God, why won't you people take that stick and hit yourself. Reality bites. Watch your media, see who talks and how and you will see. Oh, man I would pay anything for being wrong. But I am right!
Eat your checkers.
by
Mark Sashine (42 articles, 19 quicklinks, 227 diaries, 3219 comments)
on Saturday, February 2, 2008 at 7:11:20 AM
Of course this was Stalin's strategy when he had the communists in the Reichstag allow Hitler to become chancellor because then the German people would see the true face of capitalism and the workers would bring about the glorious revolution.
by
Tony Duncan (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 15 comments)
on Saturday, February 2, 2008 at 8:50:57 AM
McPain was almost out the door, he had no money no support, it was byebye baby! But all of a sudden, the media grabbed old John and brought him to the top of the pile.
Every channel had his mug plastered. They started talking about him, talking to him, and yelling how he was going to be the 'the one', and of course, a lot of people want to vote for the 'winner' so they jumped on the McPain bandwagon and pulled him to the front.
Now, what is so strange..if he is so 'popular' why is it, that Ron Paul has raised more money the last quarter than all the other republicans, in small donations, but the MEDIA Pigs still insist on boycotting him? He is the biggest fund raiser, yet he is left out of debates, when they show pictures of those running for pres, he is left out.
The media will pick our next president. It will not be the people. We are not allowed to do that. Look at the past elections.
The media is owned......look it up!
by
joyce (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 73 comments)
on Saturday, February 2, 2008 at 9:06:04 AM
To the point that somehow 'America' may need another 4 years of corrrupt disaster capitalism- has anyone asked the proud Iraqi people which they would prefer? We could ask the 10 million children that are being bombed and maimed daily if they would prefer 50=100 years of the same, or JUST 4-8 years under the next Democrat? This notion that America is 'suffering' has no comparision to the country that is really paying the price.
The effective censorship( of the war) by the mainstream media means that Americans are largly clueless to the extent of the true horror of War.
And given the exponential growth in the 'War On Terrorism' the American people may not have the luxury of 4 more years. Lets be clear about this- Democrat or Republic- this is not the issue. It is the men behind the curtains that need to be ' voted' out . Criminal trials need to be held, Sibel Edmunds and her counterparts need to be ungagged, Homeland security and the C.I.A. need to be exposed for the covert roles they are playing in domestic and foreign policy. It is not beyond reason that another false flag attack is being planned now, perhaps even before the elections. In 4 years the fEMA camps could be up and running.
No, both Democratic candidates are backed by the new world corporate order, neither have stated as equiviocally as Republican Ron Paul (or Gravel) the urgent need to come home( from all over the world and get the economy back in order.
And could it be that the so called 'spamming' of Ron Paul supporters is only a reflection of the size and scope of the movement? Is it not true that 70% of Americans want their troops home NOW ? If Ron Paul is the ONLY presidential candidate advocating then it would reflect in the material being submitted to this and other sites on the internet?
In my opinion the corporate owners are narrowing the choice to the lesser of 2 evils and folks like you are taking the bait. Let us look into the eyes of the Iraqi people and children, who are paying the real price for this monumental lie and tell them, NOT ONE MORE DAY. If America has a bone to pick with "Terrorism" then the honourable thing to do is fight it on her soil, not volunteer a neutral third party country against its will to host its fight .
... And Hillary says the 'blank check' to Iraq is over. No- the blank check to Halliburton, Blackwater, and the like is over.
by
nakedtruth (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 25 comments)
on Saturday, February 2, 2008 at 10:38:33 AM
Either way, if McCain, Hillary, or Obama win we are in big trouble. It has taken me a lot of soul searching to admit this, but the democratic Party does work for the GOP, and takes its maching orders from them. No candidate currently running would be there unless he or she had been vetted by the Corporate GOP or Corporate Democratic party. Either way, the little guy ,you and I, are going to lose out. I will no longer delude myself into thinking that voting for the Democrtic Party is going to change a thing. Give me one thing the newly elected democratic Congress has done to challenge the GOP. And, please don't give me this garbage that they just don't have the votes. I'm not buying that story anymore. Tell that to some other fool. I think as Progressives we are in trouble. The progressive wing of the Democratic Party is, in my opinion, currently DEAD! Electing Hilary or Obama is not going to resurrect anything. I think things will have to go into the crapper before progressives in the Democratic Party wake up and band together to do something drastic to change this dreadful situation we're in. Electing McCain will only bring that on faster.
