How McCain's Palin Pick Makes 'Age' Issue Number One

McCain's choice was motivated by the fact that 'age' had already become an issue and he hoped to blunt it. If McCain had chosen well, it might have been unfair to ask: what if the old codger should die in office? Now, it is irresponsible NOT to ask that question. McCain's Palin pick --focus group designed to blunt the criticism in the bud --has backfired. The campaign is now all about age.

A wise choice for McCain would have been someone with proven experience and moderate politics. Had McCain made such a choice, the 'age issue' would have been blunted, perhaps taken off the table entirely. Instead, McCain blundered before getting off the blocks, a first bad decision that may be chalked up to age and the age issue.

What kind of 'President' would the extremist Palin become? A Palin presidency is simply unthinkable. Certainly --she would never have risen to prominence so quickly were not McCain concerned about age. Instead of putting the issue to rest, he has put it on the front burner.

As an extremist, Palin makes Goldwater look moderate. She is a denier of global warming, a doctrinaire opponent of a women's pro-creative rights, a proponent of enforced teaching of creationism. McCain's death could hasten a new dark age.

Let's look at the record of the person who might very well be put in the position of leading the United States of America.

• She was elected Alaska's governor a little over a year and a half ago. Her previous office was mayor of Wasilla, a small town outside Anchorage. She has no foreign policy experience.


• Palin is strongly anti-choice, opposing abortion even in the case of rape or incest.


• She supported right-wing extremist Pat Buchanan for president in 2000.


• Palin thinks creationism (theology --NOT science) should be taught in public schools


• She's doesn't think humans are the cause of climate change.


• She's solidly in line with John McCain's "Big Oil first" energy policy. She's pushed hard for more oil drilling and says renewables won't be ready for years. She also sued the Bush administration for listing polar bears as an endangered species—she was worried it would interfere with more oil drilling in Alaska.


• How closely did John McCain vet this choice? He met Sarah Palin once at a meeting. They spoke a second time, last Sunday, when he called her about being vice-president. Then he offered her the position. [h/t Ron Foster]
  

Some quick notes about the issues involved should a right wing extremist assume the nation's highest office upon the death of senile President.

Neither creationism nor 'intelligent design' is science. Both are slick PR approved versions of 'religious' theology'. Constitutionally, folk can teach their children anything they want --at home! But the Constitutional separation of Church and State makes the teaching or propagation of 'religion' at tax payer expense unlawful. That is the standard that must also be applied to so-called 'Faith Based Initiatives'.

Like the evil hackers who try to 'sneak' malicious programs onto your computer, the axis of creationism/ID cloaked creationism to disguise their religious ideology, to make it appear to be science when in fact it was and remains religious dogma. It was hoped that as 'science', religious ideology could be taught stealthily in publicly financed schools at your expense. You would pick up the tab though you do not believe it.

Palin's big oil policies conform to the GOP party line. With Her assumption of the nation's highest office upon the death of an aging McCain, the big oil cabals will not merely retain but consolidate their ownership of the nation. They own her. Now --what does that make her?

At last, her extremist, anti-freedom, anti-people, anti-environment positions may expose her pro-hypocrisy agenda.

Sarah Palin's 17 y/o daughter Bristol is pregnant. Pass it on.

There is no truth to the rumor, however, that Palin's four month-old child with Down Syndrome is Bristol's daughter.

The McCain campaign is saying that McCain already knew about the blessed event before he made his running mate choice eight days ago. If that's true, then it seems to suggest that McCain really is as ethically blind as he proved during the Keating 5 scandal. But somehow, I doubt that McCain would've been in possession of information that intimate. According to John Cole at Balloon Juice, Camp McCain hasn't even begun vetting her, yet.

CNN reports that Palin's child with child will keep the baby and marry the father, as if making such a decision while still in high school bespeaks Christian family values. Naturally, the Palins are insisting on everybody respecting their privacy (Read: Don't write or speak about it).

You know, like the GOP would've respected Chelsea Clinton's privacy if she'd gotten knocked up in her junior year of high school.

--Family Values

As Lloyd Bentsen famously chided Dan Quayle --"You are NO John Kennedy" --we might remind John McCain: "You are no Ronald Reagan":

Reagan at his age was much more graceful. McCain's shoulders are stiff and painful from years of North Vietnamese torture, and he doesn't deliver a speech that well.

At the instinctive level with the contrast between McCain the stove up old codger and Obama's lithe articulate just old enough youthfulness, it's no contest. The ideological pros and cons of the people McCain considered have been done to death. But how about this totally non-ideological analysis:

McCain/Lieberman--two old farts. Sure losers against Obama.

