Will Dumbed-down Americans Fall for McCain?

Three choices, none perfect. The media loves the Clinton-Obama bash because it fills the holes in the slow news cycle. They also are now implying that the tiff will propel McCain to new heights, perhaps even into the Oval Office. Of course, as corporate giants, they have benefited greatly from the Bush give-aways. McCain, they hope, will continue the generosity.

I look at John McCain and all of his bungling of facts and ever-changing positions and wonder if the average voting Joe sees that he is just a bag of wind with few substantive ideas. But then, so was George W. Bush and they elected him twice. Joe is easily fooled, smoothly bamboozled and quickly propagandized. He goes into the voting booth fully saturated with all of the trimmings but with none of the meat.

Look at the supposed qualities of a good presidential candidate that have been raised by the media in this election: flag pin, pastor's remarks, the word 'bitter,' elitism, and melanin level. Is that all Joe needs to know about the person who will be the most important person in the world for the next four years?

Hillary Clinton apparently clicks with voters like Joe and that amorphous group known as Reagan Democrats. Now there is an easily deceived knot of folks. They fell in love with the idea of 'morning in America' and an actor's smooth words. Just how did these people benefit from the 'Reagan years?' Does it matter, or is it all about perception? While most of them felt good, the upper classes did well, accruing tax break after tax break. And the national debt soared out of sight.

Paul Krugman's OpEd today, Bush Made Permanent, nails McCain for the exact foolish policy that the GOP has bamboozled the American electorate with since those golden 'morning in America' years: tax cuts for the wealthy and the corporate world. Krugman says, "Mr. McCain has said nothing realistic about how he would close the giant budget gap his tax cuts would produce — a gap so large that eliminating it would require cutting Social Security benefits by three-quarters, eliminating Medicare, or something equivalently drastic."

Awe, shucks, we don't care about the national debt anyway, do we? As long as the most affluent among us is happy, maybe they'll throw a scrap from their banquet table our way. Or trickle down. Oddly, that trickle always smells like urine.