by
Leeann LoFaso (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 8 comments)
on Saturday, February 2, 2008 at 11:56:36 AM
This is just the same old "lesser evil-ism" argument --
which is a completely invalid way of viewing the situation. If Attila the Hun was running as the Republican nominee, and Genghis Khan for the Dems, you could make exactly the same argument.
Of the 7 specific points you enumerated, only a few will be different with a Dem over a Repub, and the differences will only be marginal.
McCain says, "We'll be in Iraq for 100 years." The Dem says, "We'll try to get our troops home as soon as possible."
There's no difference whatever between this two formulations, since the Dem will pretend to be "trying to get the troops home" indefinitely. The only difference is that the Dem way of saying it sounds nicer to liberals' ears. In practise, it's exactly the same thing.
If people continue to believe in the fallacy of lesser-evilism, which is precisely what you're advocating, the only possible outcome is continued acquiescence to whatever slop is served up by the Dem Party, leading to a continued rightwards shift in politics as a whole. In fact, it's only because people have bought this fallacious argument for so long, that we're in this mess.
by
Richard Mynick (2 articles, 3 quicklinks, 1 diaries, 1014 comments)
on Saturday, February 2, 2008 at 12:05:38 PM
Anyone that thinks we have any say in who leads us I'd like to talk to you about buying a Timeshare in beautiful downtown Baghdad.
We have corporate polls, broadcast on corporate networks, whose corporate pundits tell us who our "winners" and "losers" is before we cast votes on machines that very well may erase it anyway.
Our entire thought process is taken over to the point we forget why we supported, Kucinich, Paul, Gravel, Biden, and other candidates that resonated with us a hell of a lot more than the two eventual nominees will be. No one can convince me that these so-called front-runners are whom the people of this country wanted. How can it be that 70% of the people want out of Iraq and every candidate now running is not taking that stance? Does this add up at all? Don't even talk to me about a representative government. Represent who? Certainly not us.
Once again - after all that's gone down - we're going to be choosing between Tweedledee and Tweedledum. How can this be? There are more registered Independents now than Democratic and Republicans combine, yet there isn't 1 in 10 that can name an Independent Party candidate. Independents have been regulated to "undecided" voters who will be forced to vote for either a Dem or Repub, for fear of making their vote meaningless (a joke in of itself - it's meaningless anyway) and effectively making any Independent move outside the control of powers that be moot, because Corproate Amerika wants it that way.
It simply destroys me when I hear people talking about who they're going to vote for and then I ask who they originally supported and ask what characteristics the candidate they're being forced to vote for has that the one they wanted to vote for has. The looks alone I get tell it all.
McInsane will be our next president. Not that it matters, both Clinton and Obama will do Corporate Amerika's bidding also, but McCain will do it with gusto. Clinton will drive Repubs to the polls in droves and keep many Dems home. Obama will have every bigot in the land (of which this country has a lot of) to crawl out from under their rocks to defeat him and in an election brought to you by Diebold, McInsane wins in yet another (s)election "too close to call".
And have no doubt about this, it won't be a "recession", it's going to be a depression of the likes we've never seen. By this time next year we'll be in the grips of a world-wide depression that will bring on more war and chaos and look for a rapid rate of decent into fascism that will make the destruction of liberty to date look tame.
There may have been a time when Amerika picked who leads them but not in recent history. The power of the meassage by controlled media was recognized by tyrants before most of us were born and has been homed to a fine science. Most people that don't have time to spend reading and researching and only get their information from 30 second commercials and a constant barrage of 24/7 corporate so-called news channels that give us anything but news or truth. We the people don't stand a chance.
