McCain/Palin - the Alan Keyes of 2008

Calm down, Democrats. Let me tell you a story from Illinois.

In 2004, Barack Obama was chosen to run for the US Senate on the Democratic ticket. Opposing him was a good looking, fairly moderate Republican, Jack Ryan. He was an opponent who could have beaten Obama.

Then, there was a scandal! A sex scandal! And Jack Ryan was forced to make his divorce records public. I thought that was weird at the time, but I didn't understand the plan. Although he and his ex-wife, Jeri Ryan (of Star Trek and Boston Public fame) didn't want to release the documents, they were forced to, in the interests of public knowledge. (Yeah, unbelievable, I know, after years of governmental secrecy on important matters, we needed to know someone's sex life).

So, here's the sex scandal. He wanted his wife to participate in public sex. With him. Huh? Don't Republican sex scandals usually involve some guy caught snorting meth off the belly of a teenaged boy prostitute? How is a marital disagreement (that the wife won) grounds for disqualification for running for office? But before you could say Spiro Agnew, Jack Ryan was gone.

The Republicans replaced him with a crazy right wing Christian African American from Maryland! Talk about a ringer. There was no way that Alan Keyes could have won that election. Obama won by 70%. (Proving once again, that 30% of Americans are nuts. Those are probably the same ones that still think Bush is doing a good job).

So now, here we are in the 2008 election. Who have the Republicans put up this time? A man who the right-wingers hate. A man who isn't even ELIGIBLE to be President. The Constitution says that a President must be age 35 and born in the United States of America. McCain clearly is old enough, but he wasn't born in the US. He can't be President.

And now they've nominated a woman who abused power as the mayor of a town of 7,000. It's pretty bad when you know your neighbors and you still fire the librarian because she wouldn't ban the books you told her to. She also ran the town into debt. For Republicans, that should be a deal breaker. They're all about balanced budgets, or so they say. Will it really be enough for the base that she's a crazy right wing Christian who thinks that God wants the US to attack Iraq and to build a natural gas pipeline?

The media can play her up as a gutsy beauty queen all they want. I don't think many people will fall for this ticket. About 30%, I'd guess.

It doesn't really matter how people really vote. The voting machines are probably already set at a predetermined rate. I'm guessing 49% Obama, 48% McCain, just to make people think we're more closely divided than we actually are.

We are getting the close polls and the endless drama to keep our minds off the economy and the wars. It's all bread and circus, all the time.