McCain/Romney-- no chemistry, makes McCain look old, Romney himself is classy but sort of a stiff.

McCain/Pawlenty-- another lose/lose proposition. Pawlenty points up McCain's age without bringing much pizazz.

--A different take on the Palin choice

The GOP is literally owned by big oil. The GOP, therefore, must be anti-environment, pro Iraq war, pro-Bush dictatorship. By picking Palin, McCain proves that he is anything but a 'maverick'. McCain is not his own man. McCain is hardly a 'straight-talker'; his words are vetted by the robber barons of big oil. McCain is just another GOP kiss up to the Military/Industrial establishment --the folk who bought you Viet Nam and Iraq. If you like George W. Bush, then vote for John McCain and get Bush's third term!

The Palin Choice is so bad that one is justified in asking if McCain is already showing signs of senility. Was he influenced by what he might think is a pretty face hiding an extremist, right wing mentality? This choice smacks of desperation. Reams of GOP propaganda in its wake have kept many a flack, many a paid liar employed. McCain has proven that he been bought and paid for by the folk who OWN the GOP. Maverick, my ass!

Essential reading:

American essayist Gore Vidal says that despite the US claim that it is making the world safer by perpetuating democracy, the country never had any democracy.

In an exclusive interview with Press Tv correspondent, Vidal said that the United States has never had democracy and the word never was used in the US constitution, Bill of Rights or the Declaration of Independence.

Vidal also said that America has fallen into the hands of a small group of people that only care about global dominance and making money from US tax payers by waging wars.

The renowned essayist made the analogy that the democratic national convention in Denver is symbolic of a falling empire and observed that the hyper expensive entertainment-based campaigns and the current state of the US as being overextended in multiple wars and no budget surplus to finance them, all bode ill for that nation's future.

Vidal noted that despite Obama's promise to deliver universal heath care, the heath industry would oppose his plan and insure he will not be able to deliver on his stated goal.

When asked about US policy toward Iran by the rival candidates, Vidal responded that McCain is a warmonger that will likely wage war on Iran.

Gore Vidal: US never had democracy

More about Palin from Democracy Now:

Max Blumenthal of The Nation reports: Last week, while the media focused almost obsessively on the DNC’s spectacle in Denver, the country’s most influential conservatives met quietly at a hotel in downtown Minneapolis to get to know Sarah Palin. The assembled were members of the Council for National Policy, an ultra-secretive cabal that networks wealthy right-wing donors together with top conservative operatives to plan long-term movement strategy.

--Report: Secretive Right-Wing Group Vetted McCain’s VP Candidate Sarah Palin

Additional resources:

• Amy Goodman Arrested by Fascists at the RNC
• Sarah Palin Lied About Her Visit to Ireland
• McCain Voted AGAINST all Katrina Aid
• Amy Goodman Arrested at RNC
• Right Wing Lunatic Fringe Loves Palin
• McCain's Palin Pick Proves His "Put My Country First" Hypocrisy
• Maker Her Whine
• Nazi link in 'plot to assassinate Obama'

Published Articles

• Bush's Conspiracy to Create an American Police State: Part I, Police States Begin With False Flag Attacks
• Bush's Conspiracy to Create an American Police State: Part II, Police States Begin With False Flag Attacks
• Bush's Conspiracy to Create an American Police State: Part III, In Fascist Dictatorships Telling the truth becomes a crime
• Bush's Conspiracy to Create an American Police State: Part IV, the state forces an 'existential' choice
• Bush's Conspiracy to Create an American Police State: Part V, Public Opinion Becomes Irrelevant
• Bush's Conspiracy to Create an American Police State: Part VI, The government places itself above the law
• Bush's Conspiracy to Create an American Police State: Part VII, The Government Denies 'Due Process of Law'
• Bush's Conspiracy to Create an American Police State Part VIII: Atrocities are justified with lies, myths or propaganda

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GOP, Bush, Evil, Tyranny

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Life is a Cabaret but tomorrow belongs to Mein Fuhrer!

German playwright Bertolt Brecht wrote a fable that sums up the slow death that Bush and his NEOCON partners in crime have cooked up for the American people. It goes something like this:

A man living alone answers a knock at the door. When he opens it, he sees in the doorway the powerful body, the cruel face, of The Tyrant. The Tyrant asks, “Will you submit?” The man does not reply. He steps aside. The Tyrant enters and establishes himself in the man’s house. The man serves him for years. Then The Tyrant becomes sick from food poisoning. He dies. The man wraps the body, opens the door, gets rid of the body, comes back to his house, closes the door behind him, and says, firmly, “No.”

