John McCain mentioned ‘Joe The Plumber’ some two dozen times during last night’s debate. The man that Senator McCain was referring to is Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher of Ohio, who had an impromptu discussion with Barack Obama after the he made an unscheduled stop recently to go door to door to speak with voters. Wurzelbacher was in his front yard playing football with his son and ended up engaging Obama about his tax plan. You can watch footage of their conversation here.

That said, someone in McCain’s camp made a fatal error when preparing his talking points, specifically to do with Wurzelbacher. Despite the fact that he told Obama in the footage linked above that he’s been a plumber for 15 years, the truth of the matter is that Joe Wurzelbacher lied.

According to a report in today’s Toledo Blade, Wurzelbacher is not a licensed plumber, working instead under a company’s license despite the fact that, under Ohio building regulations, he must have his own license to do plumbing work. According to Tom Joseph, the business manager for Local 50 of the United Association of Plumbers, Steamfitters, and Service Mechanics, Wurzelbacher has no formal training (Union or non Union) and no license.

Wurzelbacher works for A. W. Newell Corp., which is the company that he is supposedly interested in buying, thus providing Senator McCain a reason to use him as an example in last night’s debate with regards to the taxation of small businesses.

Another day in paradise. The rivers are flowing backwards, the rain falling upwards, and the North Koreans have, for the second time, been removed from the auspicious Axis Of Evil.

Meanwhile, John McCain, to his credit, found himself defending Barack Obama at a recent Republican Party rally. One woman in the audience actually claimed that she didn’t trust Obama because “he’s an Arab”, after which Senator McCain quickly took the microphone away from her.

Of course, what would it matter if anyone running for the Presidency were an Arab American? It wouldn’t. Unless, that is, you’re the sort of bigot that believes that race somehow automatically infers that someone is, for example, a terrorist or terrorist sympathizer.

If McCain is to be given credit for anything said at that rally it’s certainly the following…

“…but I have to tell you…I have to tell you…he is a decent person that you do not have to be scared as President of the United States.”

Boos and jeering followed as McCain continued talking.

If change is what this election is all about then tonight’s debate proved one thing – the sort of change that Americans can expect is equitable to removing dirty socks and putting on a new pair only slightly less so. There was absolutely no electricity or urgency emanating from Barack Obama, who played into McCain’s set pieces from the onset. It was the old Republican warhorse blowing his own horn and the champion of change, promoted as such primarily because of who currently inhabits the White House, who seemed more an obliging centrist than anything else.

This evening’s debate proved one thing - that the American political landscape is no less a quagmire than those foreign wars that the nation is currently embroiled in. The willingness to truly take chances, to risk, and through impassioned resolve ignite the imaginations of the people has fled, replaced by placation’s ever promising embrace of success. No, democracy is not alive and well in America, only the corporate branding of two political parties and their struggle to dominate the market. In fact, it’s a trait that is almost universal in the Western world.

Leading a nation requires, above all else, true vision, and neither man that stood on that stage this evening possesses it. True, they maintain beliefs, but in the end what occurred tonight was a tangle of rhetoric devoid of vision. Words were spoken, jabs were traded, experience and temperament were questioned, but a visionary leader was not in that building.

I took notes throughout the debate, but looking at them now it seems pointless to comment. Victory in Iraq? Defeat has already occurred, but like a car crash victim drowning in shock it simply hasn’t sunk in yet, just as it hadn’t in 1971. Venezuela claimed a rogue state, the linguistic misinterpretation of ‘wipe Israel off the face of the map’ presented as fact, the Russians chastised for their actions while the Georgian government is showered with praise, and the unbelievable assertion that al-Qaeda will claim a foothold in Iraq if the US fails in its mission employed as the fear card. The Shia would eat them alive were the US to leave the country, but let’s not let reality get in the way.

No, tonight was a lesson in the exhaustive inanity of American politics. The Muses, it seems, have cast their euphoric haze and wait with anticipation to see what dead loss is born.

I was rereading my entry from yesterday regarding Biden debating Palin, which I have since revised, and it got me thinking…

All trivialities aside, we’re ultimately talking about a nation that twice elected George W. Bush (though his initial win is certainly disputed by many). True, John Kerry wasn’t the strongest candidate in 2004, but it shouldn’t be overlooked that when Bush faced Gore, who had vastly more experience having been Vice President for eight years, Bush, then the Governor of Texas, was still able to defeat him. Not in the popular vote, mind you, but that’s irrelevant in the end.

