Johnny On-The-Make McCain gave a long speech in Ohio the other day, telling any Republican who would listen that he is the way and the light and the truth who will lead them from the wilderness of ethical filth they’ve chosen to live in since 1994 and that he will save the country in the process. He foretold the future, this balding little prophet.
It’s an old messianic trick. Tell ’em about tomorrow and make it look good so they will forget about the misery of today. Johnny wants to use it to win the Presidency. And it’s not a bad strategy, given that anyone with any intelligence and ethical integrity who takes a hard look at today’s America, Republican America, might just run out and start stringing up Republicans from the nearest lamppost. Which might just put a crimp in our Johnnycake’s plan for reaming the country for another eight years.
Herewith the big speech, with commentary:
Thank you. The hectic but repetitive routine of presidential campaigns often seems to consist entirely of back and forth charges between candidates, punctuated by photo ops, debates and the occasional policy speech, followed by another barrage of accusations and counter accusations, formulated into the sound bites preferred by cable news producers. It is a little hypocritical for candidates or reporters to criticize these deficiencies. They are our creation. Campaigns and the media collaborated as architects of the modern presidential campaign, and we deserve equal blame for the regret we feel from time to time over its less than inspirational features. Voters, however, even in this revolutionary communications age, with its 24 hour news cycle, can be forgiven their uncertainty about what the candidates actually hope to achieve if they have the extraordinary privilege of being elected President of the United States. We spend too little time and offer too few specifics on that most important of questions. We make promises, of course, about what kind of policies we would pursue in office. But they often are obscured, mischaracterized and forgotten in the heat and fog of political battle.
Good admission, fella. It’s about time one of these guys admitted he and his friends have corrupted the news into a moneymaking machine of obfuscation, hypocrisy, and outright deceit. And John, The Lion thinks the voters aren’t all that uncertain anymore, given that they’ve thrown Republicans out of office in three special elections in so-called safe districts. After fourteen years the voters have figured out the Republicans are a bunch of sleaze merchants out to destroy the country so they can make a buck.
Next January, the political leadership of the United States will change significantly. It is important that the candidates who seek to lead the country after the Bush Administration define their objectives and what they plan to achieve not with vague language but with clarity.
Why, Johnny, are you predicting a Democratic win? You must be, because that’s the only way there’ll be a significant change.
And let The Lion guess – the rest of your speech is going to pander clearly by offering some prettified picture of America under your so-called leadership. Unfortunately, Johnny, some people remember ‘Bomb bomb bomb Iran’. That’s the sort of ignorant, stupid, thoughtless remark that shows you have no clue about real leadership, or even the real world. So The Lion would have to guess that this speech will be long on pretty and short on practical.
So, what I want to do today is take a little time to describe what I would hope to have achieved at the end of my first term as President. I cannot guarantee I will have achieved these things. I am presumptuous enough to think I would be a good President, but not so much that I believe I can govern by command. Should I forget that, Congress will, of course, hasten to remind me. The following are conditions I intend to achieve. And toward that end, I will focus all the powers of the office; every skill and strength I possess; and seize every opportunity to work with members of Congress who put the national interest ahead of partisanship, and any country in the world that shares our hopes for a more peaceful and prosperous world.
Oh, yes, that is a huge presumption. You approve of torture. You know zilch about economics. You have no clue about the Middle East and Bush’s wars there, though you think they’re good things.
The only way Congress will stand up to you is if the Democrats get big majorities in November, because a Congress like today’s, or one with Republican majorities, will just kiss your shiny butt and let you do whatever you want to ruin the country and kill as many people as your wildest jet pilot fantasies will allow.
As for the peaceful and prosperous world, we’ve seen what that means. Any country that sucks up to America gets on the gravy train of hope. Of course all the gravy goes to America and the foreigners get the leavings. Anybody that dares take a stand for itself, that disagrees with psychopathic American leadership, gets cast in among the evildoers and gets bombs instead of diplomacy and negotiation. ‘Bomb bomb bomb . (Fill in the blank.)