- Howard Zinn, Declarations of Independence: Cross-Examining American Ideology

Submission to a tyrant takes many forms. Most people just muddle through when forced to choose: either your life or your soul. Few are so dramatically challenged. Most of us live our lives in the grayish hinterland of compromise. Most of us seek and find, for awhile anyway, safety in the no man's land of "no affirmation" and "no denial".

But that is not the stuff of high existentialist drama. Poets and playwrights, rather, find in tyranny the seeds of personal crisis. In this crucible is sometimes born a hero's death ala Sir Thomas More as portrayed in "A Man for All Season". Submission is not a choice, though some may think so. But neither is living when life becomes but slow death from a thousand cuts. If not the body, the soul is bled to die quickly or slowly, but like ashes, it simply melts away in gray rain.

Here's the official description of tyranny:

A tyrant is a single ruler holding vast, if not absolute power through a state or in an organization. The term carries connotations of a harsh and cruel ruler who place their own interests or the interests of a small oligarchy over the best interests of the general population which they govern or control. This mode of rule is referred to as tyranny. Many individual rulers or government officials get accused of tyranny, with the label almost always a matter of controversy.

- Tyranny

That description applies to many tyrannies including that of Adolf Hitler and, more recently, George W. Bush.

As we are told, life is a cabaret but never more poignantly, tragically than in times of repression, times in which your life is thought by power to be expendable in service to some higher, ideological ideal. German cabaret, for example, blossomed in post-war Germany just as a young Adolf Hitler exploited the angst that birthed cabaret. Americans' best exposure to cabaret came to us in the form of Bertolt Brecht's "Three Penny Opera"

Through a cultural filter, we absorbed the Cabaret version of I Am a Camera, a 1951 play by John Van Druten.

By the 30's Nazis had begun to repress criticism. That included journalism and popular forms of entertainment including cabaret. In 1935, Werner Finck was briefly imprisoned and sent to a concentration camp. Kurt Tucholsky committed suicide while almost all German-speaking cabaret artists fled into exile in Switzerland, Scandinavia or the US.

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"Wires and lights in a box"

Edward R. Murrow became famous throughout America during World War II. His rooftop radio broadcasts painted a vivid picture of the Blitz in a pre-television era. Most certainly, his words made a longer lasting impression than even video from Viet Nam.

It is inaccurate to say that Murrow was unbiased. Clearly, Murrow was a champion of America's lost ideals: individual liberties and rights, truth, free speech, citizen participation. No one doubts that Murrow felt those ideas threatened by Adolph Hitler's Third Reich.

Later, Murrow would feel similarly threatened when our own right wing attacked freedom of speech and free inquiry. It was the McCarthy era, an era not unlike our own —seemingly dominated by those who fear dissent, free speech, open debate, the institutions of a Democratic society. Murrow reacted to McCarthy's threats of surreptitious investigations and attacks on free speech as if they were themselves Nazi bombs that he had earlier described so vividly from the flaming rooftops of London.

Ed Murrow is still with us; he still embodies the very finest that might be found in Western democracies. Unlike our present "leaders" who have exploited and debased the term, Murrow made of Democracy an ideal! Murrow did immeasurably more for the cause of "freedom" than all the GOP/right wing hate and fear mongering had ever done or would ever do. One Murrow is worth one thousand Bushes; one Murrow might not undo the harm done by Bush in Iraq —but his memory might awaken a lost American dream of freedom.

It is with that hope that I post Murrow's very words, excerpts from his prophetic speech to a meeting of the Radio and Television News Director's Association Convention in Chicago. It's as true today as it was on October 15, 1958.

Edward R. Murrow's address to the RTNDA Convention in Chicago, October 15, 1958

This just might do nobody any good. At the end of this discourse a few people may accuse this reporter of fouling his own comfortable nest, and your organization may be accused of having given hospitality to heretical and even dangerous thoughts. But the elaborate structure of networks, advertising agencies and sponsors will not be shaken or altered. It is my desire, if not my duty, to try to talk to you journeymen with some candor about what is happening to radio and television.

I have no technical advice or counsel to offer those of you who labor in this vineyard that produces words and pictures. You will forgive me for not telling you that instruments with which you work are miraculous, that your responsibility is unprecedented or that your aspirations are frequently frustrated. It is not necessary to remind you that the fact that your voice is amplified to the degree where it reaches from one end of the country to the other does not confer upon you greater wisdom or understanding than you possessed when your voice reached only from one end of the bar to the other. All of these things you know.