The simple fact of the matter is, if we’re to take recent political precedents into consideration, Sarah Palin could have been operating a hotdog stand five years ago. To those within the Republican party (and without) that are aligned with her conservative religious ideals, all that matters is that she is on the ticket. Scandal, corruption – these are things that don’t matter. As long as she represents the beliefs of the religious right her faults can be disregarded or defended by warped contradictions. The bottom line is that she promotes those beliefs and is therefore viewed by that segment of the party as an 11th hour saving grace.

Were reason to factor into this election, how would it be possible for the McCain campaign to defend the last eight years of Republican rule? The answer is that it can’t, which is why McCain staffers have been going on national news programs and openly stating that this election is about leadership, not the issues. While employing ambiguities about fiscal responsibility, for example, they make sure to avoid the reality that the Bush Administration has produced one of the largest national deficits in US history. Rather than addressing the realities of what is actually transpiring in Iraq they immediately evoke McCain’s tenure at the Hanoi Hilton as if that were an actual answer.

If the President endorses Mr. McCain then, at some point, parallels must be drawn between them. Unfortunately, they won’t be, and the McCain camp will work to ensure that that doesn’t happen. For every assertion made in the forthcoming debates, both Republican candidates will employ the same tactic – they will turn issues into attacks on their opponent’s records while defending their own with convolutions. Lest we not forget, the language employed in the 2004 Presidential debates was later determined to be at an elementary school level to ensure that those watching were not confused. Given Obama and Biden’s intellect, the Republicans will surely capitalize on that as well. Because the smarter of the two doesn’t win, the less confusing of the two does, even if they, themselves, employ convolutions. As long as those convolutions seem to make rudimentary sense then they might as well be direct answers.

Even worse – fact.

John McCain’s campaign can attack Barack Obama’s lack of foreign policy experience until they’re blue in the face and Sarah Palin’s lack of experience can be equally attacked until the sun implodes. The truth is that when President George W. Bush took office in January of 2001 he had absolutely no foreign policy experience – unless you count dealing with foreign Major League Baseball players. True, his running mate was Secretary of Defense under George Bush Senior, but that doesn’t alter the fact that Bush himself had none. When the shit hit the fan on the morning of September 11th the nation would be introduced to a cabal of foreign policy experts that had assumed positions within the Bush Administration, among them noted lunatics such as Paul Wolfowitz, whose Defense Planning Guidance penned during Cheney’s reign at the DOD would be transformed into one of the most reckless foreign policy doctrines in US history.

The truth is that President Bush had nothing to do with the foreign policy doctrine that now bears his name. It was promoted by a group of hardliners prior to his election, implemented after 9/11, and would, at an unprecedented rate, irrevocably harm America’s reputation abroad.

So what do I care that some conservative moose hunting fanatic from Alaska has no foreign policy experience? In truth, there hasn’t been a President since Dwight Eisenhower that has had substantial first hand foreign policy experience – and even he, in his finest hour, admonished the very real threat of US militarism as it pertained to the nation’s soul. If we’re to cut the shit, an actor turned politician is widely hailed in the United States for ending the Cold War. That alone should say something.

Yesterday during Palin’s speech she claimed that John McCain has first hand experience with regards to how “tough fights are won”. Sorry to disappoint, Sarah, but Mr. McCain was a prisoner of war in a conflict that was lost by the United States. John McCain did indeed survive, and his personal fortitude under the circumstances should be applauded. I’ll not deny his heroics with regards to the fire on the USS Forrestal in 1967, nor the fact that following that incident, and the injuries he sustained, he volunteered to serve on the USS Oriskany and continue to fly missions. I will also no deny that after being shot down he was attacked by locals, stabbed, beaten, and then initially refused medical treatment by the North Vietnamese, who beat and interrogated him for information until they learned that his father was an Admiral. In fact, McCain’s father and Grandfather were Admirals.

John McCain’s ordeal was indeed severe, and questioning his service isn’t the issue. What is the issue is the context in which it is used. Despite the fact that his internment by the North Vietnamese elevated him to the level of an American hero, the reality is that there is a rather large stone monument in Washington on which the names of those who did not return from that war stands as testament to its utter folly. Marines lost at Khe Sanh, boys too young to even legally drink a beer in their home towns disappeared in jungles never to be seen again. The dregs of US society largely fought that war, and the recognition of their sacrifice actually had to be fought for after the fact.

