Country Last
By David Michael Green

Did you also know that he was a POW, and that he was a POW?
Now that I've recapped seventy percent of the Republican Convention last week, let me fill in the remaining 30 percent: hypocrisy, arrogance, lies and bullshit.
What an unbelievable ride the last week has been, though that will be the fundamental question of this election: Will it be believable? Can Republicans use the old magic successfully one more time? Has the American public, even an angry American public, been dumbed down sufficiently in recent decades to vote against its own interests, yet one more time, even under conditions like those of 2008?
Really, nothing less than American democracy lies in the balance, and the fact that so many folks are still susceptible to this horror show is dispiriting in the extreme. Watching the Rovoclones at the RNC in action was such a scary sight. Orwell had it so right. Of course we're at war with Eurasia. We've always been at war with Eurasia. If you can fool people under these conditions with patriotic peacocks and über-elite fake outrage over ‘liberal elitism', you can basically fool them anytime.
McCain began the week with an act that, in any healthy democracy, would have instantly disqualified him to be the city dogcatcher in Wasilla, Alaska, let alone leader of the free world. He has been telling us for years that the fight against Islamofascism is the transcendental struggle of our time. He has been telling us the most important job of the Vice President is be qualified to run the country at a moment's notice (not least because this particular dude is a seventy-two year-old four-time cancer survivor). He's been telling us over and over that Iraq is the central front in the war against terrorism. Then he chooses someone who has admitted that she doesn't really know anything about Iraq, ‘cause she's been focused on Alaska state government. Given that the war has been the premier foreign policy issue for America for half a decade now, we also can safely assume, I'm sure, that she knows even less about the rest of the world.

This definitely demonstrates two things about John McCain. First, that his judgement is deeply impaired. We know, for example, that he had hardly vetted Sarah Palin at all, other than within the last couple of days before the announcement. We know, from Alaskan Republicans no less, that no one from the McCain campaign was up there asking questions prior to the choice (but they are now!). We know that McCain had met her all of once before making the choice. Americans really need to ask themselves, do we truly want another four years of a president who goes on gut hunches and politicizes every decision?

LINK TO CON.