We're getting to weird time here in the good old US of A, that quadrennial festival of banality in which anyone who has a soapbox steps up to bemoan the fact that we're not focusing on the real issues that face this country, and then promptly starts slinging lipstick.
And I'm going to be one of them. Lipstick? Really? How could any campaign operative in good faith turn a hackneyed political cliche about his opponents' policies into a personal attack? When the supposed victim wasn't even the subject of the statement? And then the traditional media spends an entire day parsing it? Really?
How? It's politics, baby, politics!
And here comes just what you expected, a somber and cranky condemnation of the performance of just about everyone's behavior over the past week and an exhortation to talk about what matters.
We just passed day 2000 since "mission was accomplished" in Iraq. We've lost 4155 men and women [1] there, and another 588 in Afghanistan [2]. And we're supposed to be rejoicing that 8,000 of those folks still alive in Iraq might get to come home next year, though they'll probably be redeployed straight into Afghanistan.
Or how about the fact that our government just nationalized two giants of the mortgage industry? Because that's what the Freddie and Fannie rescue is, the nationalization of these corporations, and their combined $5.2 trillion in debt isn't going to do anything good for our already ballooning deficit [3]. But that's better than the "Armageddon [4] the world financial system would have faced without the bailout, which we also aren't talking about.
There's always the weather [5], but does the nation really want to be reminded of the fact that New Orleans remains a huge and shameful reminder of our inability to take care of our own?
So with no news being good news this week, by all means let the McCain campaign derail the conversation for a day or two with lipstick, because they by all means don't want to have to spend any time talking about war, about the economy, about the massive failures the eight years of Republican rule have rained down upon us.
Joan McCarter is a contributing editor of DailyKos.com and a researcher of Western politics
Though McCain's deputy did have to talk about the war this week, because she's sending her son off to it (and after the repulsive, manipulative, and shameful use of the memory of the victims of 9/11 [6] at the RNC, one has to wonder at the timing of this latest deployment). And guess what? She's fallen back on that tried and untrue old saw that Dick Cheney has been pushing for the past six years--Iraq was behind 9/11 [7]:
Gov. Sarah Palin linked the war in Iraq with the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, telling an Iraq-bound brigade of soldiers that included her son that they would "defend the innocent from the enemies who planned and carried out and rejoiced in the death of thousands of Americans."
The idea that Iraq shared responsibility with al-Qaeda for the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, once promoted by Bush administration officials, has since been rejected even by the president himself.
There should be certain givens as we go into this election, and one of them should be that lying about the Iraq War is something we've put behind us. Honest disagreements about whether the escalation known as the surge worked, or whether the downturn in violence was due to the Sunni Awakening and the Sadr cease fire and the de facto segregation of Sunni and Shiia was the primary cause for it. A substantive debate on those issues might be worth our time. But perpetuating the most massive of lies about this war--that Iraq had anything to do with the al Qaeda attacks on our nation seven years ago--is nothing but a disservice to the voters and to the political process.
We should be hearing about the massive housing crisis that, in combination with continued out of control war spending, is bankrupting a generation that isn't even a glimmer in anyone's eye yet. We should be talking about the fact that income disparity in this nation is as bad, if not worse, than it was at the turn of the last century.
We should be hearing about serious energy plans that go beyond the "drill everywhere, drill now" demands that have drowned out all reasonable discussion. We should hear that drilling now isn't going to ease anyone's fuel bill in the near future.
We should be hearing about real and concrete policies and initiatives to deal with the threat of al Qaeda, not the about the promise of some Nixon-esque "secret plan [8]" to hunt up Osama bin Laden (and if McCain really had that plan, wouldn't it have been more helpful to have shared it with the Bush administration before now, before some of those 588 troops in Afghanistan lost their lives?).
We won't be hearing about those things because the campaign that is most effectively setting the narrative right now--the McCain camp--doesn't want us to. The Obama campaign, which seems to have been stuck in reactive gear since McCain chose his running mate--needs to go on offense and wrest that media narrative-setting power away. It needs to change the debate and start talking to us like we're grown-ups. We can handle it and we should be demanding it.
Now I'm going to go yell at those kids on my lawn.
Editor’s note: Joan McCarter's weekly blogs are part of a feature on PoliticsWest called "Diary of a Mad Voter." The group blog, published in partnership with NewWest.Net/Politics [9], is intended to give a glimpse into the hearts and minds of several independent-minded voters and thinkers in the Rocky Mountain West in the 2008 election year.