# 66 Good News and Bad News: Read This Post

Actually, this post should be numbered 666. That is, at least, the way I'm feeling right now.

Here's the bad news:

John McCain has a really good chance of being our next president, and Sarah Palin our next vice president.

How can that be? By all the ideals that the citizens of this country claim to live by; by all that we individually view as sacred, and by our moral and ethical standards; by the use of our minds that can reason and analyze and synthesize; by all that is meaningful in our lives, especially our children and our grandchildren and our friends and our colleagues: by all of these, John McCain should be fifteen, twenty, twenty-five points behind Barack Obama in the polls.

1) The bush administration has deregulated so many parts of our economy that the entire economy is in a shambles, leading the German president to say, bluntly, that the United States will no longer be viewed as the world's financial leader. This is the Republicans' doing.

2) The bush administration has mired us down in a war that we probably had no legitimate reason for beginning in the first place. This is the Republicans' doing.

3) The bush administration, as a result of (2) above, has failed in its pledge to capture those responsible for the September 11 attacks. This is the Republicans' doing.

4) The bush administration, even as a johnny-come-lately to environmental concerns (if we believe they really care at all), has lost all credibility and hence the ability to get global agreement to attack global warming. This is the Republicans' doing.

(5) John McCain has admitted during the campaign that he didn't know much about economics. But one of the most serious problems (of many) that we currently face is the real possibility of a devastating depression in this country, putting millions more people out of work, out of homes, out of everything, and causing unimaginably horrible ripples through the economies of every other nation.

(6) John McCain, in a successful attempt to appeal to the faaaaaaaaaaaar right base of the Republican party, selected unknown and unqualified Sarah Palin to be his vice presidential running mate. If the McCain-Palin ticket wins this election, she will be a heartbeat away from becoming president, a horribly alarming prospect since then-president McCain has had cancer four times, is still psychologically suffering from his war experiences (even his Republican handlers fear his impetuosity and his temper), and looks, sounds, and thinks like a person much older than his 72 years.

(7) John McCain's temper and impetuous nature are precisely the qualities we must not have in a president, the person with his finger on the trigger to our nuclear and conventional weapons.

(8) John McCain flew into the middle of bailout negotiations in D.C. to find a way out of the current 780 billion dollar mess, and negotiations flew into a rage, at least temporarily failing.

(9) John McCain, unprepared to face Barack Obama in a debate on Foreign Policy--for God's sake, that's supposed to be McCain's forte!--so far has backed out, using the ruse of trying to settle our economic dilemma (see #5 above).

(10) Barack Obama needs to be waaaaaay ahead in the polls going into election day if he is to have a chance to win. The bottom line is, Right Now, more people than we could ever believe will deny him their vote because he's black. It is so prevalent now that people are actually saying it to pollsters. The pollsters are further concerned that "Undecided" is becoming a code word for "notablackperson." I am disgusted with racism.

I could go on and on and what good would that do. I see no other reason than racism for the closeness of the current election. It is very depressing.

And now here's the good news.

Right now, this evening as I write this post; right now, as the news is filled with the failure of the Republicans to help construct a solution to the country's, possibly soon to be the world's, economic disasters; right now, with the polls showing just about a dead heat between the two major candidates; right now, there is no good news.

Except perhaps for this courageous statement from Paul Begala, on Anderson Cooper's "A C 360" this evening. I'm surprised his comment wasn't blipped. I'll be surprised if tomorrow it isn't all over the press here and abroad. But perhaps his saying it will somehow awaken our reason, our sense of fairness, our sense of righteous indignation that some people, some of our own countrypeople, view race as more important than ability. Tonight, Paul Begala said that the current president of the United States is "a high-functioning moron."

And no one disagreed. God bless America for its freedom of speech. And that IS good news.

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