I Will Be a Viciously Negative Bastard From Now On

The current primary season has left me emotionally numb. If you want to know the God's honest truth, I've never really worked up a huge amount of enthusiasm for either of our contenders, although I prefer Obama. (I just wish he had waited until 2016, but that's another issue.) Just thinking about Hillary being our nominee makes me feel tired and depressed, although I will not renege on my earlier pledge to support her. But in fact, I have given Obama and Clinton $0 this year, and I've just felt strangely detached. So tell ya what I'm gonna do: since I can't work up any enthusiasm FOR anyone, and I'm feeling pessimistic about our chances in November (given the rancor and division in our party) I'm just going to attack St. John McCain.

Every. Freaking. G-d damned. Bloody. Day.

*I'm going to go after him for being a fraudulent "straight talker", the "enemy" of the lobbyists who has 59 different lobbyists working for him, accepts favors from them, and is essentially bankrolled by them.

*I'm going to go after "Mr. Honesty" who hid hundreds of thousands of pages of Abramoff documents when he was in a position to do so.

*I'm going to after the man who begged ANTI-CATHOLIC, APOCALYPTIC LUNATIC John Hagee to support him for an entire year.

*I'm going after the man who has a ZERO rating from the League of Conservation Voters.

*I'm going after the phony "maverick" who votes with his party 80-90% of the time.

*I'm going after the man who crawled to the very people who slimed his own family in 2000, asking for their support.

*I'm going after one of the biggest cheerleaders for what can rightly be called THE BUSH-McCAIN WAR, one who has pledged to make our country's involvement in this tragedy PERMANENT.

*I'm going after someone who may yet involve us in a devastating war with Iran.

*I'm going after the one man in the whole Senate who should NEVER have caved in to Bush on torture--but yet did.

*I'm going after "Mr. Strong Principles" who has changed his views on taxes, overturning Roe v. Wade, seeking support from the Religious Right, and any number of other issues--whatever was expedient.

*I'm going to go after the economic simpleton who wants to make Bush's catastrophic tax cuts for the rich permanent.

*I'm going after the man who will do NOTHING about our health care problems, and who has been consistently hostile to women's rights and labor unions.

*I'm going after the man who will appoint more Scalias to the Supreme Court.

I will do this out of despair. Our party needs a compromise candidate for president desperately, but that won't happen. (It wouldn't be fair, I suppose, but I think it's the only way out. Parties have done it before.) The Republicans will turn our own words against whoever our nominee is, and do so relentlessly. And, in my semi-professional opinion, Hillary Clinton has essentially poisoned the well for Obama. Her remarks that McCain has experience and Obama doesn't will be played over and over and over again if Obama is the nominee. She has killed Obama, politically, with that statement, which she has repeated. It was always going to be hard as hell to win white voters over to Obama; 20% of Democratic voters in Ohio said race was a factor in their decision. Now, Hillary has given them cover. They're not bigoted; they just prefer experience. She has made it unlikely that Obama can pevail in the GE by the amount of blood she's drawn from him. (Humphrey did the same thing to McGovern in '72. I saw it personally.) Hillary is saying, if I can't have it, nobody on our side can. And she is the weaker of our two candidates, and will be a major drain on Red State Democratic tickets.

I've watched politics for over 40 years. This year SHOULD have been our golden opportunity, but being a Democrat, I have plenty of reasons to doubt that it will be. So instead of just bitching and moaning, I think I'll sublimate my grief into rage and take it out on McCain. What else can I do?

Oh, and one more thing: our greatest leader, Al Gore, chose not to run (and I can't blame him, but I wish he had); our most eloquent defender of the poor, John Edwards, was knocked out, and the man who has the best combination of progressive values and long experience was a non-starter: Christopher Dodd, defender of the U.S. Constitution in the Senate.

You better WATCH yourself, Mac!