You can put lipstick on John McCain but…

An Appeal to Patience by: That Girl

I tell you, after watching and (at times) participating in the What-The-Eff-Are-We-Gonna-Do-Now freak-out session that defined the liberal base for the last two weeks, I’m completely exhausted. Lipstick on mammals and bridges to nowhere aside, the Palin pick had me and the whole world thinking, “Huh?” and wondering just what the hell John McCain was up to when he decided to undermine his own campaign platform of Experience vs. Celebrity by choosing an inexperienced candidate-turned-overnight-celebrity in the face of the most intense media scrutiny since a blue dress and a cigar walked into the Oval Office about a decade ago.

Seriously, just six years ago the excessive beating of war drums and outrageous claims of mushroom clouds in our backyards elicited not scrutiny, but cheerleading from media outlets eager to scoop and flattered by executive privilege. Just ask Judith Miller. If information institutions had been as diligent or thorough in verifying certain intelligence ‘facts’ about an ongoing war as they were about certain stains and the meaning of “is”, I doubt we’d be hemorrhaging two billion dollars a week in the one sandbox the terrorists turned out not to be or watching the financial markets spiral out of control. But that’s not the point…

I couldn’t’ve said it better myself.

The point is this: Now that Lehman’s has tanked and Merril’s been liquidated all within a week of the government’s takeover of Fannie and Freddie along with a growing belief that Bush policies played an integral role in the current decline in the markets:

The spending on Iraq was a hidden cause of the current credit crunch because the US central bank responded to the massive financial drain of the war by flooding the American economy with cheap credit.

“The regulators were looking the other way and money was being lent to anybody this side of a life-support system,” [...]

That led to a housing bubble and a consumption boom, and the fallout was plunging the US economy into recession and saddling the next US president with the biggest budget deficit in history, he said.

… as well as the roles former lobbyists play on the campaign trail for a candidate who’s supposedly committed to closing “revolving doors” to “special interests” in Washington:

… when McCain huddled with his closest advisers at his rustic Arizona cabin last weekend to map out his presidential campaign, virtually every one was part of the Washington lobbying culture he has long decried. His campaign manager, Rick Davis, co-founded a lobbying firm whose clients have included Verizon and SBC Telecommunications. His chief political adviser, Charles R. Black Jr., is chairman of one of Washington’s lobbying powerhouses, BKSH and Associates, which has represented AT&T, Alcoa, JPMorgan and U.S. Airways.

… combined with an 89% average consistency in voting with Mr. Bush since the president took office in 2001 and it seems pretty clear just how the Obama campaign will proceed:

Saying that McCain had put some lobbyists in key roles of his campaign, Obama said, “If you think those lobbyists are working day and night for John McCain just to put themselves out of business, well I’ve got a bridge to sell you up in Alaska.”

Ain’t no lipstick in the world gonna make John McCain look any less like George Bush now.

So, Everybody Calm Down:

Obama has shown as well as anyone that he is a rough-and-tumble politician who doesn’t shy from a fight. But his campaign has made central his commitment to changing the way we do politics. That doesn’t mean he’s a wimp, but it does mean he can’t buy into the Bush-Rove politics that McCain now espouses.

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