Are there any answers? Can we the people fix this? I doubt it. Before things change for the better the forces that control all this are going to have to be exposed. Just who is going to do that? The corporate controlled media? Hardly. The corrupted judiciary? Come again? The stacked courts? Get real. A revolution? Against what? They've been training for an uprising, have crowd control weapons and detention camps ready to roll, the powers that be are salivating we come at them. Not that we shouldn't. I'd rather die on the streets fighting, even in vain, than die in their prisons.
No folks, sorry. We're about to descend into Hell on Earth and if anything survives it and can make a life out of the toxic dump we're going to leave behind maybe they can achieve the Paradise on Earth we let slip through our fingers.
If voting could change things - they'd make it illegal.
by
Mr M (4 articles, 0 quicklinks, 4 diaries, 1024 comments)
on Saturday, February 2, 2008 at 1:13:25 PM
Sorry, but this will be my ELEVENTH Presidential Election. Most of the time, although I was pulling the lever for the Democrat, I was in fact voting for "the lesser of two evils". Until the American electorate really wakes up and demands a change in our system for elections we shall continue along this horrid path. Don't tell me that Nader ruined it back in 2000. It was crooked vote counting and a SCOTUS that bowed to the Republican Party powers. Until this nation really "cleans house" we'll be ruled ... and I do mean ruled ... by the elite corporatocracy. Vote your conscience and your beliefs!
by
paz love (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 67 comments)
on Saturday, February 2, 2008 at 1:33:39 PM
How many believe based on evidence that both the 2000 and the 2004 electon were fraudulent, stolen, hacked?
To those that raise their hands I ask, what makes you think this election is any different and that McCan hasn't been the chosen one from the day we all saw him magically begin kissing the GOP's arse?
The poster above me has it right. We ARE ruled. To think otherwise is a disservice to the work that needs to be done. McCain will be the next resident in the White House.
That being said I will take my symbolc vote and place it in the hands of Cynthia McKinney Green Party Candidate and one of the strongest and bravest truth speaking women I have ever known.
by
Cheri Roberts-Piper (16 articles, 15 quicklinks, 9 diaries, 430 comments)
on Saturday, February 2, 2008 at 2:29:55 PM
I originally thought it was going to be Rudy and Hillary... Now I am thinking McCain and Hillary...
Either way, we are looking at 4 more years of Bush
both hillary and McCain represent the biggest corporate whores in the race, and big corporate America wins no matter which evil the sheeple "elect"
Neither will be the "lesser" that is just perception and marketing... Putting window dressing on a turd does not make it less a turd.. (sorry for being crass, but man this stuff really deserves nothing better..) We will know who the nominees are after Tuesday, I am thinking....
This election season is going to SUCK!
Ciao, CZ
by
steve scheetz (1 articles, 0 quicklinks, 1 diaries, 409 comments)
on Saturday, February 2, 2008 at 3:38:09 PM
Wow, if I didn't know you guys were all Progressives with perhaps a few Trotskyites mixed in for good measure, I'd think there were a few Libertarians in here as well. But if that were the case I'm sure someone would have mentioned the Bilderburgers, Council on Foreign Relations, Ford Foundation and Rothschilds along with postulating that the Democratic Party is a tool of the GOP.
This is reminiscent of the 2004 election in which we learned that both Kerry and Bush were members of Skull & Bones at Yale - and that being the case, how much difference could there really be between them? Hmmm?
Now fast forward to Republican disgust with Bush's liberal immigration policies coupled with Democratic disgust with Bush's empire building military policies and what do we have? A vast middle of the road conspiracy? I mean it can't really be a vast right wing conspiracy if the evil nazi-esque dictator (who only won thanks to voter fraud and hackers) is more liberal than he is conservative, yet it obviously isn't a fast left wing conspiracy when 10 million innocent Iraqi women and children are being killed daily now, can it? Ok, I stole that victim statistic from the poster above because it does add flair and drama to the dialogue and after all, no one can actually DISprove them so it makes me sound more righteously indignant and morally high-grounded to speak of empire and mass murder and vast conspiracies involving ancient aristocratic elites coupled with Corporate Amerika spelled with a "k" as in realpoliti"k" and Trots"k"y. That adds to my street cred as a hip, slick, Progressive-minded socially responsible answer to the ills of Amerikan empire builders and warmongers.
