After several days of ceaseless vitriol and incorrigible fear mongering, John McCain’s acceptance speech at the RNC came as a refreshingly collaborative surprise. I was, frankly, disgusted by the insidious mudslinging and character assassination that took place in the preceding days and hours before his address. I found most of the chosen speakers to embody the worst of what America has to offer: arrogance, condescension and close-mindedness. For the most part, I thought McCain delivered a most civilized address.
Contrary to the right wing attack dog that he chose as his VP candidate--the idea of a “pit bull” with or without lipstick in the Oval Office, terrifies me—I was impressed with McCain’s overtures to reach across party lines and even stand up to those zealots within his own party. I don’t dislike McCain, I think he’s probably a decent man. I know that he is not an extension of Bush, but his hawkish position on everything from Russia to Iran does scare me. And do we really need to argue over who’s more patriotic…must we resort to such sophomoric behavior?
Now, more than ever, we need a diplomat. Enough arrogance and tough talk--it’s obviously not working. Our military is grossly overtaxed and our economy is in turmoil. We simply can’t maintain this bravado and think that it’s not going to have terrifying consequences.
I got chills hearing “drill baby drill!” In fact, I’m haunted by it. What about chanting “conserve baby conserve!” Our reliance on foreign oil is growing increasingly perilous. No one denies that off shore drilling will provide a temporary fix, but what about simultaneously investing in ways to alleviate our dependence on both?
As Americans, we need to wake up and start accepting responsibility for our gluttony. The last eight years have been a disaster and anyone who doesn’t blame greed and bravado is fooling himself or herself. Might it be time to take a more humble approach? Could it be worth a shot?
Vote suppression worries me, I so wish you would go on Oprah and give it the attention it deserves. Acorn is being falsely smeared. Most voters don't have a clue what they are up against and won't until it's too late. Americans need to be educated and there is so little time left.
Brad from Brad Blog is excellent, as is Bev Harris at Black Box Voting. It would be criminal if voter suppression (and outright theft) changed the results of this election.
I am not alone in being afraid that it will.
I hope your site doesn't go down, your work is too important.
Thanks for all you do.
Here is what Palast sent me tonight:
ROLLING STONE: IT'S ALREADY STOLEN
Investigation by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Greg Palast released today
Don’t worry about Mickey Mouse or ACORN stealing the election. According to an investigative report out today in Rolling Stone magazine, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Greg Palast, after a year-long investigation, reveal a systematic program of "GOP vote tampering" on a massive scale.
- Republican Secretaries of State of swing-state Colorado have quietly purged one in six names from their voter rolls.
Over several months, the GOP politicos in Colorado stonewalled every attempt by Rolling Stone to get an answer to the massive purge - ten times the average state's rate of removal.
- While Obama dreams of riding to the White House on a wave of new voters, more then 2.7 million have had their registrations REJECTED under new procedures signed into law by George Bush.
Kennedy, a voting rights lawyer, charges this is a resurgence of 'Jim Crow' tactics to wrongly block Black and Hispanic voters.
- A fired US prosecutor levels new charges - accusing leaders of his own party, Republicans, with criminal acts in an attempt to block legal voters as "fraudulent."
- Digging through government records, the Kennedy-Palast team discovered that, in 2004, a GOP scheme called "caging” ultimately took away the rights of 1.1 million voters. The Rolling Stone duo predict that, this November 4, it will be far worse.
There's more:
- Since the last presidential race, "States used dubious 'list management' rules to scrub at least 10 million voters from their rolls."
Among those was Paul Maez of Las Vegas, New Mexico - a victim of an unreported but devastating purge of voters in that state that left as many as one in nine Democrats without a vote. For Maez, the state's purging his registration was particularly shocking - he's the county elections supervisor.
The Kennedy-Palast revelations go far beyond the sum of questionably purged voters recently reported by the New York Times.
"Republican operatives - the party's elite commandos of bare-knuckle politics," report Kennedy and Palast, under the cover of fighting fraudulent voting, are "systematically disenfranchis[ing] Democrats."
The investigators level a deadly serious charge:
"If Democrats are to win the 2008 election, they must not simply beat McCain at the polls - they must beat him by a margin that exceeds the level of GOP vote tampering."
Block the Vote by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. & Greg Palast in the current issue (#1064) of Rolling Stone. [Media enquiries - Dave Falkenstein, Sunshine Sachs & Assoc, via interviews@gregpalast.com.]
Note - Kennedy and Palast are releasing, simultaneously with the Rolling Stone investigative report what they call, the vote-theft 'antidote': a 24-page full-color comic book, Steal Back Your Vote, which can be downloaded or obtained in print from their non-partisan website, StealBackYourVote.org
For updates and video reports, go to RollingStone.com, www.GregPalast.com and StealBackYourVote.org.