By January 2013, America has welcomed home most of the servicemen and women who have sacrificed terribly so that America might be secure in her freedom. The Iraq War has been won. Iraq is a functioning democracy, although still suffering from the lingering effects of decades of tyranny and centuries of sectarian tension. Violence still occurs, but it is spasmodic and much reduced. Civil war has been prevented; militias disbanded; the Iraqi Security Force is professional and competent; al Qaeda in Iraq has been defeated; and the Government of Iraq is capable of imposing its authority in every province of Iraq and defending the integrity of its borders. The United States maintains a military presence there, but a much smaller one, and it does not play a direct combat role.
Oh, good, five more years of occupation. Five more years of American body bags. Five more years of soldiers dying for the egomania and lies of the Republicans. Five more years of slaughtered Iraqi civilians to endear us to the world. Five more years of American taxpayer dollars flowing to corrupt American companies getting fat off the bones of American soldiers and Iraqi civilians.
The Lion will try to remember these are the words of a man who has no clue about Sunni and Shi’a. A man who laughs while threatening to bomb Iran. A man who declared Baghdad safe because he walked through a market place accompanied by a hundred armed American soldiers, five battle helicopters, and several armored vehicles. And he wore armor. And who seems to have had nothing to say about the twenty-one civilians killed the next day precisely because of what he did.
This is the moron telling us now that Iraq will be just fine in five years.
The threat from a resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan has been greatly reduced but not eliminated. U.S. and NATO forces remain there to help finish the job, and continue operations against the remnants of al Qaeda. The Government of Pakistan has cooperated with the U.S. in successfully adapting the counterinsurgency tactics that worked so well in Iraq and Afghanistan to its lawless tribal areas where al Qaeda fighters are based. The increase in actionable intelligence that the counterinsurgency produced led to the capture or death of Osama bin Laden, and his chief lieutenants. There is no longer any place in the world al Qaeda can consider a safe haven. Increased cooperation between the United States and its allies in the concerted use of military, diplomatic, and economic power and reforms in the intelligence capabilities of the United States has disrupted terrorist networks and exposed plots around the world. There still has not been a major terrorist attack in the United States since September 11, 2001.
Let’s see:
Those people have been fighting invaders for a thousand years or more. They aren’t going to go away. They aren’t going to stop because the Great White Father in America blusters pretensions at them. If the American Indians had one-quarter the fight in them that the Afghans have, all else being equal, the United States today would be an Indian Nation and white Europeans would be the blacks.
As long as the United States behaves in the world as an arrogant imperial power run by people whose highest values are money and power, and who think they are their god’s gift to mankind, there will always be an al-Qaeda, no matter its name.
Lawless tribal areas? They have their own laws, Johnny, their own customs and culture. You seem to think that because they’re not Americans and don’t want to be Americans that America has to get in there and kill them. Explain to us again, Johnny, how a four-year-old girl splattered over the ground like a broken jar of tomato paste is a threat to mighty America.
Osama bin Laden is irrelevant. Catch him, torture him, kill him, doesn’t matter. Doesn’t change a thing. They’ll still come out to kill us. Another leader. Another name. Anywhere in the world. You miss the point. Again. What we do in the world to other people has consequences. When we change what we do in the world, the world will change, and maybe we can get on with what’s important.
The United States and its allies have made great progress in advancing nuclear security. Concerted action by the great democracies of the world has persuaded a reluctant Russia and China to cooperate in pressuring Iran to abandon its nuclear ambitions, and North Korea to discontinue its own. The single greatest threat facing the West — the prospect of nuclear materials in the hands of terrorists — has been vastly diminished.
No one has yet brought forth proof that Iran pursues nuclear weaponry, and given the constant threats against Iran sputtering from the mouths of rabid Republicans and Israelis these last several years, they’d probably be smart to get nuclear weapons. But nobody has shown that that is what they are doing or intend.
As for North Korea, they were well on their way to giving up the pursuit of nuclear weapons until your hero, Johnny boy, the inestimable and brilliant George W. Bush rode into office on the backs of a corrupt Supreme Court and told the North Koreans they were filthy little bastards and all deals were off. There was a deal in place, and the Republican warmongers and hatemongers squelched it. That was eight years ago.
