Will Kerry’s Flub Outweigh Neocon Blunders?
by Jeff Davis
In the last week before the 2006 election, the neocons have found a last straw to grab onto thanks to the blundering of John F. Kerry. Will Kerry’s insensitive flub about uneducated Americans winding up in Iraq make any real difference or will a continuing chain of neocon blunders be remembered by voters on election day?
We have endured a pointless war with thousands of dead and tens of thousands of maimed Americans, a military strained to the breaking point and an economy that has outsourced millions of manufacturing jobs and seen Ford and GM spiral toward bankruptcy. Real unemployment in “uncooked” figures is around ten per cent. We have badly maintained freeways and massive power outages every summer. Hundreds of thousands of black New Orleans refugees have spread crime in every city foolish enough to accept them. New Orleans is still not rebuilt over a year later. An attack on Iran the day after the election is an alarming possibility. Our government has given itself the authority to spy on us without warrants (even though previous presidents during world wars did not need this much power). Our government now can torture people and the president can declare any one of us an “enemy combatant” who could be dragged out of his home in the middle of the night and “disappeared” into one of those foreign prisons, where torture is commonplace.
Our freedoms are being erased with lightning speed. While it may have seemed like a good idea to white conservative patriots to have an all Republican government, we have seen with our own eyes abuses which are leading rapidly to tyranny. Perhaps we need to go back to a gridlocked government to slow down the loss of liberty.
Just one week before the election, there were at least two major polls showing the Democrats to have a double digit lead over the Republicans. GOP fundraising suffered a serious drop after the Mark Foley Gay sex scandal. Despite this gloomy situation, Rove and Bush appeared strangely optimistic. Were they taking “happy pills” and putting on an optimistic face in the hope that pretending everything was OK would make it so?
The Republicans did get a crumb of hope as John Kerry trundled out and told some students to get a good education or they might wind up in Iraq. Is Kerry secretly trying to help the GOP? Every right wing blowhard with a radio show immediately grabbed this crumb and has been feasting on it for several days now. To be fair, Kerry claims he was trying to poke fun at the likes of Cheney and Wolfowitz, who got college deferments to avoid the Vietnam War. Kerry only spoke for himself and he is not running for anything this election. The neocon hope that Kerry’s stupid remark will turn the 2006 elections around for them seems far-fetched. Things like torture, the quagmire in Iraq and the shredding of the Constitution should weigh a little more heavily than a stupid remark by a pompous twit, who can’t even be voted out of office this year.
Almost simultaneous with Kerry’s remark was Rush Limbaugh mocking a commercial with Michael J. Fox who suffers from Parkinson’s Disease. This was possibly the dumbest move ever by Mr. Limbaugh (aside from climbing on the neocon bandwagon). Even if Michael J. Fox were “acting” and exaggerating his “shakiness” as Limbaugh claimed, Limbaugh came off looking incredibly insensitive and callous. Limbaugh should have just ignored the commercial rather than making remarks even more crude and stupid than Kerry’s.
The GOP needed to get the Mark Foley/Gay sex scandal off the headlines and Kerry did that for a couple days, but the neocons’ bad luck came back when a Gay televangelist, Ted Haggard, and his Gay male prostitute made the news in the last days before the election. The Republicans need the public to be reminded of Gays in the right wing like an unfaithful husband needs to remind his wife of his romp with the babysitter.
The right wing talk show hacks are convinced that Kerry’s fumble outweighs Limbaugh ridiculing Michael J. Fox or the Ted Haggard/Gay sex scandal (not to mention all the neocon crimes over the last six years). There are only a couple days to go and we’ll find out soon enough what offended middle America the most.