You can almost hear a stirring rendition of Nearer, My God, To Thee as you read this post at Red State:
This is, in fact, the last week for John McCain to, on his own accord, shift the polling trends back in his favor. To do so, he must aggressively begin punching Barack Obama on issues that work to McCain’s advantage.
I think we’ve seen the beginnings of this with Sarah Palin going after Obama’s terrorist ties, which are extremely extensive and barely covered by the media.
***It is time for McCain-Palin ’08 to change the narrative by aggressively going after Barack Obama on Fannie and Freddie. Force the issue before the public and an unwilling media. Force the tough questions. Certainly, Obama will push back, but McCain should easily be able to handle those questions — much easier than Obama can handle his questions.
I honestly have no idea why they think they have any credible way of tying Obama to Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, and even beyond that, I have no idea why they think that those two are responsible for the meltdown. Quite clearly, asserting that those two institutions are behind the current economic disaster is silly beyond even Red State standards, but they will attempt to push it anyway. Besides, didn’t they just spend the last six months deriding how long Obama has been in the Senate and how little experience he has? Now their message is that he alone is responsible for the entire economic meltdown by proxy, through his tenuous connections to partial players? The premise is laughable and, once again, reeks of flop sweat.
But if you want to talk about actual factual matters, we should look at some numbers and charts. When the Republicans took over the White House in 2000, the DOW was at around 10,600. Currently, the DOW is 9824. In 2000, when Bush and the Republicans took office, we had a budget surplus of about 230 billion. This year, we are expected to run approximately a half-trillion dollar deficit, and that was before the trillion we have tossed on to the national debt in the last few weeks.
But here is the most startling statistic- all previous forty-two presidents, in the history of this nation, had a combined national debt of approximately 5.5 trillion. George W. Bush and the Republican administration have almost doubled the debt of his 42 predecessors, as our national debt is over ten trillion (and that does not count all the chicanery with social security obligations and the like).
George Bush and Republican rule have been a DISASTER. There is no other term for it. John McCain may think he is being unfairly tarnished with this, but it is important to remember that he has been with Bush all the way on things, and intends to continue the Bush policies that helped to get us where we are. We are on the edge of a cliff, and John McCain wants to keep walking forward (no doubt his running mate things jumping would be a good leap of faith).
So whinge about Bill Ayers. Whine about Rezko. Babble to your heart’s content about Fannie Mae. Scream Freddie Mac and Barney “Fag” all you want. These are silly, last minute desperate distractions, and the American people know who is responsible for this mess. Good conservatives should be welcoming the electoral tsunami that is about to wipe Republicans off the map- after all, they are the ones always preaching about personal responsibility, right?
The only thing I do not understand is how there are still some reasonably intelligent people out the who would vote for Johnny Drama and Bible Spice. It makes absolutely no sense to me, other than raw tribalism.