Dogs That Won't Hunt

With now exactly two weeks to go before the election that has seemingly been going on for our entire adult lives, get ready for the good stuff. The camps will pull out all the stops and stop at nothing to put their guy over the top. Why Barack Obama is even using his ailing grandmother as a campaign tool, or so the conservative pundits will be telling you for the next few days, and Colin Powell, one of the most respected and revered political figures our nation has produced, is simply supporting a fellow brothah, or so Rush Limbaugh would have his rabid supporters believe.

For days now we have been treated to the claim that Obama pals around with terrorists, as the would be demagogue-in-chief Sarah Palin likes to tell her rallies, and now we have Joe the Plumber as somehow representative of the working class because he wants to buy a business that might make a quarter of a million and is worried about all the extra taxes he’ll have to pay. It’s enough to make a guy want to ditch the American dream and stick with that $10 an hour job after all. Hey you might work long hours doing mundane and thankless tasks while barely being able to keep up with your bills and giving up luxuries like air-conditioning your house in the summer, but at least you won’t be a victim to big government and their socialist designs of turning us into France!

The Mike Myers character from Saturday Night Live, the old Jewish lady who hosted coffee talk might tackle this one. Joe the Plumber is neither named Joe nor a plumber-discuss.

So why is the McCain camp taking this path, a path which seems not to be working all that well if the polls are to be believed, although as previously stated I don’t put too much stock in the polls until the one that counts on November 4. But the question remains as to why McCain, the self proclaimed maverick and one time honorable politician, is taking the low road he promised to avoid back when this whole ordeal got started? Quite simply because the issues that he would tackle if he were so inclined are losers for the Republicans after nearly 8 years of running our economy into the ground with misguided tax policies (isn’t upward redistribution, aka trickle down economics simply a rich boy’s version of socialism) a ruinous and unnecessary war in Iraq, and a general lack of anything resembling leadership and vision.

When it comes to the key issues that Americans, real Americans, pro Americans, white, black, brown, and Asian Americans, working and middle class Americans that might earn over a quarter of a million in a good decade, when it comes to what these people care about the Republican idea bank is out of funds. The issues that these Americans care about are things like access to quality jobs with health care, affordable housing without having to resort to gimmick loans, availability of quality day care for their kids while both parents go off to eke out a meager living every day, good schools to send their kids to so they don’t get stuck in the same rut as their parents, and a few breaths of clean air on a good day in a planet that isn’t burning up at warp speed. Oh, we also care about a humane immigration policy, an effective domestic social policy, and a foreign policy that doesn’t have us fighting wars in every corner of Asia.

So with not too much to say on these issues that matter the most, the Palin-McCain camp is resorting to what Ross Perot, the original big eared candidate, called Republican dirty tricks. The irony is that they were used to discredit McCain himself back in 2000 when he still had some virtue and integrity, and he has now allowed his campaign to be hijacked by these same dirty operatives. Associating with terrorists, looking out for Joe the Business Owner, and scaring the populace with cries of socialism are just simply, as they would say in what Ms. Palin terms the real pro America, dogs that just won’t hunt.