The Wall Street Journal is reporting today that John McCain would support the lifting of off-shore oil drilling, not only in Alaska, in places like Florida and everywhere else there’s oil as well. This, he claims, is his big answer to the high gas prices, even though the Alaskan Wildlife Refuge only has enough oil to last America 3 months. Sounds like more of the same Reagan-Bush politics if you ask me. It’s simply an extension of an era that is rapidly becoming obsolete.
You know, it’s sad. There was a time when I actually liked McCain. He spoke of bi-partisan legislation and put his money where his mouth was, working with Democratic favorites Russ Feingold, the late Paul Wellstone and even Ted Kennedy to reform campaign finance, defense spending and many other important topics. He came out against torture and sided against the Guantanamo styled, Abu Gharib, water boarding policies of the Bush Administration. It seemed that despite his party loyalty, he was always a thorn in the side of the Bush Administration.
Then things changed.
McCain began to back peddle from his previous policies. He began to hang out more with George W. Bush. He began to enlist former Bush members into his upcoming election effort. He spoke at Fallwell’s university despite having called Fallwell a religious extremist that was dragging the party down. McCain had seemed like the old Goldwater, with all the same eccentricities, yet now he was trading in his chips for a ticket on the Bush-Reagan express. Only problem was, the tracks to that train go nowhere, and, it appears that the extension to that line was never finished.
Now McCain calls the largely Republican appointed Supreme Court’s decision to force Bush to treat political detainees at Guantanamo Bay with due process one of the worst decision in American History. He sides with Big-Oil and talks up a big defense spending budget. In fact, Obama’s plan, with all its health care spending, and other long-term investments in our nation’s future, is more fiscally responsible than McCain’s plan, despite all his talk of pork, he is oblidged to cut the taxes for those making above $350,000 a year and saddle the government with a massive defense debt. The same EXACT policies that drove our nation into the poorhouse in the first place.
At first, I though Obama’s strategy of linking McCain to Bush was clever and would ultimately pan out. Now however, I see it’s more than words, it’s reality!
What’s going on? It’s simple. Bush won the last two elections by motivating the base. The Rove Strategy micro-targeted religious groups and potential Republican sympathizers on the Right