John McCain is a war hero. A hero of a war that was lost, that should have never been fought, and that took the lives of over 58,000 Americans and injured a further 304,000. In its aftermath, more Vietnam veterans would commit suicide than were lost in the war itself. In a study conducted in the late 1980’s it was revealed that, at the time, 29,000 Vietnam vets were serving time in federal prisons, a further 37,000 had been paroled, 250,000 were under probationary supervision, and 87,000 were awaiting trial for crimes committed. Those statistics come from information provided by the Veterans Outreach Center regarding the affects of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

In the end, the names of the boys on the wall in Washington perhaps represent the lucky ones.

The conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan are not comparable to the world’s most devastating wars. There has been no Bastogne in Iraq, no Iwo Jima in Afghanistan. The conditions faced by those serving in those conflicts are unique to them, just as Vietnam was, and to not take that into consideration is folly.

That folly has dug graves over the last seven years while the oligarchs in Washington, their faces painted with concern and resolve for affect, have attempted time and again to ennoble wars that cannot be. They have overblown the significance of a ‘global enemy’ to the point that the war in Iraq was transformed into one against al-Qaeda, even though it didn’t exist in Iraq prior to the invasion of the country and only represented a mere 5% of the insurgency at its height. Meanwhile, kids from small towns in Texas and Indiana are returning home and suffering the affects of PTSD, some of them committing criminal acts, the notions of which they would have never even entertained prior to their deployments. For many of them, given the state of the US Armed Forces, they are made to go back.

Sarah Palin is the Republican Vice Presidential candidate. Her son is due to deploy to Iraq on September 11th (something that was, of course, mentioned in her recent speech).

The rich and influential very rarely pay for ground. They commonly just walk over it after it has been soaked with blood and, like Robert Duvall in Apocalypse Now, breathe in the fumes of the price paid for it. There are exceptions, of course, such as John McCain’s son.

In the end, the lot of them can go straight to hell as far as I’m concerned. Because this election isn’t about politics, pandering to patriotic fervor or special interest groups – it’s about wars and the futures of those that have been made to fight them under false pretenses. Politicians lie, no matter which side of the political fence they happen to be on. What they do not do is die as a result of their policies, and it’s about time that people woke up to that fact.

The rumors are true. The aged Senior Senator from Arizona who’s best know for his stay at the Hanoi Hilton is the Republican Party’s nominee for President of the United States.

But right now you wouldn’t know it.

In one of the greatest political blunders in recent memory, the McCain camp chose Governor Sarah Palin to be McCain’s Vice Presidential running mate, a decision that would render McCain a shadow in his own campaign in less than a week.

Since the announcement, Palin has brought nothing but unwanted baggage to the ticket. She’s under investigation for corruption, has a mere year and a half’s worth of experience as Governor, and issues with her family, such as the pregnancy of her unwed 17-year-old daughter, have snowballed into front page news.

Buried beneath the avalanche of Palin is John McCain, the man who is supposed to be the focal point. There are those that believe, rather foolishly, that disenfranchised Clinton supporters will back Palin, but even Clinton herself has rejected comparisons made by Palin. Clinton and Obama may have their differences, but they are differences that are in no way as severe as those between Clinton and Palin, whose ideologies, no matter their gender, are vastly different.

At this point, the McCain campaign is in serious peril. There has even been talk of replacing Palin, though at this late hour that would most likely cause even more damage to the campaign’s credibility, which is already at a low point.

The McCain campaign released a statement today condemning the press for its questioning of the vetting process that ultimately led to Palin’s inclusion on the ticket. Rather than dealing with those issues that Americans want addressed, this is the sort of thing that the Republicans must now focus on.

I’ve been doing my best to steer clear of US politics lately, primarily because it’s a shit show. In the past I have conceded that of the two Presidential candidates I prefer Barack Obama, and that hasn’t changed. To be honest, John McCain just scares the hell out of me.

If Obama wins in November he will enter the White House in 2009 with the same, if not slightly more, foreign policy experience than John Kennedy possessed. Obama is routinely attacked for his lack of foreign policy experience, but the truth is that, no matter who wins, the next President of the United States will inherit the most devastating foreign policy mess in US history and will, in my opinion, be limited to a single term in office because of the massive hole left in the Bush Administration’s wake. That hole is so massive that four years isn’t long enough to seriously confront it, which will only lead to the early demise of whomever is elected in November.

That said; a recent piece by Patrick Buchanan entitled And None Dare Call It Treason is worth a look. An excerpt…

“Who is Randy Scheunemann?

He is the principal foreign policy adviser to John McCain and potential successor to Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski as national security adviser to the president of the United States.

