Crossing the Red River

My brother in Wisconsin wrote me yesterday that his oldest daughter has decided to vote for John McCain, for one reason and one reason only, abortion, which he is against. Today I received a letter from an old golfing buddy of mine, a Radiologist who lives in a neighboring state, who is Catholic like my niece, telling me he had never heard of Palin but thought she was swell and that he was going to vote for her and McCain because they were pro-life and that was the only crucial issue with him too.

These one-issue types drive me up a tree; they put the cart before the horse before they take a good look at priorities. My brother has argued with his daughter that it would be a big mistake to put that Republican pair in the White House after eight years of Bush and the neocons and what they have done to this country. All the screws of the ship of state are coming loose and, like the Titanic, we seemed to be taking on water, fast. Grover Norquist, one of better-known neocons has always said he’d loved to drown the State in a bathtub. Bush and his cronies may achieve that task. Sometimes I think it has been their main purpose in office.

Nouriel Roubini, an economist who teachers at New York University but has an international experience, who is better known as “Dr.Doom’ because he calls a spade a spade when it comes to the economic and financial mess we are currently stuck in. He has a new designation for our country: Rather than USA he says USSRA, The United Socialist State Republic of America. Why does he say that? The Government has nationalized private companies who have overstep their bounds, taking them over, to one degree or another, to rescue the rich from themselves, as their faith in deregulation and the market turned out to be a pie in the sky. Isn’t it ironic that it’s the Republicans who were against “nation-building” as a foreign policy but they have been trying to do precisely that in Iraq and Afghanistan for the past six years; and now the Party that hated Socialism in any form has become the USSRA. They have created a monster; the very beast they swore was a deadly enemy. My, my, what strange bedfellows greed and corruption can make. Comrades Bush, Bernanke, and Paulson have crossed the Red River and God knows if they’ll ever get back. On September 17 Roubini wrote: “ This transformation of the country where there is socialism for the rich, the well connected and Wall Street (i.e. where profits are privatized and losses are socialized) continues with the nationalization of AIG.” The government is now the largest Insurance Company in the world. Who would have guessed?

As for Palin, I think the bloom is coming off the rose. It was bound to happen. A growing number of Republicans and conservatives are coming out to declare she is not qualified to be Vice President or—God forbid!-- President. Senator Chuck Hagel said so last week and so did several conservative journalists, including the influential David Brooks of the New York Times. They were very polite in saying so. I can be more impolite: I think her nomination is a sick joke, a sop thrown to the social conservatives at the Convention and nothing more that. She was elevated to help the stumbling maverick to get elected, or at least to put up a fight for the remaining weeks of the too long campaign. She clicked with the base, but McCain has made it clear he has no particular use for a Vice President. He has said that they have two jobs: To check on the President’s health every day and to attend the funerals he doesn’t want to go to. He’d probably give her an office in the basement of the White House and ask her to also take care of the White House Christmas Cards for him. If she needed help, Cindy could help.