The Republican convention is finally over. Thankfully, my large-screen TV's still in tact despite three nights of me throwing my enraged liberal Birkenstocks at it. The whole event was a freak-show of deception, scripted by the duplicitous campaign chief Steve Schmidt and GOP operative Karl Rove and executed by a shameless parade of disingenuous conservative liars.
The biggest liar of all is the party's nominee, Sen. John McCain, who is desperately trying to portray himself as the Washington "outsider" and the candidate of change. In fact, listening to the Republicans this week would lead one to believe that it's been the Democrats, not them, who have been running Washington these past eight years. The New York Times wrote Friday that:
"The nominee's friend described him as a 'restless reformer who will clean up Washington.' His defeated rival described him going to the capital to 'drain that swamp.' His running mate described their mission as "change, the goal we share." And that was at the incumbent party's convention."
Drain that swamp? If Washington's been a swamp since George W. Bush took office in 2000, then McCain's been wading in it with his thigh-high muck-boots along with Bush, Dick Cheney and the rest of the Bush administration's swamp-dwelling, Constitution-defiling cronies.
All week long we heard about McCain and his anti-woman woman running-mate Sarah Palin talk about heading to Washington to shake things up. Watch out DC, McCain/Palin's comin' to town to whip all you corrupt, amoral, wasteful-spending insiders into shape! And the central character in this line of bullshit is Palin herself. That somehow McCain's six terms as a U.S. Senator is negated by his decision to appoint some no-name arctic oil-champion as his running mate.
It's astounding how McCain can attempt to credibly run as a Washington "outsider" when over the course of his 25 Senate "inside" years he was a disgraced member of the corrupt Keating Five, enthusiastically supported every one of Bush/Cheney's reckless war blunders, voted with Bush 90% of the time, and has had more lobbyists on his payroll than your average K Street lobbying firm.
But credibility has never been the Republicans' strong suit. They're the guys who dodged the Vietnam draft yet paint war heroes like John Kerry, Jack Murtha and Max Cleland as weak and unable to protect America. They're the guys with the highest wealth and privilege yet paint Barack Obama and Joe Biden as elitists. They're the guys who've controlled power for the last eight years under Bush, and for virtually all of the past 14 years in the House and Senate, yet portray Washington as a Democratic cesspool. And now we have McCain and his 25-year swamp-stained D.C. muck-boots calling Obama the Washington insider.
Let's hope that over the next 60 days McCain and Palin are exposed for the frauds that they are.