I'm poking fun at everyone involved, because I believe that you share a collection of perceptions, beliefs and theories that are based on imaginative memes far more than on any facts that we are actually privy to and can prove. In college, I always enjoyed Sociology more than Psychology because I felt that the former exposed the power of groupthink whereas the latter assisted in promoting it. Thanks to mass media and the various mind-altering influences in our illustrious popular and underground cultures (like Russell T. Davies, Neil Gaiman, binaural beats, subliminal programming, crack cocaine, American Idol and Fox News), we seem to be enjoying such a successfully staged mass hypnotic trance that I seriously doubt that hardly anyone has any idea what is real and what isn't.
If McCain wins, perhaps he will be both as flawed and as successful as Reagan. If Hillary wins, perhaps she will be both as flawed and as successful as Bill Clinton. If Obama wins, perhaps he will be both as flawed and as successful as Kennedy. There is no perfect solution, there is no best or worst case scenario, there is only our best (and worst) intentions which produce our choices that launch probabilities and possibilities the likes of which we cannot possibly anticipate in the overall web made up of life and interconnectivity. In other words, it really doesn't matter - but not because of any vast, evil conspiracy that you might imagine. It doesn't matter because life will continue to happen, and we will continue to manifest more of who we really are, either way.
by
Lagomorph13 (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 7 comments)
on Saturday, February 2, 2008 at 3:42:26 PM
So, the Bilderbergs, Tri-Lateral Commission, Council on Foreign Relations, Bohemian Grove and all the rest don't have any influence, they just meet to play bridge. Ninety-percent of the wealth in the world is owned by members of these groups and when they meet they don't have anything to do with the way policies unfold? Life just happens. Is that your contention?
Maybe you should go back and do both Sociology and Psychology courses over again and I would add History to it to, because as history as a judge it sure looks like something else besides the will of the people is directing which turns societies take.
Your "what ever will be, will be" contention lacks any real perception of the forces that propel masses of people to do one thing or another. You're dismissing those that have understood these forces and used them to further agenda's that benefit those that have wealth and wish to neither share it or give it up to the masses by having anything close to a fair democratic election process. You seem to understand that the influences are there but don't seem to want to give credit to what they derive other than to confuse the masses into not knowing what is real or not.
Myself and others seem to know what's real. I know the elitist groups are real and I'm not naive enough to believe they don't have an agenda that isn't sinister to a degree that effects everything we do. I know that companies do exist that live for war and that they have major influence with those selected to supposedly lead us. I know that 90% of what I see on M$M I really don't need to know and the other 10% I find hard to believe.
I know these things because I am fortunate enough to have a lot of time to spend reading, studying, researching and pondering these things that a majority of people simply don't have, and if that makes me "hip" because I wish to disassociate myself from the main-stream by using a "k" in Amerika, it's because I feel I am disassociated from it. And it seems that your judgmental attitude is one that makes you think you're the "superior" one.
And when it comes down to who will eventually become POTUS, with the current field it really doesn't matter. But you seem to have the contention that "life will continue to happen" regardless of forces that control most of it. Well, sorry, but history again trips you up. Tell the 6 million people put to death in Germany's death camps that "life continues to happen" and that there was no organized conspiracy behind their deaths and or the 1 million Iraqi's that we "liberated", or the people in Dafur or Sudan where genocide in being committed that there isn't an organized effort by forces beyond their control killing them. Pretend that there aren't crowd control weapons and "detention" camps fully staffed and ready to be filled, go ahead. Deny increasing police surveillance and brutality. Try to explain Waxman's reneging for hearings of Sibel Edmonds or Conyers complete reversal on impeaching as just mere politics, when even someone as astute as you are on human nature can see their tortured response to these questions leave little doubt that something else is at play. Act like the Patriot Act and Military Commission Act hasn't eroded your rights and the pending bill S. 1959 isn't there by design. Nah, don't worry about it - life just happens. Until of course it doesn't.