The size of the Army and Marine Corps has been significantly increased, and are now better equipped and trained to defend us. Long overdue reforms to the way we acquire weapons programs, including fixed price contracts, have created sufficient savings to pay for a larger military. A substantial increase in veterans educational benefits and improvements in their health care has aided recruitment and retention. The strain on the National Guard and reserve forces has been relieved.
We don’t need a larger goddam military, Johnny, unless you intend to continue the policies of your predecessor. We don’t need seven hundred bases overseas sucking up taxpayer dollars while our schools crumble, our bridges fall, our highways rot, our people are increasingly homeless and hungry and out of work. A bigger military isn’t going to stop the destruction of the environment or the disaster climate change has already begun to wreak on the world. You can waste all the money you want on equipment, but if you continue the same old policies, the same old way of thinking, you’ll just get American soldiers killed fighting stupid wars against people who will never give up their homeland to an army they see as the new Nazis.
And by the way, Johnnycake, you just voted against a new GI bill. Hypocrisy, thy name is Crap-for-brains McCain.
After efforts to pressure the Government in Sudan over Darfur failed again in the U.N. Security Council, the United States, acting in concert with a newly formed League of Democracies, applied stiff diplomatic and economic pressure that caused the government of Sudan to agree to a multinational peacekeeping force, with NATO countries providing logistical and air support, to stop the genocide that had made a mockery of the world’s repeated declaration that we would “never again” tolerant such inhumanity. Encouraged by the success, the League is now occupied with using the economic power and prestige of its member states to end other gross abuses of human rights such as the despicable crime of human trafficking.
In the first place, Johnny, by the time you manage to put all that together, Sudan will have finished its agenda of killing.
In the second place, the world doesn’t need a League of Democracies. The only reason you Republican idiots would even propose it is because you envision it as a Delian League, controlled by Athens, which today would be the United States. You folks can’t deal with a United Nations which doesn’t kiss America’s bloody ass every time some ignorant American politician starts blustering. Perhaps it might be well to remember that the United States has done its best, under Republican regimes, to bring down the United Nations. The so-called League of Democracies is just another American snit because the U.N. sometimes refuses to do America’s bidding.
As for ending gross abuses of human rights, we might want to recall that the United States tortures people, imprisons people without warrant, holds them without charges for years, and has put in place, through the corruption and politicization of its own Justice Department, the roots of human and civil rights abuse in the United States. Let’s clean up our own house before we go pissing on anybody else.
The United States has experienced several years of robust economic growth, and Americans again have confidence in their economic future. A reduction in the corporate tax rate from the second highest in the world to one on par with our trading partners; the low rate on capital gains; allowing business to deduct in a single year investments in equipment and technology, while eliminating tax loopholes and ending corporate welfare, have spurred innovation and productivity, and encouraged companies to keep their operations and jobs in the United States. The Alternate Minimum Tax is being phased out, with relief provided first to middle income families. Doubling the size of the child exemption has put more disposable income in the hands of taxpayers, further stimulating growth.
Ah, yes, lots more goodies for the wealthy and the corporations, and more trickle down for the bulk of American citizens. No mention of taxing the rich so they can pay their fair share of fixing the mess they helped to create. No mention of who’s paying off the horrendous debts racked up by the Bush Republican economic trainwreck to pay for useless wars and corporate corruption.
Congress has just passed by a single up or down vote a tax reform proposal that offers Americans a choice of continuing to file under the rules of the current complicated and burdensome tax code or use a new, simpler, fairer and flatter tax, with two rates and a generous deduction. Millions of taxpayers are expected to file under the flat tax, and save billions in the cost of preparing their returns.
Oh, yeah, the old flat tax dodge. Let’s see, the fellow making $20,000 pays two grand, and has eighteen left to try to live on in a wrecked econ0my. The guy making two million pays what, half a million, and has and million and a half to live on and do just fine. Thanks for that, Johnny. At least you proved true what you said about being a complete moron on economic matters.
After exercising my veto several times in my first year in office, Congress has not sent me an appropriations bill containing earmarks for the last three years. A top to bottom review of every federal bureaucracy has yielded great reductions in government spending by identifying programs that serve no important purpose; and instigating far reaching reforms of procurement and operating policies that have for too long extravagantly wasted money for no better purpose than to increase federal payrolls.