But Randy Scheunemann has another identity, another role.

He is a dual loyalist, a foreign agent whose assignment is to get America committed to spilling the blood of her sons for client regimes who have made this moral mercenary a rich man.

From January 2007 to March 2008, the McCain campaign paid Scheunemann $70,000 – pocket change compared to the $290,000 his Orion Strategies banked in those same 15 months from the Georgian regime of Mikheil Saakashvili.

What were Mikheil’s marching orders to Tbilisi’s man in Washington? Get Georgia a NATO war guarantee. Get America committed to fight Russia, if necessary, on behalf of Georgia.

Scheunemann came close to succeeding.

Had he done so, U.S. soldiers and Marines from Idaho and West Virginia would be killing Russians in the Caucasus, and dying to protect Scheunemann’s client, who launched this idiotic war the night of Aug. 7. That people like Scheunemann hire themselves out to put American lives on the line for their clients is a classic corruption of American democracy.

U.S. backing for his campaign to retrieve his lost provinces is what Saakashvili paid Scheunemann to produce. But why should Americans fight Russians to force 70,000 South Ossetians back into the custody of a regime they detest? Why not let the South Ossetians decide their own future in free elections?

Not only is the folly of the Bush interventionist policy on display in the Caucasus, so, too, is its manifest incoherence.”

When it comes to John McCain there is going to be a considerable amount of double talk in the months ahead. One of the key issues that I hope that Americans focus on is McCain’s connection to lobbyists, two of which took ‘sabbaticals’ to run his campaign. Not long ago, nine McCain staffers were purged because of their ties to lobbyists after it became apparent that it could hurt him, especially given his rhetoric on the subject.

I can’t believe I’m actually about to do this, but in an interview on Fox News yesterday, McCain was asked the following by Chris Wallace…

“Let me ask you one last question. David Axelrod said you talked in your speech today about changing the way Washington does business, but your campaign is run by two of the biggest lobbyists in Washington. How do you respond to that?”

McCain’s response was, as one might expect, befuddled. He stumbled and then said…

“…they are not lobbyists, but the fact is Americans care about my vision and plan of action for the future…”

Not surprisingly, it being Fox News, Wallace did not pressure McCain for a direct answer, nor did the Senator from Arizona provide one.

This is an issue that should concern Republican supporters, especially those that stalwartly believe in the principles of small government.

With help from readers I’ve been able to track down what was said by John Lehman, Senator McCain’s foreign policy advisor, to Wolf Blitzer during a recent interview on CNN with regards to Iran…

“They trained some of the 9/11 conspirators. They gave them free passage to al Qaeda.”

Rather than simply discarding this for the nonsense that it is, let’s examine two fundamental questions regarding this statement.

First, where did Lehman get his information? Obviously it’s not something that the current administration is willing to promote, which speaks to its validity given the administration’s overtly anti-Iranian agenda. One could argue that the administration won’t touch it in fear of comparisons to past falsehoods employed to justify military action, but the question still has to be satisfied – from which of the nation’s sixteen intelligence agencies did Lehman glean it? And if the US intelligence community is not the source, then who is?

Second, if Lehman has no reasonable source, and is simply spewing conjecture, then why wasn’t he called on it during the interview? Further to that, why hasn’t CNN, or any other news agency, criticized the McCain camp for the promotion of such information?

One has to seriously wonder when it became allowable to go on national television and claim the sky green and not be called on it. Even more, to tie a nation to a terrorist attack and not provide substantial evidence while those that are supposed to be vigilant with regards to factuality don’t question it.

In conclusion, John McCain’s foreign policy advisor openly claimed on national television that Iran was complicit in the attacks of September 11th and got away with it. That said; given that he did, will we hear it again? And if we do, how many more times will it take before it becomes the ‘truth’.

I woke up this morning feeling like I’d run a marathon after which I was hit by a bus, dragged four blocks, and then set upon by wolves. Rehearsals are one thing; the real deal is something altogether different. Being that I haven’t played with a band for more than two years, and put out that sort of energy during a performance, it’s safe to say that I am completely and utterly out of shape. Something else I’d forgotten is how much more difficult it is to sing with a full band with regards to vocal longevity. We played for just under two hours last night and my voice is rather angry with me this morning. That too is something that I’m going to have to get used to again. Nonetheless, it was fun, and I’m looking forward to tomorrow night.

I’ve been pretty lax with regards to documenting things photographically. I’ll do my best to correct that over the next few days and post a few photos to the flickr set for the tour.

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