No, we didn't get to sit in the energy policy meeting cheney had or even get to find out who was there so we can't say for certain that they were planning invasions and wars to plunder the Earth's dwindling resources, but we can sure tell by their actions. No, we can't attend the next Bilderberg meeting and find out if indeed they're picking our next leader for us, but we can find out through research that all recent past presidents did attend. And no we don't really know what's going to happen next, but using logic, history and conjecture we can come damn close. And if I want to get mad about it, it's my prerogative, as is yours to be a judgemental intellectual snob.
by
Mr M (4 articles, 0 quicklinks, 4 diaries, 1024 comments)
on Saturday, February 2, 2008 at 5:54:55 PM
The Bilderbergers have already decided it will be more of the same, but it will be handled by Hillary Clinton. Listen to her and we will have Iraq with Iran in the bullseye. We will have a North American Union, scheduled to commence in 2010. We will have a Pan American Union. Make no mistake, these “free trade” agreements have little to do with trade, they have all to do with the power elite gaining control over sovereign nations through corporate power.
The reason you state for having McCain win is exactly why the power elite will put Clinton in, these things will be more acceptable as the GOP has taken so much the people are ready to “change”. Clinton does not refer to any of these listed above, but gives lip service to healthcare, taxes, bring troops home, etc. because those are things the people want to hear. Her healthcare will actually be a boon to the insurance companies as they will pick up those 40 some million who are paying them nothing at present. Her talk about bringing troops home is sketchy at best, with little or no mention of what to do with the Embassy and the military bases that have been built there. Are we to assume they will simply be left empty? I think not.
America's only hopes for a change agent was given the heave-ho by the power elite through their corporate media propagandists and the Democrat Party. Dennis Kucinich was the only candidate talking about giving the power back to the people, away from the corporations. Even the “other” candidate, Ron Paul, is for giving more power to the corporation through what is called privatization – take what the people's tax dollars have built and give it to corporations so the people can continue to pay for the service, at greater expenses, but have no power over how those services should be handled.
The only power the people have, the vote, has been privatized, in the hands of corporations and should that source not produce the correct candidate the Supreme Court will.
The people have seen their Democracy stolen, just as other Democracies are seeing through those “free trade” agreements. The Power Elite is gaining their “New World Order”.
by
Dennis Kaiser (5 articles, 0 quicklinks, 1 diaries, 80 comments)
on Saturday, February 2, 2008 at 3:55:18 PM
Hillary will win. That's an inevitability. It has been decided by forces more powerful than this newsource or even the American electorate.
So the question that I think we should be asking ourselves is: where is progress possible? What are the points of resistance where our effort can have an impact? What can we do to promote qualitative change in the long term, looking beyond this election and the next 8 years of Hillary?
For me, one of those answers is registering and voting green. But beyond that it's changing my mindset and my lifestyle to something more sustainable and more communal, something centered in love and forgiveness, not fear and perpetual hatred; to look at every person as a friend or a potential friend, not to prejudge people with categories that I violently force upon them, denying their individuality.
When we look at the power of evil we despair. Where then is hope? In our own power for good. I am endlessly encouraged by these words: "Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good."
by
Caleb Friz (2 articles, 0 quicklinks, 1 diaries, 28 comments)
on Saturday, February 2, 2008 at 6:24:41 PM
The son of man watches and waits while self-important, self-rigteous people fight for power, dividing the people.
He chuckles to himself because on one hand he knows it is but a matter of time before the people discover the truth that will empower them and unite them.
On the other hand, he groans and grieves because so many people are suffering from the consequences of the folly of egocentric leaders.
I know this from reading his message, which you can read at:
and then see what happens on the impeachment of Bush to determine who is the least bad of Clinton, Obama and McCain.
Frankly if Bush isn't impeached America may as well elect Osama bin Ladin because the world will be going to hell in a handbasket and we may as well get this lawless honorless American hegemony crap over with quickly.
Without the global rule of law (in the form of a peace treaty like the UN Charter) the highest objective is the establishment of a peace treaty that has a chance of holding. If it costs the world America to get such a peace treaty - the price would be worth it.
by
Brett Paatsch (0 articles, 2 quicklinks, 17 diaries, 773 comments)
on Saturday, February 2, 2008 at 7:57:51 PM
