My thoughts

I am feeling very upset right now.  I had had hopes that this campaign would be about the issues and that when the Republican attack machine tried its dirty tricks, it wouldn't work because the American people would finally say "ENOUGH!"  But that's not happening.  Instead, many Americans (hard to know how many) are yet again falling for obvious and shameless manipulations and lies -- the same ones that Republicans have relied on for years -- that Democrats are anti-Christian, anti-small-towns, are the ones on attack, don't have strong moral values, etc.

 

I suppose McCain has little choice, because on the issues, he loses in a landslide.  Obama wants to make sure EVERY American has health insurance, whereas McCain apparently doesn't think 45 MILLION Americans without health insurance is a crisis.  Obama wants to cut taxes for 95% of Americans, while McCain wants to cut them only for the top 5% (or is it only the top 1%?) -- the ONLY group that's really done well over the past decade (or two or three?).  The list goes on and on...

 

So the smears and distractions are ramping up dramatically.  Beyond the evil-Democrats-are-attacking-Palin-because-she's-a-Christian (or from a small town) nonsense, there are two more lies McCain and his people have been spreading in just the past day: trying to distort "lipstick on a pig" (a phrase McCain himself used to refer to Hillary's healthcare plan and which is so common that, when I Googled it, there were 418,000 hits!) into an attack on Palin (do THEY think she's a pig???), and the outrageous distortion in an ad about sex education (see below).  This makes me SICK!

 

Sadly, I see people polarizing now, undermining Obama's dream of Americans coming together, which obviously benefits McCain politically.  Yet more irony of his hollow talk about "Country First", when his campaign is now making it abundantly clear that their strategy is to polarize people and further tear apart the fabric of this country to improve their odds of winning.  What a tragedy it would be if it works!