Voting For Dummies

There seems to be a deep seated belief in the right wing that that once vaunted "silent majority" is going to keep them in office no matter what they say or do.

I had a chat with Woody Guthrie's Guitar yesterday and he thinks just the same thing. I disagree.

I do believe the public has learned we can't make the mistake of voting the disaster party back into office, and the polls are showing most of the public condemns the WH cabal for the mess we're in. I just wish it were the violations of laws, trashing the constitution, torture that were the element the public reacted against, but it's actually their pocketbooks.

While senseless war and economic ruin, torture and fighting the public interest have marked the last seven+ years, is there really a brain dead segment out there ready to vote the war criminals back in?

The latest gambit by McCain seems to anticipate that.

As many reports have noted, the McCain/Bush policy on offshore drilling doesn’t make sense as a response to $4-a-gallon gas: the White House’s own Energy Information Administration says that exploiting the outer shelf wouldn’t yield noticeable amounts of oil until the 2020s, and even at peak production its impact on oil prices would be “insignificant.”

But what I haven’t seen emphasized is the broader picture: Mr. McCain has now aligned himself with an administration that, even aside from its blame-the-environmental-movement tendencies, has established an extensive track record as the gang that couldn’t think straight about energy policy.

Remember, they didn’t just insist that the Iraqis would welcome us as liberators; on the eve of the Iraq war, administration officials were also adamant that regime change in Iraq would add millions of barrels a day to the world oil supply, driving oil prices way down. (In fact, Iraq’s oil output took five years just to recover to preinvasion levels.)

So why would Mr. McCain associate himself with these characters? The answer, presumably, is that it’s a cynical political calculation.
(snip)
But I very much doubt that Mr. McCain’s gambit will work. In fact, it’s almost certainly self-destructive.

To have a chance in November, Mr. McCain has to convince voters that he isn’t just Bush, continued. Energy policy is one of the areas where he could best have made that case.

Instead, he has ceded the high ground on energy to Mr. Obama, and linked himself firmly to the most unpopular president on record.

Krugman seems to credit the public with much better sense and judgment than McCain does. For the sake of the country, I hope Krugman is right, that Woody is wrong and I am right. If the White House returns to the hands of the anti-American wingers, I don't have much hope left for our future as a country.

We need to make the effort to spread the facts, and to refute the lies. The right wing is determined to keep feeding from the public trough - and it is making a real mess for all of us.