You should also know at the outset that, in the manner of witnesses before congressional committees, I appear here voluntarily-by invitation-that I am an employee of the Columbia Broadcasting System, that I am neither an officer nor a director of that corporation and that these remarks are of a "do-it-yourself" nature. If what I have to say is responsible, then I alone am responsible for the saying of it. Seeking neither approbation from my employers, nor new sponsors, nor acclaim from the critics of radio and television, I cannot well be disappointed. Believing that potentially the commercial system of broadcasting as practiced in this country is the best and freest yet devised, I have decided to express my concern about what I believe to be happening to radio and television. These instruments have been good to me beyond my due. There exists in mind no reasonable grounds for personal complaint. I have no feud, either with my employers, any sponsors, or with the professional critics of radio and television. But I am seized with an abiding fear regarding what these two instruments are doing to our society, our culture and our heritage.

Our history will be what we make it. And if there are any historians about fifty or a hundred years from now, and there should be preserved the kinescopes for one week of all three networks, they will there find recorded in black and white, or color, evidence of decadence, escapism and insulation from the realities of the world in which we live. I invite your attention to the television schedules of all networks between the hours of 8 and 11 p.m., Eastern Time. Here you will find only fleeting and spasmodic reference to the fact that this nation is in mortal danger. There are, it is true, occasional informative programs presented in that intellectual ghetto on Sunday afternoons. But during the daily peak viewing periods, television in the main insulates us from the realities of the world in which we live. If this state of affairs continues, we may alter an advertising slogan to read: LOOK NOW, PAY LATER.

For surely we shall pay for using this most powerful instrument of communication to insulate the citizenry from the hard and demanding realities which must be faced if we are to survive. I mean the word survive literally. If there were to be a competition in indifference, or perhaps in insulation from reality, then Nero and his fiddle, Chamberlain and his umbrella, could not find a place on an early afternoon sustaining show. If Hollywood were to run out of Indians, the program schedules would be mangled beyond all recognition. Then some courageous soul with a small budget might be able to do a documentary telling what, in fact, we have done--and are still doing--to the Indians in this country. ... I have reason to know, as do many of you, that when the evidence on a controversial subject is fairly and calmly presented, the public recognizes it for what it is--an effort to illuminate rather than to agitate....

Our experience was similar with two half-hour programs dealing with cigarette smoking and lung cancer. Both the medical profession and the tobacco industry cooperated in a rather wary fashion. But in the end of the day they were both reasonably content. The subject of radioactive fall-out and the banning of nuclear tests was, and is, highly controversial. But according to what little evidence there is, viewers were prepared to listen to both sides with reason and restraint. This is not said to claim any special or unusual competence in the presentation of controversial subjects, but rather to indicate that timidity in these areas is not warranted by the evidence. ...

Nowhere is this better illustrated than by the fact that the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission publicly prods broadcasters to engage in their legal right to editorialize. Of course, to undertake an editorial policy, overt and clearly labeled, and obviously unsponsored, requires a station or a network to be responsible. Most stations today probably do not have the manpower to assume this responsibility, but the manpower could be recruited. Editorials would not be profitable; if they had a cutting edge, they might even offend. It is much easier, much less troublesome, to use the money-making machine of television and radio merely as a conduit through which to channel anything that is not libelous, obscene or defamatory. In that way one has the illusion of power without responsibility.

... when John Foster Dulles, by personal decree, banned American journalists from going to Communist China, and subsequently offered contradictory explanations, for his fiat the networks entered only a mild protest. Then they apparently forgot the unpleasantness. Can it be that this national industry is content to serve the public interest only with the trickle of news that comes out of Hong Kong, to leave its viewers in ignorance of the cataclysmic changes that are occurring in a nation of six hundred million people? ...

I have no illusions about the difficulties reporting from a dictatorship, but our British and French allies have been better served--in their public interest--with some very useful information from their reporters in Communist China.One of the basic troubles with radio and television news is that both instruments have grown up as an incompatible combination of show business, advertising and news. Each of the three is a rather bizarre and demanding profession. And when you get all three under one roof, the dust never settles. The top management of the networks with a few notable exceptions, has been trained in advertising, research, sales or show business. But by the nature of the corporate structure, they also make the final and crucial decisions having to do with news and public affairs.

