Okay, it's time someone said it... so I'm going to say it... (sorry it's so long, but it's worth it)
JOHN McCAIN IS THROWING THIS ELECTION! DELIBERATELY!
Let me explain...
In the 2000 Republican Party primaries John McCain was dirty-tricked/swift-boated by Karl Rove in his efforts to steal the White House with an Evangelical candidate that appealed to the ignorant Christian voting block.
This smear took the form of asking prospective Republican voters if they would still vote for John McCain if they discovered he had fathered an illegitimate black baby. The hypothetical query was put to voters the week before a photo of John McCain, his wife Cindy, their children and youngest daughter Bridget (who was adopted in 1993 by the McCains from one of Mother Theresa's orphanages) appeared in several newspapers and was pushed as a campaign image by Karl Rove.
The prospective redneck/Evangelical voting block was sufficiently uncomfortable with this image (and sufficiently ignorant of the racial differences between Indians and blacks) to resist drawing their own conclusions regarding the veracity of Rove's smear tactic.
Consequently, John McCain lost the Republican party presidential nomination to moronic god-bot George Dubya, to the lasting detriment of human civilization.
Fast forward to 2008... John McCain wins the Republican party presidential nomination by, essentially, becoming a quasi-George-Dubya... in crass contrast to his previous positions. (How many high profile Republicans have lamented that they would prefer to vote for the old-style John McCain, rather than the current incarnation?)
But why has John McCain done this?
I know why...
John McCain's skin cancer is terminal.
John McCain has decided to destroy the Republican party... or at least take the Evangelical power base down with him. The same base that thwarted his best chance at being president: the 2000 election.
Consider the facts:
-John McCain fights back from being an also-ran to being the presumptive Republican nominee: in effect he ran such a good campaign that no one else could keep up... then suddenly he can't do anything right
-he picks the absolute worst possible running mate
-he claims he didn't vet Palin, yet she is exactly what is needed to finally split real Republicans off from the Evangelicals: Dubya in a dress but even more Christey... and even more ignorant
-he squanders campaign money on blatantly false smear ads, which only help Obama when the fact-checkers do their thing
-he misquotes facts and statistics to an alarming degree during the debates... more fact-checking
-he suspends his campaign in order to deal with the bailout, yet he doesn't speak at the meetings... even when Obama does
-he not only defends Palin's missteps but repeats them, and lets her campaign unsupervised
...he's at least competent enough to do better than this. He's at least competent enough that his continuous wrong-turn-only campaigning is somewhat suspicious.
Obama is going to win this election with a populist landslide (70% of the popular vote and 400 electoral college votes). He'll serve THREE terms... desperate times mandate desperate measures, fuck that amendment.
In the aftermath of such a debacle the Republican Party is going to split into a traditional, fiscally-conservative but SECULAR Constitutionalist Party (Ron Paul will head this "New GOP") and a super-Christian ignorant-hypocrite party that will back a disastrous third-party Palin presidential bid in 2012.
Discuss...
The Luke