The Republican party is in shambles and has a choice to either grow up or be forever marginalized.

What ought to really boggle the mind on this economic horror is that it is just one slice of the pie. There is no doubt that there are other economic puddles out there that are also drying up.

It’s going to get worse folks, much worse.

John McCain served his time as a POW with great courage, loyalty and tenacity. More that 600 of us did the same. After our repatriation a census showed that 95% of us had been tortured at least once. The Vietnamese were quite democratic about it. There were many heroes in North Vietnam. I saw heroism every day there. And we motivated each other to endure and succeed far beyond what any of us thought we had in ourselves. Succeeding as a POW is a group sport, not an individual one. We all supported and encouraged each other to survive and succeed. John knows that. He was not an individual POW hero. He was a POW who surmounted the odds with the help of many comrades, as all of us did.

I furthermore believe that having been a POW is no special qualification for being President of the United States. The two jobs are not the same, and POW experience is not, in my opinion, something I would look for in a presidential candidate.

Sadly, McCain’s POW status is not unique, nor his experiences any different from anyone else’s there nor his heroic acts any different from the heroic acts of the other POWs. Yet McCain can’t let a moment go by or answer a single question without mentioning his time as a POW, as if that gives him a pass on everything else. Hell, he even invoked his POW status when asked what his favorite music was, which is patently ridiculous. (ABBA, if you want to know)

John McCain is profoundly unqualified to be a US Senator, let alone President of the US and most assuredly not President in these difficult times at the end of 8 years of an Administration that has done more to destroy this country than any external enemy we’ve ever had.

I’ve always like Dock Ellis.

So I began listening to other candidates and found Edwards the most interesting from a policy perspective and he became my candidate of choice, with Hillary second, primarily because of health care for both but his stands on other issues made him first on the list. Obama was still interesting but, like Krugman, I felt his health care approach was inadequate. Then Edwards dropped out and I began to look more closely at Obama and realized that I not only liked what I saw and heard there were significant differences in how he approached issues that I preferred to Hillary’s approach. But I would still have happily voted for Clinton and remember saying so quite specifically after one of their one-on-one debates. I was impressed by both.

Then it became clear that he was the better campaigner, that he had scanned the landscape and mapped out a much clearer path to the nomination that included the widest range of America, and I really liked that, while she more and more began to resemble an old-line DLC candidate, and I definitely didn’t like that.

But I would still have happily voted for her had she prevailed.

Then came the early Spring and Obama showed amazing strength in the primaries and she showed amazing weakness, both in style and in tactics and he impressed me even more and her shortsightedness began to concern me.

I was still quite willing to vote for her however, had she prevailed but I was now taking a very close look at Obama.

Then the accusations of gender bias started coming out of the Clinton camp and not without justification in a certain sense because the more out-there Obama supporters sometimes exhibited such behavior and it was easy to cherry-pick that to focus on, but Obama didn’t nor did his close campaign people. But that’s politics and to be expected, just as the subtle playing of the race card by Clinton surrogates was to be expected (the First Surrogate was a huge disappointment in that regard) but she didn’t do that and I wrote it off as typical politics.

Then she began the “he’s not a Muslim, as far as I know” crap, that’s not a surrogate speaking, that’s her saying that. But Obama was nothing but gracious in his response (while surrogates played the game surrogates played, I generally don’t blame the candidate that much for over-the-top supporters, some but not that much, on either side). And then she made the absurd Bosnia statements, not once but many times and then claimed “fatigue” at the very time she was also putting out an ad stating that she’d be the best one to respond correctly to the 3 a.m phone call, rather a bit of cognitive dissonance there, and then she made the “white Americans” statement which was truly bizarre and her campaign began to work that theme rather strongly while ignoring the reality that Obama has done quite well indeed in very white states, then they started pushing hard at the elitist argument (which I’ve always hated) and it became not just occasional surrogates talking but an actual campaign tactic which she herself echoed and it became much harder to think kindly of her as a candidate.

But I still would have voted for her if it came to that.

Then she mentioned assassination (and it matters not what she “actually meant”, she said it and it was bad judgment to do so and no, I don’t think she was hoping for assassination) and then responded badly to being called on it and she lost me completely, especially as she continued to fail to thrive politically and began rewriting history and playing “if” games with numbers and whining about “counting every vote” because to disenfranchise voters is unDemocratic while she and her campaign continually sought to demean voters like me who live in caucus states by implying that we aren’t really representative of our states (and believe me anyone who actually attended an overcrowded caucus here knew better) and the dissonance of her campaign began to really bother me.

And she lost my vote and because I live in a state that is so blue it blends in with the surrounding ocean I actually may not vote at all in the unlikely chance that she becomes the candidate.

But she won’t, because she’s lost and she seems determined to bring down the Democratic Party along with her candidacy because if she can’t have it than no one can and I’ve had quite enough of that attitude for the last 8 years.

And it doesn’t have a goddamned thing to do with sexism, nor does most of the opposition to her that I’ve seen from thoughtful liberals and progressives (the majority).

There are still things that concern me about Obama’s policies, on health care for sure, but from what I’ve seen his campaign has been the one behaving the most honorably and with the most concern for the nation while hers has appeared deeply ego driven (notwithstanding that it takes a big ego to run for that office at all).

I rather like a quote I saw recently “when I go into the voting booth and pull the lever for Obama I still cry out Edwards’ name” and that is still the case with me but I will be extremely happy to be able to vote for Obama because he’s lightyears better than anyone else out there now, sadly including Hillary.

I have also asked, as have others, time and again for some reasons why those in here who support her do so and haven’t gotten much in the way of an answer.