Programs that serve no important purpose? And you’re going to decide what’s important? You, who have as tenuous a connection to how most Americans live as George Bush has to any reality at all? What do you want to cut first, Johnny? Children’s lunch programs? Head Start? Children’s health insurance? Unemployment programs? Yes, John, let’s collect the children’s lunch money and buy some jet fighters to bomb children in Iraq or Iran.
New free trade agreements have been ratified and led to substantial increases in both exports and imports. The resulting growth in prosperity in countries from South America to Asia to Africa has greatly strengthened America’s security and the global progress of our political ideals.
Our political ideals? Whether any country wants them? Perhaps you have more Iraqs in mind? They didn’t threaten us and they didn’t want us there. But you and yours progressed right on into their country and destroyed it in the name of democracy. How’s that for political ideals, Johnny?
U.S. tariffs on agricultural imports have been eliminated and unneeded farm subsidies are being phased out. The world food crisis has ended, inflation is low, and the quality of life not only in our country, but in some of the most impoverished countries around the world is much improved.
Dream on. Population increases, climate change, and American corporation’s blatantly evil control of genetically-fouled seed stocks for profit pretty much guarantee more hunger, more impoverishment, more death, and more war. And Americans won’t be immune, no matter how many Republicans they put in office, or hang from lampposts.
Americans, who through no fault of their own, lost jobs in the global economy they once believed were theirs for life, are assisted by reformed unemployment insurance and worker retraining programs. Older workers who accept lower paying jobs while they acquire new skills are provided assistance to make up a good part of the income they have lost. Community colleges and technical schools all over the country have developed worker retraining programs suited to the specific economic opportunities available in their communities and are helping millions of workers who have lost a job that won’t come back find a new one that won’t go away.
This is pie-in-the-sky crap that the country won’t have the money to pay for. The crisis is on us now, and the best the government can do is bail out Bear Stearns while pissing on hundreds of thousands of Americans who are losing their homes.
And those who lost their jobs through no fault of their own, Johnny? You might want to mention, just for clarity, that policies and laws created by Congress and the President and the corporations that feed them money, are at fault. Let’s not pretend it all just happened for no reason at all.
Public education in the United States is much improved thanks to the competition provided by charter and private schools; the increase of quality teachers through incentives like merit pay and terrific programs that attract to the classroom enthusiastic and innovative teachers from many disciplines, like Teach for America and Troops to Teachers. Educational software and online teaching programs endorsed by qualified non profits are much more widely in use, bringing to the smallest classrooms in America some of the greatest math, English, and science teachers in the country. This revolution in teaching methods has especially benefited rural America. Test scores and graduation rates are rising everywhere in the country.
Again: pie, sky, crap. The government has stultified education by imposing a teach-to-the-test mentality and program. Nothing innovative is going to happen while that’s in place. And you don’t improve public education by taking money out of the system to give to private schools, and by withholding funding from schools that don’t meet arbitrary, one-size-fits-all standards imposed by Republican Conservatives who despise public schools. And the fact that you think this so-called improvement in education is going to happen during your first term clues us in again as to how clueless you are.
Health care has become more accessible to more Americans than at any other time in history. Reforms of the insurance market; putting the choice of health care into the hands of American families rather than exclusively with the government or employers; walk in clinics as alternatives to emergency room care; paying for outcome in the treatment of disease rather than individual procedures; and competition in the prescription drug market have begun to wring out the runaway inflation once endemic in our health care system. More small businesses offer their employees health plans. Schools have greatly improved their emphasis on physical education and nutritional content of meals offered in school cafeterias. Obesity rates among the young and the disease they engender are stabilized and beginning to decline. The federal government and states have cooperated in establishing backstop insurance pools that provide coverage to people hard pressed to find insurance elsewhere because of pre-existing illness.
People don’t want health insurance, Johnny, they want health care. And they want everyone to get the same good quality of health care. Republicans don’t want that, John, that’s obvious. Their health care policy amounts to “Listen, dumbass, if you can’t afford the insurance from the companies that finance our campaigns and tell us how to vote, then go lie in the gutter and die.” And of course if you’re brain dead, the Republicans will call out the full force of the United States Government to make sure that you live a few more decades tethered to a feeding tube that keeps your carcass functioning for no reason at all. Get the Republicans and the insurance companies out of health care, and get the insurance companies out of Congress, and maybe then we can develop a rational health care plan that works for everybody and that doesn’t bankrupt anyone.