Frequently they have neither the time nor the competence to do this. It is not easy for the same small group of men to decide whether to buy a new station for millions of dollars, build a new building, alter the rate card, buy a new Western, sell a soap opera, decide what defensive line to take in connection with the latest Congressional inquiry, how much money to spend on promoting a new program, what additions or deletions should be made in the existing covey or clutch of vice-presidents, and at the same time-- frequently on the same long day--to give mature, thoughtful consideration to the manifold problems that confront those who are charged with the responsibility for news and public affairs.

Sometimes there is a clash between the public interest and the corporate interest. A telephone call or a letter from the proper quarter in Washington is treated rather more seriously than a communication from an irate but not politically potent viewer. It is tempting enough to give away a little air time for frequently irresponsible and unwarranted utterances in an effort to temper the wind of criticism.Upon occasion, economics and editorial judgment are in conflict. And there is no law which says that dollars will be defeated by duty. ...

There is no suggestion here that networks or individual stations should operate as philanthropies. But I can find nothing in the Bill of Rights or the Communications Act which says that they must increase their net profits each year, lest the Republic collapse. I do not suggest that news and information should be subsidized by foundations or private subscriptions. I am aware that the networks have expended, and are expending, very considerable sums of money on public affairs programs from which they cannot hope to receive any financial reward. I have had the privilege at CBS of presiding over a considerable number of such programs. I testify, and am able to stand here and say, that I have never had a program turned down by my superiors because of the money it would cost.But we all know that you cannot reach the potential maximum audience in marginal time with a sustaining program.

This is so because so many stations on the network--any network--will decline to carry it. Every licensee who applies for a grant to operate in the public interest, convenience and necessity makes certain promises as to what he will do in terms of program content. Many recipients of licenses have, in blunt language, welshed on those promises. The money-making machine somehow blunts their memories. The only remedy for this is closer inspection and punitive action by the F.C.C. ...

What, then, is the answer? Do we merely stay in our comfortable nests, concluding that the obligation of these instruments has been discharged when we work at the job of informing the public for a minimum of time? Or do we believe that the preservation of the Republic is a seven-day-a-week job, demanding more awareness, better skills and more perseverance than we have yet contemplated. ...

So the question is this: Are the big corporations who pay the freight for radio and television programs wise to use that time exclusively for the sale of goods and services? Is it in their own interest and that of the stockholders so to do? The sponsor of an hour's television program is not buying merely the six minutes devoted to commercial message. He is determining, within broad limits, the sum total of the impact of the entire hour. If he always, invariably, reaches for the largest possible audience, then this process of insulation, of escape from reality, will continue to be massively financed, and its apologist will continue to make winsome speeches about giving the public what it wants, or "letting the public decide." ...

To a very considerable extent the media of mass communications in a given country reflect the political, economic and social climate in which they flourish. That is the reason ours differ from the British and French, or the Russian and Chinese. We are currently wealthy, fat, comfortable and complacent. We have currently a built-in allergy to unpleasant or disturbing information. Our mass media reflect this. But unless we get up off our fat surpluses and recognize that television in the main is being used to distract, delude, amuse and insulate us, then television and those who finance it, those who look at it and those who work at it, may see a totally different picture too late.I do not advocate that we turn television into a 27-inch wailing wall, where longhairs constantly moan about the state of our culture and our defense. But I would just like to see it reflect occasionally the hard, unyielding realities of the world in which we live. ...

I began by saying that our history will be what we make it. If we go on as we are, then history will take its revenge, and retribution will not limp in catching up with us.We are to a large extent an imitative society. If one or two or three corporations would undertake to devote just a small traction of their advertising appropriation along the lines that I have suggested, the procedure would grow by contagion; the economic burden would be bearable, and there might ensue a most exciting adventure--exposure to ideas and the bringing of reality into the homes of the nation.To those who say people wouldn't look; they wouldn't be interested; they're too complacent, indifferent and insulated, I can only reply: There is, in one reporter's opinion, considerable evidence against that contention. But even if they are right, what have they got to lose? Because if they are right, and this instrument is good for nothing but to entertain, amuse and insulate, then the tube is flickering now and we will soon see that the whole struggle is lost.This instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and it can even inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise it is merely wires and lights in a box. There is a great and perhaps decisive battle to be fought against ignorance, intolerance and indifference. This weapon of television could be useful. Stonewall Jackson, who knew something about the use of weapons, is reported to have said, "When war comes, you must draw the sword and throw away the scabbard." The trouble with television is that it is rusting in the scabbard during a battle for survival.

Good night, and good luck!

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