Another Day, Another Planet.

Every day brings a new round of mind-blowing episodes from the Twilight Zone that is now Republican America, usually touched off by one of McCain’s main mouthpieces, “Tucker” Bounds. Today, in response to a new Obama ad that challenges McCain’s gutter-trolling campaign tactics, the New York Times reports that Mr. Bounds said the advertisement was inappropriate “as Americans face economic uncertainty.”

Let’s see, does he mean inappropriate like McCain’s ad that shows Obama’s cadre of wolves racing through the woods looking for that innocent lamb Sarah Palin, presumably to rip her throat out before she shoots them from her airplane? Or the one that implies Obama advocates teaching a full sex ed course to 5 year olds? Was the economy so much more certain 5 days ago that disgusting ads like the ones McCain put out were acceptable then? Please let me out of this alternate universe, where Republican operatives talk out of both sides of their mouths, but do it with such fake, righteous indignation pasted across their faces that somehow an apparently large group of people somewhere in this country swallows it hook, line and sinker.

I can’t understand it. Article after article describes how Palin has created the most stereotypically dirty of small-time administrations, both as mayor of her little town and as governor of her state. She has fired people who disagree with her, and hired high school friends for positions only minimally related to their experience. She’s taken enormous earmarks for her state, as well as a nice little chunk of money from the taxpayers through the use of per diems for sleeping away from the governor’s mansion in Juneau at her own home back in Wasilla. She has sniffed around her local library inquiring about banning books. She and her staff have special email accounts that they use because they believe those records would be harder to subpoena. Still, she stands up in front of enormous groups of cheering people who don’t seem to find any disconnect between her claims of sweeping reform and her own actions that belie it.

How can it be? Do people not read the papers? Do they only watch Fox News? Or do they simply choose not to face the ever-increasing number of damaging facts simply because they want yet another “someone like them” in the White House? When is America going to learn what that gets us? Or, as is looking more likely, when is MY half of America going to learn that the majority sees that what we think of as a failing America as a success?