The reduction in the growth of health care costs has begun to relieve some of the pressure on Medicare; encouraging Congress to act in a bipartisan way to extend its solvency for twenty-five years without increasing taxes and raising premiums only for upper income seniors. Their success encouraged a group of congressional leaders from both parties to work with my administration to fix Social Security as well, without reducing benefits to those near retirement. The reforms include some form of personal retirement accounts in safe and reliable index funds, such as have been available to government employees since their retirement plans were made solvent a quarter century ago.
Of course if the Republicans hadn’t been so intent on wrecking Social Security and Medicare since the days they were created, there wouldn’t be any need to consider ‘fixing’ them.
Reliable index funds? Have you looked at the economy lately, Johnny? Have you paid attention to the schemes your friends in the financial industry have come up with to steal people’s money? Financial funds are for people who have money to burn, Johnny, people like you and your wife. And it’s only people like you who would tell working stiffs who haven’t a penny left at the end of the month that their retirement depends on them putting money they don’t have into financial shenanigans run by your friends in the financial industry.
And why the hell are government employees exempt from Social Security? They should be the first ones in, led by members of Congress.
The United States is well on the way to independence from foreign sources of oil; progress that has not only begun to alleviate the environmental threat posed from climate change, but has greatly improved our security as well. A cap and trade system has been implemented, spurring great innovation in the development of green technologies and alternative energy sources. Clean coal technology has advanced considerably with federal assistance. Construction has begun on twenty new nuclear reactors thanks to improved incentives and a streamlined regulatory process.
Christ, what a fucking moron! Right now the world is at risk for a minimum of a hundred years if every source of greenhouse gases were turned off. What we do not need is any program that encourages the use of any fossil fuel, and so-called cap-and-trade at best continues to pour pollutants into the atmosphere. Clean coal is an oxymoron, John. Republican plans for dealing with climate change run along the lines of packing all that carbon dioxide into rocketships and sending it into space. (Think about it.)
Oh, and that ‘streamlined regulatory process’? You mean like the streamlined processes at work in the FDA and the EPA and Department of Agriculture, the processes that have allowed more bad food and bad medicine and bad products to reach out and kill more Americans? That’s what you want for the nuclear industry?
How many windmills can you build for what one nuclear power plant costs? How many tidal generators? How many solar panels? How many homes can be refitted to minimize fossil fuel use and increase solar and wind use?
And, Senator, how much stock do you and yours hold in nuclear and fossil fuel interests? Maybe you could ask your wife to tell us that, ya think?
Scores of judges have been confirmed to the federal district and appellate courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, who understand that they were not sent there to write our laws but to enforce them and make sure they are consistent with the Constitution. They are judges of exceptional character and quality, who enforce and do not make laws, and who respect the values of the people whose rights, laws and property they are sworn to defend.
No, John, their job is to interpret the Constitution in light of over two hundred years of law and history, longer if you include law back to Magna Carta (do you remember habeas corpus, Johnny, you know, that little bit of law that survived for some eight hundred years until you and Bush and your Republican mates put the screws to it?). And it is not the judges’ job to protect the rich and screw the poor, which appears to be the unspoken mantra of conservative judges like those you would undoubtedly foist on us.
Border state governors have certified and the American people recognize that after tremendous improvements to border security infrastructure and increases in the border patrol, and vigorous prosecution of companies that employ illegal aliens, our southern border is now secure. Illegal immigrants who broke our laws after they came here have been arrested and deported. Illegal immigration has been finally brought under control, and the American people accepted the practical necessity to institute a temporary worker program and deal humanely with the millions of immigrants who have been in this country illegally.
Wow, after years of rabid Republican hate-talk against immigrants, years of stirring up the haters and yahoos for no other reason than to get their votes, someone finally comes along and says we have to treat people decently and humanely. (About your support for torture, Johnny…?)
