It's A Trap!

If you think that John McCain picked Sarah Palin just to get the white, middle class vote or the Hillary vote, think again. In the words of the great Admiral Ackbar at the Battle of Endor, “It’s a trap!”

Here is what the McCain campaign is trying so desperately to do: they want you to forget the last eight years. It’s sort of like in “Wayne’s World” when Wayne and Garth do their flashback sequences. Imagine Republican hands waving in front of you and they do “dad a doo, da da a doo” (translation questionable!) and suddenly…voila! The past eight years of foreclosures, high gas prices, inflation, and unemployment never happened, the GOP elephant roars! Well except for 9-11. By God! Don’t you forget 9-11!

Do yourself a favor: avoid the crazy hype from the last few weeks of conventions and look at what has been going on in our economy over the past eight years and ask yourself “is the country better off than it was eight years ago?” Only someone in the upper income bracket will answer yes. The past eight years were a disappointment. And I have every right to be angry about the last eight years because I was idiotic enough to vote for Bush twice!

That’s right, I voted for the man twice. In 2000, I voted for Bush because like most people that live in Tennessee, I disliked Al Gore and his Senator Palpatine twin, Joe Liberman. In 2004, I voted for Bush again because I actually believed that we were doing the right thing in Iraq; there had to be WMD’s in Iraq! Of course, just a mere few weeks after the election, I found out how wrong I really was. The damn war was just a way for Cheney and his friends to make more money while thousands of young Americans die. The whole hocus pocus of “the terrorists are coming through Iraq” was brought to you by Bush, Inc.

I wish I could take my votes back but unlike Wayne and Garth, I can’t force a flashback. And unlike the Republicans and the people that are following them, I have learned my lesson. Unfortunately for the Republicans, I can not forget how Bush and crew betrayed my trust. My vote showed my trust in them to make things right. They never made things right; instead, they just followed the “right” ideology.

If you believe that McCain is a “maverick” think again! This is a guy that over 80% of the time has agreed with President Bush on the issues! When he spoke Thursday night, what did he say that he would do to help the American economy? Can you even remember? How is he going to help curb the over 7,000 foreclosures that are going on each day in this country? How is he going to help those families keep their homes? And pray tell, what did he say he was going to do to help the Veterans of this current war? Did he, a former Navy man and POW, even mention the Veterans? And were any of you McCain supporters smart enough to catch that it wasn’t Walter Reed hospital in the background but another building (it turns out it was a school).

What the Republicans have tried to do is get the Middle Class and Independent voters forget that we have had eight straight months of job losses and rising prices at the grocery store. Salaries are not keeping up with inflation and many Americans, while employed full time, have Healthcare plans that are expensive or lacking in coverage. With companies planning to increase the deductibles their employees have to pay and the possibility that the economy will continue to slow down through 2009 (no matter who gets elected), why would we even want four more years of the same old solutions?

Don’t fool yourself: drilling in Alaska and offshore is not going to help ease the oil crisis. The only way that will be solved is if we change our way about energy consumption. And despite what the Republican vice presidential nominee says, there is no way to cleanly burn coal.

The same old thinking has not worked in Washington and Republicans have another thing coming if they believe they are not in trouble. Republican congressmen know this; they hear it from their constituents. Just recently, in my district, first term Republican Congressman David Davis failed to get his party’s nomination after stories of his pandering to big business and standing by President Bush, right or wrong.

For years Republicans have been preaching “trickle down economics” and “thousand points of light” helping the middle and lower classes. And yet Palin slapped so many people in the face with her snarky remark concerning community leaders. What cracked me up was that many in the audience were laughing at her comment. Hmmm…and so many of them are community organizers themselves!

Both parties need to quit pointing fingers at each other and need to focus on how they are going to fix this economy and the mess we face overseas. Right now though, I get the feeling that Republicans are in the same bubble they were in during the reelection runs of Bush, Sr. in 1992 and Hoover in 1932. In both times, the middle class was in crises. And both times, their struggle was ignored.

Finally, ask yourself this…what kind of world do we live in where a bunch of rich white people like to refer to Barak Obama as elitist? Wait a second…a black man raised by a single mother is elitist? Just because he made something of his life and attending the same schools many of these same people attended? Honestly, I don’t get it.

But I do get it when Admiral Ackbar yells “It’s a trap!"

Trap indeed.