Staging the Presidency

_____

"All the world 's a stage, and all the men and
women merely players. They have their exits and their
entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts"

        -- William Shakespeare
            As You Like It, Act II, Scene VII
_____

Indeed, never before have the words of the great Bard rung so true. All across the United States, the play's the thing wherein the GOP will try to capture the attention of the people, and with it the crown of a new king. Make no mistake about it -- that's what they've effectively turned the Presidency into, and a John McCain presidency will simply continue along the path set by his predecessor. It's time to royally dethrone them and wrest the future of our nation from their arrogantly clumsy, ham-handed fingers and present the nation with a rare treat -- an actual leader, with intelligence and charisma and stuff. Eight years of Republican dominance, political gamesmanship and unopposed, entrenched cronyism has created a standing pool of fetid, putrid corruption that permeates the entire infrastructure of our nation. The injection of political spin into the realms of science, law enforcement, legislation, accountability and oversight has reached maximum absorption -- we can't take any more. Things are falling apart; the centre cannot hold, and the very foundations are crumbling. This should not be a close race, and indeed -- it isn't. The polling has been recently revealed to show a disproportionate amount of Republicans included within the samples, skewing results and making the race appear closer than it is. This, in and of itself, works in the favor of the Republican fear and smear machine, bolstering their attempts to put lipstick on the pig and tamp down the stench from their rotten-fish politics. The choice should be easy. At home and abroad, our nation has been pummeled by the failure of the Bush Administration and the Republicans. We've got an economy that is failing, two ill-advised and poorly executed wars -- one of which is illegal, and initiated through deliberate and carefully coordinated deception of the Congress and the public -- and our diplomatic corps has been beset by incompetent cronies put into place who seem to forget that "diplomacy" has a real, meaningful and useful role in the world at large. But "the game is afoot" as they say; the Republicans continue to attempt to manufacture their own reality out of whole cloth, and the media fails to call them on it. Our very citizens need to yell louder and bring pressures to bear to help foment the kind of push-back that has long been absent, holding those who have deceived us and who have been incompetent, negligent, uncaring and criminally complicit accountable for their multiple failings. We are not the minority. We, the citizens who want change, who want our nation to purge itself of the ills that have been carefully shepherded by the GOP, are the growing majority. And we are not alone in the world.

_____

But what of the rest of the world? This is the reaction I fear most. For Obama has stirred an excitement around the globe unmatched by any American politician in living memory. Polling in Germany, France, Britain and Russia shows that Obama would win by whopping majorities, with the pattern repeated in Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Latin America. If November 4 were a global ballot, Obama would win it handsomely. If the free world could choose its leader, it would be Barack Obama.

[...snip...]

If Americans choose McCain, they will be turning their back on the rest of the world, choosing to show us four more years of the Bush-Cheney finger.
_____

Emphasis mine. The world has, almost miraculously, held its breath while we rolled ever closer to the ending of this error in collective, democratic government. Even so, it has more than yearned for the type of leadership it once knew our nation was capable of providing on the world stage -- it has actively sought it, unwilling to cut our nation completely loose to drift by itself on the seas of utter stupidity, but taking measures just the same to mitigate and minimize the damages should the final ties need to be severed. And still, the GOP plays on, hoping that we're oblivious to our own needs and to the sane, third-party views of the world in which we live.

_____

Even if it's not ethnic prejudice, but some other aspect of the culture wars, that proves decisive, the point still holds. For America to make a decision as grave as this one - while the planet boils and with the US fighting two wars - on the trivial basis that a hockey mom is likable and seems down to earth, would be to convey a lack of seriousness, a fleeing from reality, that does indeed suggest a nation in, to quote Weisberg, "historical decline". Let's not forget, McCain's campaign manager boasts that this election is "not about the issues."
_____

It's time to shut down the damned, pornographic and debilitating production that the GOP has constructed. They have, as I've stated before, built a very elaborate illusion with which to deceive us, and have run roughshod over reality with their Kabuki theatre in a Potemkin village for nearly a decade now. Their sets are worn, their actors tired; the costumes don't sparkle all that much any more. The same old lines, the familiar background score -- it's all wearing thin. The attempt to bring in new blood and to slap some fresh paint and a new costume or two, update a line here and there and lure in more people with promises glazed in candy-flavored offal has generated some excitement, but we need to wake up. We need to call the ushers, turn up the lights and gently pry the candied promises from the mouths of the uninformed before they get sickened by their sweet poison. This production has run its course, and wouldn't even make a good off-Broadway run -- never mind even a one-night showing in Oshkosh. Everybody -- every US Citizen, every American, every realist -- needs to help put an end to this fiasco and choose to elect a leader for a change. A leader for actual change. In spite of all the rhetoric, the McCain campaign has made it abundantly clear that John McCain is not the man the for the job, and neither is Sarah Palin. The world at large agrees. It's time to make sure the rest of our nation sees the support and competence, the leadership and integrity, and the promise of actual change from the destructive path set by the Republican corporate behemoth and their twisted, psychopathic Christian Taliban terrorists. It's time to show the growing support and commanding lead in the polls, in the news and over the top of the malignant talking-point lies that have so characteristically marked the cancerous politics of the current Republican party leadership. Barack Obama should be our next President, hands-down, with Joe Biden as his veep and a sweep of Progressive candidates into Congress, into governorships, into school boards and town governments across the nation; the old guard needs to be retired. A good portion of the old guard needs to be spanked (and not in a manner of their choosing, either), and some of them should probably be arrested, tried, imprisoned and subjected to intense psychological scrutiny. We've got one helluva mess to clean up. If we put the right man in the job, we'll probably have an awful lot of help getting started.