2010 Scenarios - Which country do you want first?

by Janet Ritz

Have you thought about what America will be like two years into the next administration?

Here are four scenarios:

First scenario - McCain:

It is 2010. President McCain has fired the head of the SEC, FEC, FCC, SIPC (note spelling)... and has formed the M.F.I. Commission to study the collapsed economy under Treasury Secretary Phil Gramm, while Saudi Arabia and Dubai (where Dick Cheney is living out his retirement) have matched China, India and Iraq in owning our over thirty-three trillion dollar national debt.

We're in proxy wars with Russia and in a bomb, bomb, bomb war with Iran.

Out-of-work parents say goodbye to their enlisted sons and daughters.

President McCain adds more cars to the thirteen(?) he currently owns.

Ditto on the houses.

A safe education is available only for the home-schooled or vouchered.

Health care becomes more out of reach to those who can't afford it.

Drilling is everywhere but ANWR and, yet, oil is over $200 a barrel.

Alternative fuels legislation receives lip-service but little effective support.

There are no salmon.

Tucker Bounds becomes Press Secretary. Doug Holtz-Eakin is the new CEO of Blackberry.

Questions about policies are met with blame and obfuscation.

Sound far-fetched? Perhaps.

But what if it's not?

Second scenario - McCain:

It is 2010. President John McCain defies his right wing and lobbyist backers and tries to do the right thing, but receives no support from a partisan congress or from the right wingers and lobbyists he's betrayed.

See above for the rest.

Sound far-fetched? Perhaps.

But what if it's not?


Third scenario - Palin:

It is 2010. Out-of-work parents say goodbye to their sons and daughters on their way to the trenches of Iran and Russia, while President Palin (sworn into office in 2009 after President McCain's untimely demise) and President Ahmedinejab rave about their respective end-times.

Social Security and Medicare are discontinued. Health care is unattainable.

Tent cities spring up in city parks. National parks are buzzed by aerial hunters.

Hurricanes wipe out the Gulf coast, the oceans have become one big dead zone with only lionfish and jellyfish, America's beaches are covered with garbage; the Midwest is a permanent flood zone (between tornadoes), cities, chokingly polluted, are filled with paranoid citizens with gun permits, new prisons are the only new home construction, twenty-five percent of endangered species have passed the tipping point to extinction, though not on any government list, and Saudi Arabia and Dubai (where Dick Cheney is living out his retirement) have matched China, India and Iraq in owning our over thirty-three trillion dollar national debt.

Sound far-fetched? Perhaps.

But what if it's not?


Fouth scenario - Obama:

It is 2010. President Barack Obama has formed a coalition with our (once again) allies to put pressure on Iran to belly up to the diplomacy bar. Joe Biden and Bill Clinton are dispatched to speak with world leaders who respect them.

A worldwide coalition has formed to combat the root causes of terrorism and shore up failing states.

Bipartisan government programs, pushed through by a Democratic majority in both houses, are instituted to forestall foreclosures while forcing corporate responsibility. Wall Street and Main Street (slowly) recover.

The homeless, rather than being beaten up by unattended teens, are ushered into community programs, as are unattended teens. Continued...

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Sarah Palin as George Bush

by Janet Ritz

In a polemic penned by George Bush's former speechwriter, Sarah Palin attempted to define Barack Obama as her equal and John McCain as above them both, while avoiding any subject of substance.

Sorry, Sarah, that husky don't hunt.

Palin's (Matthew Scully's) speech revealed a surprising parallel to George Bush -- albeit with phonetic care given to the correct pronunciation of certain words -- in her bid to become vice president to an aging politician with a history of health problems amid a pointed lack of relevance to the issues at hand and a cynical willingness to distort the truth.

The RNC talking points/heads are now questioning the media for pointing out that Palin's speech was written by Bush's former speechwriter (who'd only met her a week before).

What about the democrats, they charge; are you asking them who writes their speeches???

The answer, in the case of Barack Obama, at least -- since he was the focus of Scully's speech -- is that Barack Obama is the primary writer of his own speeches, a point the RNC has made many times in their attempts to denigrate his abilities as both a writer and speaker.

As for Senator Biden, no one can accuse him of not speaking his mind or of not caring about women's issues, given that he was the driving force behind the Violence Against Women Act.

What was missing from Scully's speech for Palin, aside from actual support for women's issues, was any discussion of policy, any mention of current events; no compassionate conservatism about the huge ice sheet -- the size of Manhattan -- that just broke loose in the Arctic; the approach of Hurricane Ike that has already swelled to a Category 4; the wolves she rewards her constituents for shooting; the fact that she does not believe in man-made global warming; her support for the teaching of creationism in schools; her opposition to equal pay, access to health care and those pesky books she wanted banned from libraries...

[Former Wasilla mayor] Stein says that as mayor, Palin continued to inject religious beliefs into her policy at times. "She asked the library how she could go about banning books," he says, because some voters thought they had inappropriate language in them. "The librarian was aghast." The librarian, Mary Ellen Baker, couldn't be reached for comment, but news reports from the time show that Palin had threatened to fire her for not giving "full support" to the mayor.

Those who question Palin's policies do not receive an answer to their questions, while any concern about her qualifications as a future commander-in-chief are dismissed as sexism. That's silly, of course. Especially when the only information her speechwriter has offered constitutes identity politics and divisive attacks on community organizers, parroting a new campaign by Rush Limbaugh to define such community organizers, many of whom are ethnic in background, as "radical activists."

Are we to accuse the RNC and their media allies of racism?

Or perhaps it's conservative elitism: We don't need no stinking "radical activists" stirring up disenfranchised ethnic communities and getting them to demand a fair shake. Continued...

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