Fool me twice?

John McCain is given a free pass on his political, policy and character issues, while corporate interests scour things like Michelle Obama’s college thesis for any dirt they can find. Can you even begin to imagine what would be said about Obama had he returned from the war, traded in his first wife (disabled from a car accident, having raised the children [alone] for years) for a younger model, and been one of the Keating Five in the savings-and-loan scandal? Since they have nothing like this on Obama, they resort to fiction.

[So] McCain made some mistakes, OK? What matters? He can’t remember the difference between the Sunni and the Shia. Let’s start there. And he wants to continue the Bush policies: Keep on decimating our budget and putting us into debt, giving free rein to multinational corporations who outsource our jobs. … What a nightmare continuing those failed policies will be for our children and their children. We have already left them a legacy of debt and maimed soldiers and broken armed forces. Yellow ribbons don’t fix that.

Folks, don’t be fooled again into voting against your own best interests. My father was a conservative WWII veteran who spent four years in Europe. He saw the camps, he landed in Sicily with bodies raining down around him, dead from friendly fire. He knew what evil was, and the unbearable messiness of war. He was fiercely opposed to the Iraq invasion. He said that these neocon “conservatives” were frauds, and that we should “follow the money.” He was a devout Christian biblical scholar who understood well the misuse of the Muslim religion … .

Before our invasion, many in Iraq suffered. Now, all do. We sit smugly with our plumbing and electricity, while women in Iraq cannot leave their homes without fear of being killed. Remember Afghanistan? Where bin Laden was operating? The guy who caused 9/11? We bombed it to rubble and left. Not a lot of oil there.

We must all pray hard that Iraq works out in the end, but how was it our place to make this call and bankrupt our own country in doing so? … Gee, think it all has anything to do with the massive wealth under the sands? The neocons planned it for years, and then cynically used 9/11 as the opportunity, playing on our patriotism and grief.

We have all—right and left—been used, and our military abused. Wake up, America. Can we please just have an intelligent president with good character—an honest man? Don’t believe the lies. Two hundred thousand people cheer Obama in Europe, and the neocons tell us this is a bad thing. Yes, much better if the world hates us. Right.

— Rebecca Tate
Asheville

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