Voluntary national service has grown in popularity in part because of the educational benefits used as incentives, as well as frequent appeals from the bully pulpit of the White House, but mostly because the young Americans, no less than earlier generations, understand that true happiness is much greater than the pursuit of pleasure, and can only be found by serving causes greater than self-interest. Scores of accomplished private sector leaders have joined the ranks of my administration for a dollar a year and have instituted some of the most innovative reforms of government programs ever known, often in partnership with willing private sector partners. A sense of community, a kinship of ideals, has invigorated public service again.
Oh, my, how altruistic! And how unbelievably full of crap. The private sector has had the Republicans in its pocket for decades. The only reforms that will come out of a McCain administration will be those that benefit the corporations and that gut the federal government.
Voluntary national service? You must be kidding. After what the Republicans have done in the last eight years? Senseless wars. Unending corruption. Selling out to corporations. Kissing the asses of the wealthy while kicking the poor and the workers in the teeth. Do you really think no one has been paying attention? Voluntary national service? Is that anything like serving as a page in the Congress and getting propositioned and fondled by Congressional perverts whose actions are covered up by their Republican leadership?
Republicans screw people, they don’t help people. Not too many people have missed that lesson. The Lion expects there aren’t all that many left who want to help another Republican administration screw them and the country.
This is the progress I want us to achieve during my presidency. These are the changes I am running for President to make. I want to leave office knowing that America is safer, freer, and wealthier than when I was elected; that more Americans have more opportunities to pursue their dreams than at any other time in our history; that the world has become less threatening to our interests and more hospitable to our values; and that America has again, as she always has, chosen not to hide from history but to make history.
And yet, Johnny boy, you haven’t presented one single concrete plan, or piece of a plan, that would accomplish any of this so-called progress. Nothing. Nada. Not a single piece of reality has managed to intrude on your fantasies.
This entire speech is nothing but pander. This is an old whore pleading that she can be good if we give her a chance to suddenly become something she hasn’t been all her adult life.
I am well aware I cannot make any of these changes alone. The powers of the presidency are rightly checked by the other branches of government, and I will not attempt to acquire powers our founders saw fit to grant Congress. I will exercise my veto if I believe legislation passed by Congress is not in the nation’s best interests, but I will not subvert the purpose of legislation I have signed by making statements that indicate I will enforce only the parts of it I like. I will respect the responsibilities the Constitution and the American people have granted Congress, and will, as I often have in the past, work with anyone of either party to get things done for our country.
Good thing you think you can’t act alone. But nobody who’s been around and thinking for the last eight years and retains any intelligence and integrity isn’t going to believe you. You hugged the resident White House psychopath despite the slime he smeared on your family. You’ve supported him pretty much down the line. Even today you’re supporting Bush’s smears of Senator Obama, made in the Israeli Knesset and which he and his handlers are now trying to run away from. Bottom line? You can’t be trusted to give up the powers that your party has allowed and encouraged to accrue to the Presidency to the denigration of the Constitution, the laws, and the people of this country.
For too long, now, Washington has been consumed by a hyper-partisanship that treats every serious challenge facing us as an opportunity to trade insults; disparage each other’s motives; and fight about the next election. For all the problems we face, if you ask Americans what frustrates them most about Washington, they will tell you they don’t think we’re capable of serving the public interest before our personal and partisan ambitions; that we fight for ourselves and not for them. Americans are sick of it, and they have every right to be. They are sick of the politics of selfishness, stalemate and delay. They despair when every election — no matter who wins — always seems to produce four more years of unkept promises and a government that is just a battleground for the next election. Their patience is at an end for politicians who value ambition over principle, and for partisanship that is less a contest of ideas than an uncivil brawl over the spoils of power. They want to change not only the policies and institutions that have failed the American people, but the political culture that produced them. They want to move this country forward and stake our claim on this century as we did in the last. And they want their government to care more about them than preserving the privileges of the powerful.
Good point, Johnny! But you forgot to add that it’s mostly been that way since the Republicans took over in 1994. Before that it may not have been pretty, but it was mostly civil, and there was considerably more concern for the real America. But that was before Newt Gingrich and the Republicans took out their contract on America. Frankly we’d have been better off if the Mafia had taken out a contract.
