Voting in Wonderland

Or, the US Presidential Election through the Looking Glass.

It is now time, after two years of phoney war, for America to decide who gets to sit and weep on top of the smoking wreckage of the United States that Dubya leaves behind him.

And what a choice it is! Will you go for TweedleDem, the charismatic young black man, or TweedleRep, the heroic old white man?

Or will you, God forbid, actually decide who to vote for on the issues rather than on telegenics?

Let's have one final look at the issues:

If elected, Barack Obama will maintain the Federal Reserve.
So will John McCain.

If elected, Barack Obama will maintain the income tax levels and the commensurate level of federal spending, despite America's massive debt burden.
So will John McCain.

If elected, John McCain will continue the "War on Terror", and will likely expand its arena of conflict to include Pakistan and Iran.
So will Barack Obama.

If elected, John McCain will perpetuate the post-9/11 agencies and legislation which erode civil liberties.
So will Barack Obama.

If elected, Barack Obama will try to prevent normal market corrections, such as falling property prices, failures of unsound businesses, and liquidation of bad debt, thereby likely making the recession into a deep depression.
So will John McCain.

If elected, John McCain, will maintain the CIA, the FDA, military spending and overseas black ops interventions in the sovereignty of other countries.
So will Barack Obama.

If elected, Barack Obama will continue to offer unlimited American economic and military support to Israel, despite their occupation of Palestinian territory and daily breaches of human rights and UN declarations, leading to Muslim resentment worldwide.
So will John McCain.

If elected, John McCain will proceed with the unwinnable 'War on Drugs', which has so far wasted billions of dollars, created black markets and criminality, and made the USA the most incarcerated and addicted country on Earth.
So will Barack Obama.

If elected, John McCain will keep U.S. troops in Iraq indefinitely with no withdrawal date set.
So will Barack Obama.

If elected, John McCain will keep funding the American global military presence and its bases in more than half of the world’s sovereign countries.
So will Barack Obama.

If elected, Barack Obama will promise education, healthcare and welfare provision that cannot actually be paid for without either raising taxes high or borrowing money that frankly does not currently exist on the capital markets.
So will John McCain.

If elected, John McCain will start drilling for oil in Alaska, off-shore and wherever else the USA can lay their hands on this dwindling resource.
So will Barack Obama.

Will there be change you can believe in this time tomorrow? Probably not.

After all, there isn't even a choice you can believe in. Tweedledumb and Tweedledumber are pleading for your votes, America. And they represent exactly the same policies.

As Bill Hicks once said, "It's the same guy holding up both puppets!"

Listen to Bill before you vote, y'all.

Miss Alaska for Vice-President?

Or maybe even for President in four years time?

It seems that John McCain has decided to go with Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his vice-presidential candidate.

It's a superlative choice that's really going to let the Democrats know they're in a fight for the Whitehouse.

She is a dream candidate for the Republicans - she's extremely photogenic (even now, as opposed to her beauty queen heyday, right), married to an Inuit (there goes a slice of Obama's ethnic vote), the mother of a Downs' Syndrome kid and a soldier on active duty, and she has actual experience of governance (unlike Obama, Biden or McCain).

She'll appeal to the ethnic vote, to the swing vote and to the still disgruntled Clintonista sisterhood vote.

An election that ought on paper to have been a Democrat landslide is now blown wide open. They have the wrong candidate, the wrong vice-presidential candidate and the wrong election strategy (Roman pillars for the acceptance speech? WTF?)

By contrast, McCain is quietly playing a blinder. Palin is a genuine heavyweight candidate, despite her beauty and relative youth. Alaskan politicos allege that the political landscape of the territory is littered with the corpses of those who've opposed her in the past.

She will give Biden a good debate and she will shore up the demographic holes in the McCain vote.

Despite the Obamania of the convention, the much-awaited bump in the polls has not materialised for the Democrats. McCain remains doggedly in touch.

It will be interesting to see the polls following the Republican convention. I suspect by then McCain will be neck-and-neck with Obama if not in front.

Certainly, the media agenda hijacking of the Democrat convention by today's announcement is a genius move by the GOP that the Democrats have nothing to respond with.

If they keep boxing clever like that, no amount of waffly Obama rhetoric will be able to propel him to the Whitehouse come November.

What's worse for the Democrats is that if the McCain ticket does get elected, then Palin can run against Obama or Hilary or whoever the Dems choose in 2012 with four years of executive experience under her belt.

The real nightmare for them would be for McCain to die about three years into a term of office. They'd be looking realistically at eight years of Bush junior, followed by three of McCain, followed by nine of Palin.

The American presidential election digested

From the inimitable Fred Reed comes the most succinct summary of the choice America faces in the forthcoming months about which leader to choose:

We’ve got Obama, an empty suit with a good line of patter and a past few write about, and McCain, a pugnacious senile temper tantrum who can’t remember whether Al Qaeda is Sunni or Shiite.
Not too promising.
That leaves Clitler, a strange visitor from another planet probably and crooked as kite string in a ceiling fan, but neither stupid, ignorant, nor crazy.

Needless to say, he's a Hilary supporter by default. Though given he resides in Mexico, she's unlikely to benefit from his vote.

He's pretty good on current and former presidents too:

Bill Clinton was said to be the first black president. W is the first kinky president, which is a whole new approach to democracy.
All sorts of countries torture people, because intelligence agencies naturally attract cowboys, assassins, incorrigible juveniles, and sadists.
But W’s S&M operation in Gitmo is a first. Whipseys and Cheneys. It’s because he’s a Christian. Poor Jesus.
His followers act like the Marquis de Sade—torturing, burning old women at the stake, turning water into water boards. I’d love to know what movies you might find on hard drives at the White House.

There you have it - the five minute lesson in US presidents past, present and future. Perhaps they should lure Fred back across the Rio Grande and stick him in the White House. Not that he'd do it, of course. He knows Washington too well:

Washington is a curious city, separated from most of the rest of the United States by a gaping cultural chasm. It is probably the nation’s best educated town, and it is certainly a place where people know the score.
The population consists of politicians, reporters, beltway bandits attached to Uncle Sucker’s well-worn mammaries, wonks from policy shops, or outfits supplying all of them with one thing or another.
In a country that doesn’t, they travel.
It doesn’t make them better people than others. It means that they know it’s all a game, a matter of whose rice bowl gets filled by what contract and who gets re-elected how.
Things are dirty and rigged and one either hides things from the public or misrepresents them to gull the rubes. This of course is no secret. It doesn’t have to be. It works anyway.

But if Fred was, somehow, to assume the reins of power, he does have a plan, a single idea to put an end to the war in Iraq. I like his plan. It's neat, and it just might work:

I will strap the mothers of the graduating class of Harvard to the front bumpers of Humvees in Baghdad, and see how long support for the war lasts.

I couldn't have put it better myself.