Absolutely, Helice. It's not the Muslims, it's not al-Queda, it's not the terrorists, it's not bin-Laden, it's not Iran, or Iraq, or Afghanistan or Pakistan, it's the liberals.

That's about the quality and intelligence of the Republican campaign. But since it's being managed by former proteges of Karl Rove, can you expect anything else?

On the other hand, since they have nothing on the issues, and can't brag about the past 8 years, it's all the Republicans have. However I don't think the majority of the American people are being fooled any longer.

It took a long time to wake them, but I think they're up now.

I guess I will respectfully withdraw from this discussion then. The views you guys express are so distorted that I do not think we can have any further meaningful discussion.

The only thing America is waking up to is a reminder that sometimes you have to take out the old garbage to have room to replace it with more garbage. Politically America is stuck between two candidates who will still stink the place up when given the chance. And if you think the Democrats have woken up from anything you must be forgetting how close Hillary Clinton was/is to being their nominee.

Distorted? In what way?

My view is that the whole thing is "politics as usual", and that Obama is no Messiah, and McCain is no saint. You think that anyone could get to the point of running for the office of President of the United States without a certain fierceness and craving for power, a desire to bend others to his/her will and have things done their way, a willingness to say whatever needs to be said to attain the goal of power?

The ends that all that power-craving is put to may differ, and the means to the ends are certainly going to differ, but you can be sure that both of these candidates have that fire in the belly that brought them to this point, and caused them to hire teams of handlers and marketers to promote them to the electorate like cornflakes and shaving cream and cheesepuffs. Which one tastes great? Which one is less filling?

The nature of the campaigns they run are partially dependent on the candidates themselves, but are mostly given over to the people they have hired to sell them in the supermarket isles of the country, and after they make those initial decisions on who to hire, they lose a little control over their labeling and ad campaigns. They might find out after the fact that their ad teams have delivered up commercials or given out statements in their names that cause their sales to fall and their brand name to suffer (irregardless of whether the statements and commercials really reflect the candidate's positions). Remedies are to deny and repudiate, and lastly to fire those responsible, to try and repair your brand name in the consumer's eye. If you're hired the wrong people to handle you and run your media campaigns they're going to allow unpopular things slip into your press releases and media (whether or not they represent the candidate - that's irrelevant, it's just about selling the candidate).

Both of these candidates want power. A lot. That they are where they are at this point attests to the fierce craving they both have for it.

Both of these candidates think they know what's "good" for the country, arrogantly so. Their views on how to get this country to a "good" place and what methods to use differ, but they both want things to be "good", and they both perceive themselves to be "good".

They both have camp followers who are persuaded, for various reasons -- some sound, some foolish -- that the particular path to "good" their favorite candidate espouses is "the shit", and because they are callow, they make the assumption that this automatically makes the opposing candidate "evil".

The respective marketing teams take advantage of this callowness to produce media that plays upon the respective emotions of their camps to make those pre-existing tendencies to see "good" and "evil" flare up as much as possible, trying to make their own candidate seem like the embodiment of all the good Commander-in-Chief virtues and the opposer like a weak, foolish, cowardly, ineffectual, out-of-touch, inexperienced, calculating, spendthrift, indecisive liar who is trying to cheat his way into office against Good Ol' Honest Insert-Name-Here.

They are both just guys. They both crave the power of the office. They both think they know bettter than anyone else how to steer the US out of the morass it is currently in (no arguments from neo-cons, it *is* in a morass and sinking as we speak).

The best thing anyone could POSSIBLY do to help them decide who to vote for is to shut off the TV and radio, stop reading opinion columns completely, and confine one's political reading to descriptions of exactly what the andidates say they plan to do to fix various problems. Then use the brains you have left to figure out if the goals are possible and/or realistic, if the methods are humane, effective, and moral, and if the candidates are addressing what YOU perceive to be all the important problems, or if they are forgetting anything grossly important, or over-focusing on one thing to the detriment of others.

You forget about who loves their pets more, who kissed the most babies, who had more cups of coffee at rural diners and who had more tractor rallies or inner city rallies, you don't look to see which one is more photogenic or which one's skin matches yours.... you go which "Which set of solutions matches the set of problems I see as important?"

Then you vote, your guy loses because the majority of the public voted on stupid criteria, and you are bitter for another 4 or 8 years till next time.

There is nothing new under the sun, it's all bullshit. Of COURSE McCain runs a dirty campaign; that's what Republicans *do*. Of COURSE Obama played the race card to goad McCain who was running negative ads against him, that's what Democrats *do*. Any questions? My answer will be the same 8 years from now, so print it out and line your sock drawer with it.

You call *that* "distortion"?

I think I'm the only sane person here.

As a followup:



Aww, what a b*tch, huh? And he was only having some good, innocent fun, right?

Oh I know. It's getting so as a no-talent heiress who's based her celebrity upon being (or, at least pretending to be) an air-headed, ill-educated slut just can't get respect these days. Tsk, tsk, tsk. However, her mother's assertion that the ad was "a complete waste of the money John McCain's contributors have donated to his campaign" probably misses the mark. Whereas nobody wants to alienate any campaign supporters, still I'm guessing that ad brought in plenty of contributions as well as support from those on the fence who might be encouraged to see John McCain "grow a couple" and take the fight to Obama.

So in your opinion, until now, John McCain has been "lacking a couple"?

Does it take negative campaigning to manifest the presence of said couple? I thought he promised not to do that, especially since he suffered so at the hands of the Bush campaign which spread the nasty "McCain has a black baby" story about him in a previous campaign. He spoke a lot about keeping his hands clean.

Does growing a couple mean getting those hands as dirty as Bush's were under Rove's direction?

It's the McCain campaign with the bizarre double standard. According to it, the McCain ad showing Obama's face on a dollar bill with a voiceover essentially saying "who the hell does he think he is?" wasn't racist. But for Obama mention that ad was not only racist, but "shamefully, disgracefully" so.

Unlike Brittany Spears, who received a decent education, IS talented...and certainly not an airhead. She was the part of McCain's humor, why?

Wow! That's sounds like a rather exciting ad. I don't suppose you could find a copy of this "shamefully racist ad" produced by the John McCain campaign, oh say on YouTube or something? I seem to have missed that one.