There are serious issues at stake in this election, and serious differences between the candidates. And we will argue about them, as we should. But it should remain an argument among friends; each of us struggling to hear our conscience, and heed its demands; each of us, despite our differences, united in our great cause, and respectful of the goodness in each other. That is how most Americans treat each other. And it is how they want the people they elect to office to treat each other.
You know, that sounds an awful lot like a plea to forget the crimes and sleaze and corruption the Republicans have visited on the country for the last eight years, and the death and destruction they have visited on the Middle East for the last seven years. Let bygones be bygones, eh, John? No investigations? No trials? No punishments? No price to pay, John? Your buddy George gets to pardon everybody for everything they did and just walk away?
Maybe the best we can get is to crush the Republican Party to the size of a bathtub and drown it. That sounds like a good outcome.
If I am elected President, I will work with anyone who sincerely wants to get this country moving again. I will listen to any idea that is offered in good faith and intended to help solve our problems, not make them worse. I will seek the counsel of members of Congress from both parties in forming government policy before I ask them to support it. I will ask Democrats to serve in my administration. My administration will set a new standard for transparency and accountability. I will hold weekly press conferences. I will regularly brief the American people on the progress our policies have made and the setbacks we have encountered. When we make errors, I will confess them readily, and explain what we intend to do to correct them. I will ask Congress to grant me the privilege of coming before both houses to take questions, and address criticism, much the same as the Prime Minister of Great Britain appears regularly before the House of Commons.
It’s easy to tell that here you’re handing out unadulterated bullshit, Johnny. You wouldn’t last ten minutes in the Prime Minister’s question time in the Commons. You might in Congress, given the unwarranted deference those fools give to Presidents, even the foulest, sickest President the country’s ever had. That would be your buddy George, by the way.
As for press conferences, no no no. In the first place, you’ll lie. In the second place, the Washington press corps has forgotten how to ask a hard question, how to persist, how to ask hard follow-ups. In fact, they’ve completely forgotten that they don’t work for the White House or the President. They seem to think that their role in life is to play fat, happy dogs chained in the backyard and taught not to bark.
We cannot again leave our problems for another unluckier generation of Americans to fix after they have become even harder to solve. I’m not interested in partisanship that serves no other purpose than to gain a temporary advantage over our opponents. This mindless, paralyzing rancor must come to an end. We belong to different parties, not different countries. We are rivals for the same power. But we are also compatriots. We are fellow Americans, and that shared distinction means more to me than any other association. I intend to prove myself worthy of the office; of our country; and of your respect. I won’t judge myself by how many elections I’ve won. I won’t spend one hour of my presidency worrying more about my re-election than keeping my promises to the American people. There is a time to campaign, and a time to govern. If I’m elected President, the era of the permanent campaign will end. The era of problem solving will begin. I promise you, from the day I am sworn into office until the last hour of my presidency, I will work with anyone, of either party, to make this country safe, prosperous and proud. And I won’t care who gets the credit.
No, John, we are not fellow Americans. The Lion is not your friend. The fantasy America you live in, that you Republicans live in and that you try to foist on the rest of us, is not The Lion’s America and never will be. You are the standard bearer of the party of corruption, hypocrisy, and sleaze. You pander to religious bigots for their votes. You are such a stupid sonofabitch that you don’t know the difference between negotiation and appeasement, but that doesn’t stop you from smearing Senator Obama with the same fecal matter your mentor spit out in Israel. You can’t stand criticism. You called your wife a cunt in public. You think women are less than men, and apparently exist for no other purpose than to serve your lust. Oh, and provide you with money and a wealthy lifestyle. There’s probably not a corporation in America that can’t buy and sell you.
And this whole treacly speech, this sickening display of pander and suck, you don’t believe one word of it. The Lion watched you giving it. It was pander all the way. It was empty bombast. How many hours did you spend rehearsing sincerity, Senator?
You’re a liar, Senator. All we can really expect from you is eight more years of Bush policies and ‘Bomb bomb bomb Iran’ while the United States goes down the drain, flushed there by Republicans.
We’ve had enough.
Thank you.
Screw you, Senator.
Grumpy Lion 