My wife, who is around Hillary’s age, is furious with her, even more so than I am. She is disappointed precisely because she saw Hillary as a great candidate to be the first woman President and feels truly let down by what is happening. All the complaints listed about the Obama campaign in this article in Britain’s New Statesman are the very things that the Clintons say are necessary in terms of tactics to “season” Obama as a candidate (for the future) when it comes from their side. Either the behavior is acceptable or it isn’t and my wife and I come down on the “it isn’t acceptable” from either camp but the level of such behavior from the Clinton side is just becoming too much to bear.

An excerpt, but read the whole article and learn:

America’s other main enemy is al-Qaeda in Iraq, which is to Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda what a cheap watch is to a Swiss timepiece—effective, easily reproduced, and disposable. Al-Qaeda did not exist in Iraq before the invasion, but today it, along with Iran, are the two strongest arguments the U.S. makes for “staying the course.” Al-Qaeda in Iraq is essentially a religious criminal gang that kills anyone who threatens its power or differs from its Salafist views on establishing a perverse form of an Islamic state. Its death squads and enormously destructive truck bombs have killed thousands of Shias, but Sunnis, too, have suffered al-Qaeda’s violent nihilism. Car bombs, assassinations and “religious punishments,” including decapitations and cutting off the fingers of smokers, have put Sunni Iraq under a Mordor-like shadow of terror and justified collective punishment from the Shias. In his testimony to Congress, Gen. Petraeus pointed out the lethal threat of al-Qaeda. But this should come as no surprise to an American general—because the U.S. Army helped create al-Qaeda in Iraq.

From the Smiley commentary, but read the whole thing. It’s a winner.

I don’t doubt Dean. I always thought that for a Republican, he had something of a conscience. What amazes me is that Republicans who are now exclaiming at what has happened to the Republican Party (and yes, I talked to my mother this morning) didn’t see this coming. Everything, every value, that the Republicans have held up for my lifetime as desirable has been pointing us in this direction. As I’ve said before on the HuffPost, all of this is the necessary consequence of traditional Republican values, not an accidental byproduct. Or maybe I’ll put it this way — when you reject common humanity, value profits above people, practice sectarian religion, feel contempt for the choices of others, exalt wealth, conflate consumersim with citizenship, join exclusive clubs, daily practice unkindness rather than kindness, and develop theories, such as those of free market capitalism, that allow you to congratulate yourself morally for selfishness and short-sightedness, then being a gang member is in your future.

Contrast that with the two civilians, Michael O’Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack – war supporters inaccurately put forth as critics, who spent a couple of days on a Pentagon scripted junket to Iraq and wrote their own Op-Ed in the NYTimes gushing about how swimmingly the war was going and that “we might just win”. Notwithstanding that such a sentiment is hardly what could be considered overwhelmingly positive it was touted endlessly in virtually all media outlets as “proof” that even “war critics” like O’Hanlon and Pollack were now convinced the surge was working and Iraq was a glorious Bush victory-in-waiting (we just might win!).

The soldiers saw it differently.

VIEWED from Iraq at the tail end of a 15-month deployment, the political debate in Washington is indeed surreal. Counterinsurgency is, by definition, a competition between insurgents and counterinsurgents for the control and support of a population. To believe that Americans, with an occupying force that long ago outlived its reluctant welcome, can win over a recalcitrant local population and win this counterinsurgency is far-fetched. As responsible infantrymen and noncommissioned officers with the 82nd Airborne Division soon heading back home, we are skeptical of recent press coverage portraying the conflict as increasingly manageable and feel it has neglected the mounting civil, political and social unrest we see every day.

And now the ultimate insult to these brave soldiers, who were ridiculed by rightwingnuts everywhere as disgruntled malcontents or simply ignored (nothing to see here, let’s move on). Of the seven soldiers who contributed to that Op-Ed piece one was gravely wounded before it was even published (he survived with a serious head wound) and now comes word that two other sergeants, Staff Sergeant Yance Gray and Sergeant Omar Mora, died a couple of days ago along with 5 other soldiers in vehicle accident in Iraq.

It has been popular to dismiss comments about how so many of the wingnuts cheerleading this war are “chickenhawks” by saying they have the freedom to choose but to have brave soldiers like these sergeants who are brave not only in battle but in bucking the wingnut military propaganda mentality unfortunately so prevalent in today’s military with the courage to state their opinions clearly and forcefully, have to lose their lives in this war is the ultimate insult by all war supporters.

Support the troops? Bush and his ilk don’t know what that means. Honor our soldiers? They haven’t a clue.

I mourn for these fine men and for all the fine men and women whose lives have been sacrificed in this unnecessary war which seems designed only to feed Bush and Cheney’s sick, twisted egos.

The level of disgust I feel now not only towards Bush and Cheney but to our politicians, Democratic or Republican, who sit by and do nothing and to the pathetic Fox News addicts cheerleading this disaster.

The American I grew up in may never exist again. These people are destroying our country.

How is it that a border no one can see or touch stands between car bombs, militias, death squads and… peace, safety? It’s difficult to believe- even now. I sit here and write this and wonder why I can’t hear the explosions.

I wonder at how the windows don’t rattle as the planes pass overhead. I’m trying to rid myself of the expectation that armed people in black will break through the door and into our lives. I’m trying to let my eyes grow accustomed to streets free of road blocks, hummers and pictures of Muqtada and the rest…

How is it that all of this lies a short car ride away?

How is it indeed? And how is it that our Dear Leader cannot understand that simple fact, that getting out is so much better than staying with the bullets and the bombs and the death squads? That our very presence has robbed Iraqis of those very simple human realities as safety in one’s person and the comfort of friends and neighbors and a functioning infrastructure and the realities of daily life?

We have robbed these good people of so much and all because Bush apparently bought into the Vietnam rhetoric of “we had to destroy the village in order to save it” so much that he escalated it to “we had to destroy the nation in order to save it”.