First Door on the Left

Not too long ago I had a lot of respect for Senator John McCain. Since he started playing both sides of the field during this year’s presidential campaign and has apparently now sold his soul to the Republican right-wingers in hopes of a 2008 candidacy for himself, that respect has dwindled considerably.

The 2008 election would definitely be his last opportunity. He would be way too old for a run in 2012. His 92-year-old aunt even questions the wisdom of a run in 2008…

“He would be a very good president,” McCain’s aunt, 92-year-old Rowena Willis, said Sunday before the first of the birthday parties. “But don’t you think he might be too old? I don’t know.”

A successful 2008 campaign would put McCain in office at age 72, older than Ronald Reagan, who became the oldest man elected to the presidency with his 1980 victory at the age of 69. Although he has recovered fully after having malignant melanomas removed four years ago, McCain’s age and health would almost certainly become campaign issues in a presidential run. (source)

I do have one question, and perhaps somebody reading this will be able to answer it for me. The Consitution requires that the president be a natural-born citizen of the United States (at least until they get around to amending it for Schwarzengroper). John McCain was born in the Panama Canal Zone. I am guessing that that is not a problem since the Panama Canal Zone at that time was owned by the United States (the U.S. transferred ownership to the Republic of Panama on December 31, 1999). Is this correct?

I doubt that I will be watching any of the Republican National Revival Meeting. I just don’t have the stomach for it. I actually still have a modicum of respect for a few of the people who will be stepping up to the podium and I fear that watching them sell their souls to the devil would cause me to lose that. That, and the fact that I don’t like being lied to or being played for a fool.

If you are looking for bloggers who are covering the fiasco currently underway in New York City, might I suggest that you check this site.

Meanwhile, I am sure you’ve heard that George W. said today that he does not think we can win the war against terrorism. I think the truth is that he does not want to win the war against terrorism. It’s the only thing that is keeping him and his buddies in business.

When your nation is at war and your leader does not believe that you can win that war, it may be time to select a new leader.

Oh, and another Republican congressman has resigned under allegations that he is homosexual. I still do not think that being gay is reason enough to resign any political office. I do, however, believe that living your life as a liar and a hypocrite is. (I am not passing judgment… just saying.)

Straight from the GOP News Channel:

Bush Calls Iraq Invasion a ‘Catastrophic Success’

Dictionary.com defines a catastrophe as “a complete failure; a fiasco.”

Something can be a catastrophe or it can be a success, it cannot be both. Given our current commander-in-chief’s limited command of the English language, we need to credit him with at least getting the first word right.

What would you do if you walked into a new car showroom and the only car the salesman showed you had the windows all blacked out and he refused to let you see the interior or look under the hood? Would you buy the car?

That is exactly what is happening at the Republican National Revival Meeting this week. They are letting us see the exterior of the car, and it looks pretty good. Yet they are refusing to let us look at the interior. They won’t let us look under the hood to see what makes the car run. You can see all that stuff, the salesman says, after you buy the car and get it home.

When you get the car home and finally look under the hood, you find discrimination and bigotry, huge tax cuts for the rich and no help for the middle class, neverending wars, corporate cronyism, rising health care and prescription costs, raping of the environment, a weak national defense, indiscriminate spending resulting in huge deficits that your kids and grandkids will have to pay for… but it’s too late. You bought the car. There is no warranty and no returns are allowed. You’re stuck.

The Republicans are hoping that this week you will buy the car with the windows blacked out and the engine hood locked down. Will you?

Will you buy the car?

Sometimes in order to get a clear picture you must be standing on the outside looking in. This article from the Toronto Star contains a lot more objectivity and common sense than I have seen from any of the media in the United States…

Bush, not Kerry, should face scrutiny

It’s downright strange that the U.S. presidential election campaign — easily the most important in decades — has come to focus on what happened in a faraway boat during the course of a few minutes more than 30 years ago.

That such a crucial election isn’t more focused on the many pressing current issues is remarkable enough.

But if the election is to hinge on what happened decades ago during the Vietnam War, it’s truly astonishing that the candidate in the hot seat is the one who actually went to Vietnam and was injured in the line of duty, rather than the one who used family connections to do his service at home and then didn’t bother to show up for duty.

It’s not surprising that Republicans have tried to smear Democratic candidate John Kerry’s impressive war record.

It’s clear that no smear is beneath them. They proved that in 2002, when they attacked Senator Max Cleland for lacking patriotism — when all he really lacked were the three limbs he lost in Vietnam.

Kerry, without a single missing limb, was clearly a sitting duck for the Republican attack machine. Furthermore, Kerry had the audacity to run as a war hero, an image that had to be demolished in order to preserve the already far-fetched notion that George W. Bush is the appropriate man to lead the country in these war times.

Click on the headline to continue reading.

This is from the official website of the 2004 Republican National Revival Meeting:

Americans who served in the military will be well represented at the upcoming Republican convention, more so than at last month’s Democratic convention or in the U.S. population overall, according to the GOP.

About 15 percent of the 4,800-plus delegates and alternates to the convention in New York are veterans, organizers said Monday. An additional 3 percent are active military personnel. [emphasis added]

This is from Department of Defense Directive number 1344.10, dated August 2, 2004:

4.1.2. A member on active duty shall not:

4.1.2.3. Participate in partisan political management, campaigns, or conventions (unless attending a convention as a spectator when not in uniform).

Could it be possible that the party currently in power is not aware of the law?

Three percent of 4,800-plus delegates and alternates is 147-plus delegates and alternates who are active military personnel. Delegates and alternates to a political convention participate actively in said convention. They are not there as spectators.

Oops.

Here is a man who, despite what George Bush and Dick Cheney have to say about “frivolous” lawsuits, has every right to sue his doctor right off the face of this planet…

Man’s HIV Diagnosis Reversed 8 Years Later

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) – A California man who once tested positive for HIV has learned the diagnosis made eight years ago was mistaken and he never had the virus that causes AIDS.

Jim Malone spent years battling depression and losing weight, expecting to die at any time. He attended support group meetings and accepted free meals from an AIDS charity. Malone’s main doctor, Richard Karp, acknowledged the error in an Aug. 4 letter to the Department of Veterans Affairs clinic where Malone was treated.

“As his primary care provider, I take full responsibility,” the doctor wrote.

Malone, who is gay and has lost friends to AIDS, said he is relieved but angry at his doctor.

“He told me, ‘We made a very big mistake. We did not do our job,’” he said. “I said, ‘You mean to tell me that all you have to say is you are sorry? Sorry that I lived for all this time believing I was going to die?’”

The Oakland Department of Veterans Affairs should be included in his lawsuit…

The Oakland Department of Veterans Affairs is investigating.

The error may have occurred because Malone arrived at the clinic in 1996 with lab results from a testing firm showing he had HIV, said Karen Pridmore, spokeswoman for the VA’s Northern California Health Care System.

The clinic performed its own HIV test on Malone to confirm the first set of results and it came back negative, but that information was never shared with the patient, Pridmore said.

The mistake was uncovered by the VA’s computer system, which tracks HIV patients and conducts a periodic review of cases.

A second test came back negative, but that information was never shared with the patient? Somebody sure screwed the pooch on this one. I hope they pay dearly.

Atrios has the story of Sheri Dew, the Mormon lady who has been selected to offer the opening invocation at the Republican Revival Meeting tomorrow. (Jerry Falwell wasn’t hateful enough to do the honors.)

Ms. Dew is 50 years old and has never married. In the Mormon faith, sex outside of marriage is strictly forbidden. This means that if Ms. Dew has been true to her faith, she is a virgin.

Yet, she feels entitled to preach the evils of gay marriage.

We’ll just file this one under “strange, but true.”

A group of Republican leaders and former elected officials is calling upon their party to “Come Back to the Mainstream.” Here is their statement:

To RNC Chairman Ed Gillespie, President George W. Bush, Senate Majority Leader William Frist, House Speaker Dennis Hastert and delegates to the 2004 Republican National Convention:

As Republican former Governors, Senators and public officials, we urge our party to renew its allegiance to the proven, common sense values which unite America.

Instead of partisan ideology—which increasingly has led moderates to leave the party—what’s needed is a speedy return to the pragmatic, problem-solving mainstream. Here’s how the President and Republican-majority Congress can send that clear signal to the nation:

• stop weakening environmental law, and once again protect our air, water and public lands as Teddy Roosevelt and other great Republican leaders intended;
• restore fiscal responsibility, with “pay-as-you-go” budget discipline to end record deficits that jeopardize economic growth;
• put the health of millions first, and clear the way for embryonic stem cell research;
• appoint mainstream federal judges, and respect the Constitution;
• make America safer, and protect cities and towns, still vulnerable three years after 9/11, by securing chemical and nuclear plants and shipping containers;
• rebuild our alliances with real partnerships, and restore America’s standing in the world.

By returning to the mainstream in these ways, the Republican Party party can regain the trust of a divided nation and earn a vote of confidence in November.

Sounds exactly like the Democratic platform.

These things are never going to happen as long as George W. Bush remains in power.

Garrison Keillor has penned an amazing article for In These Times on the transformation of the Republican party entitled “We’re Not in Lake Wobegon Anymore.” I’ll post a couple of paragraphs, but you should click on the link and read the full article.

Something has gone seriously haywire with the Republican Party. Once, it was the party of pragmatic Main Street businessmen in steel-rimmed spectacles who decried profligacy and waste, were devoted to their communities and supported the sort of prosperity that raises all ships. They were good-hearted people who vanquished the gnarlier elements of their party, the paranoid Roosevelt-haters, the flat Earthers and Prohibitionists, the antipapist antiforeigner element. The genial Eisenhower was their man, a genuine American hero of D-Day, who made it OK for reasonable people to vote Republican. He brought the Korean War to a stalemate, produced the Interstate Highway System, declined to rescue the French colonial army in Vietnam, and gave us a period of peace and prosperity, in which (oddly) American arts and letters flourished and higher education burgeoned—and there was a degree of plain decency in the country. Fifties Republicans were giants compared to today’s. Richard Nixon was the last Republican leader to feel a Christian obligation toward the poor.

…

The party of Lincoln and Liberty was transmogrified into the party of hairy-backed swamp developers and corporate shills, faith-based economists, fundamentalist bullies with Bibles, Christians of convenience, freelance racists, misanthropic frat boys, shrieking midgets of AM radio, tax cheats, nihilists in golf pants, brownshirts in pinstripes, sweatshop tycoons, hacks, fakirs, aggressive dorks, Lamborghini libertarians, people who believe Neil Armstrong’s moonwalk was filmed in Roswell, New Mexico, little honkers out to diminish the rest of us, Newt’s evil spawn and their Etch-A-Sketch president, a dull and rigid man suspicious of the free flow of information and of secular institutions, whose philosophy is a jumble of badly sutured body parts trying to walk. Republicans: The No.1 reason the rest of the world thinks we’re deaf, dumb and dangerous.

Notice that he uses the word “transmogrified” in the second quoted paragraph. I am sure that many of you were already familiar with that word, but I have never had occasion to make use of it. It did not appear in my Webster’s New World Dictionary (always at my side), so I checked dictionary.com. To transmogrify something is to change it into a different shape or form, especially one that is fantastic or bizarre.

I would say he made excellent use of the word, wouldn’t you?